LeMons Southern Discomfort 2012 at Carolina Motorsports Park: Tech and B.S. Inspection Day

It's the weekend, which means there are whole packs of people with nothing better to do than drive crapcans around in a circle—the least we could do was schedule a LeMons race to keep them away from the general population. Southern Discomfort 2012, the second race of the season, kicks off tomorrow at Carolina Motorsports Park in South Carolina (about an hour south of Charlotte), but today was filled with the pomp and circumstance of BS and tech inspections! The Reatta above was one of the highlights: The LeMons staff has been begging competitors to bring a Buick Reatta for years, and Pittsburgh-based Dave Morrow finally came through. The Charlie-Brown-kite-in-a-tree theme was the icing on the cake. Jeff Bloch, a.k.a. SpeedyCop, spends his days patrolling Washington, D.C., landmarks as an officer in the U.S. Park Police, and his spare time amassing ultra-terrible machines to race in LeMons. For the first of two 2012 races at Carolina Motorsports Park, Bloch brought a super-rusty Ford Galaxie, the first-ever LeMons AMC Pacer, and a Lancia Scorpion body snapped, slot-car-style, onto a second-gen Toyota MR2 chassis. How does one haul a fleet that size? With the world's most ridiculous enclosed trailer, of course. Ten mpg on the tow from D.C. to SC was considered a victory. One of the machines that we feel gets far too little exposure at road-racing events is the Mitsubishi Cordia. There's certainly a really good reason for that, but NSF Racing decided to investigate for themselves. Factory 1.6-liter turbo power almost guarantees an early exit, but NSF will do their best to beat the odds. Dodge/Plymouth Neons are surprisingly good LeMons cars—so good, in fact, that the cars are definitely on the radar of the LeMons B.S. judges. So how do you slip a Neon through judging with zero B.S. laps? By distracting officials with a choreographed ballet routine. At the start of the 2012 LeMons season, a new "Prototype" class was added (joining the existing classes of Good, Bad, and Ugly). In a nutshell, Prototype cars are packed with so much custom engineering and fabrication that they'd dominate the typical sorry-ass LeMons car without breaking a sweat. The first car slapped with the Prototype label was Team Turbo Schnitzel's Merkur XR4ti, fitted with a home-built turbocharged V8. After experiencing various problems with the original blow-through turbo/carburetor setup, the Schnitzels decided to go with a less-conventional "blow-at" turbo setup. Our first thought when seeing the double-air-filtered setup: "Why isn't the Lancer Evo rigged like this?" For most enthusiasts, there really isn't much to recommend the late-'90s Pontiac Grand Prix. Unless, of course, it's been converted into an ice cream truck that's about to embark on two days of road racing. Check back this weekend for a race update and a list of winners from Southern Discomfort 2012; in the meantime, LeMons news, updates, race schedules, and more are available here. from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com

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