24 Hours of LeMons Detroit: The Winners

Sunday, April 22, 2012

24 Hours of LeMons Detroit: The Winners

Yesterday, the Bucksnort Racing BMW 325 kept turning fast laps and avoiding black-flag-triggering screwups while most of the competition broke their cars. While the Bucksnorts had a big lead starting Sunday's race session, we've learned from experience that a last-hour thrown rod or rash of on-track misbehavior can— and often does— derail what looks like a sure chug to victory. This time, though, the storybook ending actually happened; after nine races of struggling and gradual improvement, Bucksnort Racing took the checkered flag with a huge 15-lap margin of victory.
If any team ever earned a LeMons overall win the hard way, this is it.
Congratulations, Bucksnort Racing! Now you can go ahead and ditch the E30, because it's time you started your quest for the Index of Effluency. We suggest a Renault Fuego Turbo for your next car.
The Index of Effluency is, of course, the top prize of LeMons racing. Much as Bucksnort Racing struggled for years to take a win on laps, the LemonAid Racing Geo Metro team has been campaigning their three-cylinder Suzuki in pursuit of the IOE… and their 15th-out-of-62-entries finish left no doubt that they'd earned the big one this time. Yes, the most wretched commuter appliance this side of the Subaru Justy managed to crush three-fourths of its rivals, including numerous Integras, 944s, E30s, SE-Rs and various muscled-up Detroit bombs. Well done, LemonAid Racing!
The Organizer's Choice trophy was taken home by a team called "You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought!" This aptly-named team races a fire-spitting Porsche 944 with several hundred pounds of backyard body modifications, the engine out of a Thunderbird Turbo Coupe under the hood, and a life-size Darth Vader on the roof.
We had no choice but to give the Most Heroic Fix trophy to the New Zealanders of Apocalyptic Racing and their 1978 Toyota Celica. We'll be telling their story in more detail in the near future, so we'll do just a summary for now: The car shot a connecting rod through the side of the block several minutes into the race. Apocalyptic Racing removed the offending piston and patched the shattered engine block with license-plate aluminum and JB Weld. The result didn't run so well, but they managed six laps before the engine gave up completely. At that point, they scrounged up a 22R engine to replace their very dead 20R, spent all night swapping it and dealing with the many headaches associated with replacing a 1978 engine with a close-relative-but-not-identical 1989 engine… only to find that the 22R's carburetor was bad and the 20R's intake manifold wouldn't fit the cylinder head. After hours of increasingly desperate gasoline-soaked antics, they got the bright idea to use the oil pan from the bad engine as raw material to build an intake-manifold adapter for the way-oversized Holley double-pumper that probably killed their original engine in the first place. This worked (sort of) and the car managed to take the checkered flag under its own power.The I Got Screwed trophy goes to the team that, well, gets screwed. This race, we decided to award the IGS to the team named We Are Not Really From Iran and their Escort GT-engined Ford Festiva. This team wrenched for about 18 straight hours to assemble one good engine from three bad ones (bad engines being the only ones they could find in rural Michigan on a Saturday afternoon, apparently), and it worked! At most LeMons races, this effort would result in an easy Most Heroic Fix win, but there was no way any team was going to pry that trophy out of the hands of the madmen of Apocalyptic Racing. No Heroic Fix for them!