LeMons Detroit Day One: Most Top Contenders Blow Up, Long-Suffering Bucksnort BMW Takes Big Lead

When the green flag waved this morning, we had a half-dozen or so Midwest Region-dominating teams set to battle for the Campaign To Prevent Gingervitis win on laps, with another 55 or so hopefuls aiming for an upset victory. When the checkered flag ended the day's racing session, all but one of those teams had suffered catastrophic mechanical failure. Could this be the race that the paid-their-dues-and-then-some Bucksnort Racing guys finally take home an overall win trophy? Photograph by Nick Pon We've watched this family-based BMW E30 3-Series team climb up through the ranks for years now, improving a bit with each race. In the last few Midwest Region races, they've been in the hunt for a win each time, only to lose a crucial few laps with some nickel/dime mechanical problem and get edged out by the likes of the Clueless Racing Honda CRX or the Skid Marks Racing Dodge Neon. The first time we met the Bucksnorts was at the infamous Lamest Day 24 Hours of LeMons at Nelson Ledges in 2009. This then-rookie team picked up black flags for offenses ranging from passing under a caution flag to intentional infliction of emotional distress. In fact, they were among the worst offenders at a race brimming over with terrible driving and bonehead wipeouts. Here we see their car after the LeMons Supreme Court made them bolt three old tires to the roof as a public symbol of shame. The bolt holes are still there, three years later, but the Bucksnort drivers have since found a way to get their beat-to-hell BMW around the track quickly and black-flag-free.Meanwhile, their nemesis got knocked out of the running early when its transmission went kaboom. Skid Marks Racing, with its impossibly smooth-driving Neon pilots, has been the team to beat in the Midwest. Bucksnort Racing has battled hard with Skid Marks in race after race, but this time the Neon lost many hours while the team swapped transmissions (to their credit, the Juggalo-themed Skid Marks crew didn't throw in the towel after getting pushed out of contention, instead breaking out the wrenches and getting right down to fixing their busted Dodge). Then another one of the toughest teams at Gingerman Raceway fell by the wayside. The Team Reynolds Style Toyota Celica limped off the track with what appears to be a severe front suspension failure and spent the rest of the day up on jack stands. The Bucksnorts kept going around and around and around the track. At that point, the favorite became the extremely fast Clueless Racing CRX, aka "The Yellow Submarine." That lasted about an hour, at which point the Clueless CRX scattered its engine all over the front straight, in a truly spectacular connecting-rod-throwing incident. Bucksnort Racing then had the lead, but by a nerve-wrackingly thin margin; the relentless Little Lebowski Urban Achievers Volvo 245 stayed glued to the Bucksnort E30′s bumper… until a bit later in the afternoon, when the Volvo wagon's head gasket blew out and the car clanked into the pits in a cloud of steam. Which isn't to say that only the fastest teams are suffering from mechanical woes; it seemed that half the racers at Gingerman were making junkyard runs to buy replacement engines by about 2:00 PM today. Thrown rods, spun bearings, disintegrating transmissions, burned-up brakes, you name it. The Heroic Fix Award decision is going to be the toughest we've ever faced; as I write this, at least three teams are assembling Frankensteined engines from collections of busted parts (when I left the track, one team had managed to find "two and a half" sets of main bearings for their ex-motor, and it just gets worse from there). You'll get some of those stories later, once we know how the all-night wrenchfest sorts out. My role as LeMons Supreme Court Justice has been enhanced by this fine Isuzu I-Mark Diesel Judgemobile, dragged from Michigan to Maryland by LeMons Legend Speedycop, for use as a parts car by a team that races a Chevette Diesel. Speedycop himself is doing the LeMons Iron Man routine, by driving every stint in his Suzuki X90, all weekend long. Most racers start to get a little loopy after maybe 45 minutes of wheel-to-wheel action, and very few can keep going for more than two hours… but Speedy put in ten straight hours behind the wheel of his Red Bull-mobile today, pausing only for fuel stops. The Gang of Outlaws X90 holds a comfortable lead in Class C. Tomorrow, we'll see if Speedycop can maintain his Class C lead, while the Bucksnort Racing guys battle to keep their challengers at bay and their connecting rods securely inside the block. from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com

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