LeMons Real Hoopties of New Jersey 2012: The Winners!

The LeMons carnies are busy scraping out the funnel-cake machine, while the racers try to persuade their busted-up cars onto their trailers. Amid all this frenzy, I'm contemplating some of the greatest LeMons cars I've seen in the five-plus years of the series' history. Many cars deserved trophies, not all got them, and the who-gets-what-prize decisions were as tough as we've ever experienced. There's no decision involved in counting which team got the most laps, and this time that honor went to Duct Tape Motorsports and their BMW 318. Yes, a four-cylinder E30 beat more than 100 cars (including too many six-cylinder E30s to count) on a horsepower-friendly road course with lots of pedal-to-metal straights. We've been watching this team climbing the ranks for quite a few races now, and they earned their trophy with a near-flawless performance, beating the second-place Near-Orbital Space Monkeys Mustang by a comfortable five laps. Now that we've got the team that ground out the most laps out of the way, let's talk about the winner of the top prize in LeMons racing. The Index of Effluency award goes to the team that squeezes a shocking number of laps out of a car that never belonged anywhere near a race track. This time, there wasn't much doubt that the Three Pedal Mafia Sea Sprite/Chevy S10 hybrid (aka "The Boat"), which finished 64th out of 102, deserved the IOE trophy. The Boat spent Saturday night towing "water skiers" around the paddock and "dropping anchor" at various pit-party locations. During the day, The Boat was all business— slow business, admittedly— and ran endless black-flag-and-breakdown-free laps. The Organizer's Choice award, which is bestowed upon the team that just plain makes the organizers happiest, was handed to the Rally Baby Monitor 1975 Mercedes-Benz 450SL. We've been pleading with teams to run an R107 since the beginning of time, and the normally-Audi-driving Rally Baby team really stepped up with this gorgeous (and surprisingly quick, given that R107s weigh something like two tons and this particular example didn't run until the night before the race) Benz. The Heroic Fix Award was taken home by the Elmo's Revenge Saturn team. During Saturday's race session, a hardened steel differential pin came loose and tore a huge hole in the transmission case. The team couldn't find a junkyard transmission within 400 miles. All seemed lost. Then LeMons Chief Perp Jay Lamm had a suggestion: "Just patch the hole with beer-can aluminum and JB Weld!" So that's exactly what Elmo's Revenge did! They had to weld up some busted gears while they were at it, but the end result was a fully functioning transmission that held together all day Sunday. The I Got Screwed award, which is similar to the Heroic Fix (except that the fix doesn't work) went to the BlackThunderSwan team and their Lincoln Mark VIII. The Lincoln blew a head gasket a few laps into the race on Saturday, and the team (which had nearly zero wrenching experience) proceeded to dive into what everyone who has worked on the Ford Modular Twin-Cam engine can tell you is a boiling-in-oil nightmare even for a seasoned mechanic in a proper shop, working for about 30 straight hours to fix the engine. Late in the day on Sunday, the BlackThunderSwan Mark VIII was ready to go! The car roared out onto the track… and returned a few minutes later, spewing steam and making ominous clattering noises under the hood. The team missed the checkered flag by about 90 seconds. Next weekend, the LeMons Carnival starts all over again at Gingerman Raceway in Michigan, when the Campaign To Prevent Gingervitis gets rolling. Be sure to check in here for race updates! from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com

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