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The race cars have been loaded onto trailers, the residents of New England have crawled into sandbag fortresses in anticipation of the onslaught of Hurricane Sandy, and your 24 Hours of LeMons correspondent is typing these words in the back seat of a rented Kia Sorrento on the way to the nearest major airport that's not shut down by weather.. which happens to be in Charlotte, North Carolina. A few hours ago, however, we were celebrating the first-ever overall LeMons win for a Saab-engined Nissan 300ZX. In fact, we're going to go out on a limb here and say that this is the first race win for any Saab-engined Nissan.
The Rust In The Wind Nissan 300ZX gets its power from an engine yanked from a 1994 Saab 900 Turbo, using a homemade transmission adapter plate to convince the front-wheel-drive Saab engine that sending its power to the rear wheels through a Nissan transmission is the natural order of things. It was a nail-biting battle to the very end, with the Nissan grabbing the lead from the Bill Danger and the Road Hazzards late on Sunday and hanging on to win by just 20 seconds. Rust In The Wind has been working the bugs out of their mutated machine for seven races now, and this time everything came together.
The Class B win goes to the Swedish Mafia Racing 1989 Volvo 240 wagon. This team (which runs an 8-valve, naturally-aspirated four-cylinder engine) finished fourth overall, out of 117 entries, and beat all the Mustangs, all the Camaros, all the Integras, and all the Miatas.
After ten or so LeMons races in venues stretching from California to Detroit to New England, the oft-repaired Rusty Tear racing had never won a class trophy. This time, though, nothing broke and the Rusty Tears took 21st place and a Class C win.
The Organizer's Choice trophy went home with the Waahmbulance Racing Dodge Daytona Turbo. This team spent race after race averaging about 1.7 killed engines per event, always finishing down in the standings with the DNS crowd. At the 2012 Halloween Hooptiefest, the Waahmbulancers finished mid-pack, and their never-stop-engine-swapping enthusiasm earned them something of a cumulative Organizer's Choice.
The Index of Effluency, top prize of the 24 Hours of LeMons, was handed to the members of Rusty Penny Racing and their incredibly oxidized 1979 Datsun 210. Finishing 60th overall was a staggeringly powerful achievement for a pushrod A14-powered, 33-year-old econobox. Congratulations, Rusty Penny Racing!
We've got other winners, but your correspondent's laptop battery is about dead and 800 miles remain in his hurricane-fleeing journey. Check in later for the rest of the story. Read full story »
from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com | 
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