Heaps In the Heart of Texas 24 Hours of LeMons: Winners!

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Heaps In the Heart of Texas 24 Hours of LeMons: Winners!

The checkered flag has been put away, the busted connecting rods are being swept out of pools of oil on the concrete at Eagles Canyon Raceway, and the LeMons HQ crew— actually, just Chief Perp Lamm— is on its way back to not-quite-as-butt-freezing California. Earlier this evening, however, the winning teams were glorying in their accomplishments during the final race of the 2012 24 Hours of LeMons season.

The team that completed the most laps (winning Class A in the process) was Team Back To the Past, who drove their Nissan 300ZX to a clean, nearly black-flag-free victory. This is only the second 300ZX in history to take a LeMons win on laps (as we've mentioned before, the Nissan Z Car tends to be quite blowy-uppy in this series), and this out-of-nowhere win for Back To the Past is quite an accomplishment.

Class B went to the Blue Goose Audi 4000S. The Blue Geese have been racing in the LeMons Gulf Region since the very beginning, starting with an extremely terrible Honda CRX, then a somewhat less terrible VW Rabbit, and then to this what-were-they-thinking Audi, and they're way overdue for an overall win.

The Mustang II-equipped Macaroni Racing fended off the other Class C cars and took home the most coveted of the class trophies.

The Most Heroic Fix award was earned by LeMons Speed, who— unable to find parts on Sunday in rural Texas— were forced to fabricate a lifter tray for their V6 out of random junk they scavenged up in the pits.

You get the I Got Screwed award when your heroic fixing doesn't work, and Team -ing With Bad Ideas did just that. After hauling their Beetle 1,700 miles from California, they threw a connecting rod 200 yards after the green flag on Saturday.

So, they swapped in their spare engine (savvy air-cooled Volkswagen racers always bring a spare engine)… and promptly blew it up. Screwed!

The organizers always create a special event-specific trophy for each race, and this time that trophy was the Jay's Dream Car Award. Team Lost In the Dark grabbed that trophy by squeezing a Ford Modular 4.6 V8 into their '78 Ford Fairmont. This turned out to make the car faster than anyone expected, and the Chief Perp couldn't get over how ridiculous-yet-cool the swap was.

When your team shows up with a Hostess theme on Friday, then the team's "CEO" sells "the brand" to Wal-Mart on Saturday night and the car shows up on Sunday as Team Wal-Mart, you have a good shot at the Judges' Choice trophy. That's what happened with Team OK Speed.

Getting to the serious trophy hardware now, we've got the '12 Heaps In the Heart of Texas Organizer's Choice winner: NSF Racing. Why? Painfully stock Aries K wagon! In our vision of the ideal LeMons race, K Cars would replace all 3-series BMWs.

The top prize of LeMons racing, the Index of Effluency, was a very easy call: the Hell's Treehuggers Harley-Davidson-powered Toyota Prius. We'll have a special feature about this fine race car in the near future, of course. Congratulations, Spank, Anton, and the Hell's Treehuggers!