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The last time LeMons racing came to New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Hurricane Sandy forced the LeMons perpetrators to drive their rental Kia to North Carolina immediately after the checkered flag. This time, the weather was a bit better, but we still had to endure a blizzard of thrown rods and a hail of engine-block bits. Still, enough stoic New Englanders kept their heaps running well enough to collect some trophy hardware.
At the 2012 Loudon Annoying 24 Hours of LeMons, the Bill Danger '94 Honda Accord took the overall win by three laps. A year later, the Bill Dangers did the same thing, although their margin of victory was a much more nail-bitey single lap this time. This car was by no means the quickest at this race— in fact, the P2 through P6 teams each had lap times 1-4 seconds quicker than the Bill Danger Accord— but the team made not a single mistake all weekend and their car was trouble-free.
Much of Sunday's race session saw a back-and-forth lead-swapping battle between the Bill Danger Accord and the Ford 302-powered Volvo 242 "Jew-Wop-E" (so named, in a bit of East Coast humor, because all its drivers are of Jewish or Italian ancestry) of the Keystone Kops. The Volvo was much faster, but its thirsty V8 required more frequent fueling stops than did the frugal four-banger of the Honda. A black flag for a pass-under-caution-flag offense late in the day cost the Kops the overall win; the Volvo's driver pitted and rolled into the LeMons Supreme Court's Penalty Box immediately, so quickly that he beat the call from Race Control and we assumed we were dealing with an innocent-man-falsely-accused case. We sent the Jew-Wop-E right back out, but the lost minute was enough to give the win to the Bill Danger team. In this kind of racing, a contending team can't afford to make even one mistake!
The Class B victory went to Team Apres Ski Racing and their '88 Acura Integra. The Apres Skiers' car was too worn-out and loose to be a solid Class A contender, but a bit quick for Class B, so the LeMons Supreme Court put the team in Class B with an 8-lap handicap. In the end, the team won Class B by 11 laps; their lap times were on the sluggish side (even by Class B standards), but consistency and clean driving were just as effective for Team Apres Ski as they were for the Bill Danger team.
The race for the Class C win usually features a lot of hard-fought battles between the slow-but-scrappy teams, but this time we watched every Class C team other than Three Pedal Mafia limp into the pits with busted parts early on Saturday. At that point, the C struggle became a contest between the two Three Pedal Mafia entries: a 1971 Sea Sprite boat on a Chevy S10 chassis and a 1980 Triumph TR7 with Buick 3.8 V6 power. As we've explained before, the Triumph TR7 is one of the least reliable vehicles in LeMons racing, and the Buick V6 tends to make a TR7 even worse. Somehow, though, the TPM Triumph finished 17th (out of 87 entries) and beat its nautical stablemate by 14 laps.
The LeMons Supreme Court had numerous Most Heroic Fix candidates to choose from, but in the end we had to give the trophy to Team Farfrumwinnin. The Farfrumwinnin '93 Volkswagen Fox had consumed most of the bolt-in VW/Audi engines in the Northeast during its four-year LeMons career, and so there were none to be had after the car nuked one engine two weeks before the race and another during practice laps on the day before the green flag.
You can read the entire depressing story here, but at least there was a happy ending: the Fox roared to life with an hour to go on Sunday and managed to avoid dead-last place by turning 42 laps. For that accomplishment, Team Farfrumwinnin took home the Most Heroic Fix award.
It took six-plus years of LeMons racing for a GM car to grab an overall win. That car was a G-body Chevy Monte Carlo; meanwhile, no GM F-body— out of the many dozens of LeMons Camaros and Firebirds— has been close to an overall win as many times as the Sorry For Party '85 Pontiac Firebird. The Sorry For Party guys rolled into NHMS feeling confident— this could be our race, they thought. But no, they blew up their engine soon after the green flag on Saturday morning, drove five hours to fetch a junkyard replacement, then watched in horror as that engine lost all oil pressure after a handful of laps on Sunday. 30 laps (the winner got 514), second-to-last place, and the I Got Screwed trophy.
Because this is LeMons racing, the team that finishes in dead last sometimes takes home a trophy, in this case the Judges' Choice award. Rusty Dragon Racing and their '87 Volkswagen Golf won the Judges' Choice at the '12 Halloween Hooptiefest, after refusing to give up when everything failed on their terrible VW.
For this race, the Rusty Dragons swapped in the A20 engine out of a mid-80s Honda Accord. Honda engines might be bulletproof on the street, but they are among the least reliable powerplants in LeMons racing. The Rusty Dragon guys knew this, but what the hell— an engine is an engine, right?
Sure enough, the Rusty Dragon Golf puked its transplanted Japanese guts all over the tarmac (while creeping along under a caution flag, no less). No problem, said the team, we'll just remove the offending connecting rod, hammer the piston up into the cylinder and pin it in place with a snapped-off screwdriver, and patch the hole in the block with sheet metal and epoxy. This worked about as well for the Rusty Dragons as it did for the Apocalyptic Racing Celica last year, and a cascade of subsequent failures got the team on a first-name basis with all the wrecker crews. Throughout all this, the team seemed to be having more fun than anybody else in the race. 25 total laps… and the Judges' Choice trophy.
For the Organizer's Choice award, we were so awed by the Mater Madness '85 Chevy S10 and its million well-executed details that we didn't even consider any other possible recipients.
The Mater Madness guys managed to bust their small-block Chevy's crankshaft in an unfortunate dropped-on-a-jackstand incident on Friday evening, then spent all of Saturday and part of Sunday making sure the repairs measured up to their quality standards (while your LeMons correspondent kept urging them to burn rubber to the nearest junkyard and defile their masterpiece with a rusty, crusty 305 pulled from a wrecked van). Sunday afternoon, the Mater Madness tow truck hit the track and ran very well. Organizer's Choice!
For the Index of Effluency (the top prize in LeMons racing), the Three Pedal Mafia TR7 and Sea Sprite finish in P17 and P20, respectively, proved unbeatable. Congratulations, Three Pedal Mafia!
For all your LeMons-coverage needs, check out the C/D-LeMons roundup page! 
from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com | 
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