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We were all very excited to see a Checker Marathon and a bunch of AMCs at Friday's pre-race inspections, and Saturday's race session didn't disappoint. All three classes— A, B, and C— featured hotly-contested struggles for their respective leads, with great drama to be had as fortunes shifted during the course of the day.
In Class A, the Raized Crazy 1989 BMW 325i finished the session with 213 laps, three better than its closest pursuer. The Class A contest was a wild, seesawing affair, with at least four cars holding the lead at some point during the day. Eventually, the Back To the Past Nissan 300ZX (winner of the 2012 Heaps In the Heart of Texas race in December) got collected by a nihilistic Mazda Protege spinout and had to pit for some Sawzall-and-sledgehammer repairs, while the Jetti Knight Jetta got a case of black flag fever and lost a few positions. The Raized Crazy car boasts some heavy-duty LeMons provenance, having raced at California races during the early Altamont days of 2007 and 2008. This car— which has changed hands several times since that era— has contended in at least a dozen races but has yet to take an overall win.
Meanwhile, the Ghetto Motorsports Mazda RX-7 team— winner of every previous Colorado 24 Hours of LeMons race and normally one of the cleanest-racing LeMons teams in the country— got whipsawed by an unprecedented string of driver mistakes and lost a bunch of laps. With 210 laps versus Raized Crazy's 213, Ghetto Motorsports remains a real threat to come back for a fourth consecutive BFE GP win.
In Class B, we're seeing something we never thought would happen: one of the Volatile RAM twin-engined Toyotas has managed to avoid breaking anything for an entire day of racing and now leads its class! This fiendishly complicated "FX32″ Corolla— the manual-and-automatic-transmission equipped unholy union of an FX16 Corolla GT-S and an MR2— finished the day in 12th overall, with 199 laps to its credit. Sadly, its AE92 Corolla/MR2-mashup stablemate fried its rear engine and finished way down at P43.
Chasing the Volatile RAM FX32, we've got the 1994 Ford Escort of the Geezer Escort Service. This team— the members of which spent the day in a tense feud with a Corolla team called The Geezers, the dispute having to do with which group had the highest average driver age— wrapped up Saturday's race session with 192 laps, seven back of the FX32.
Class C nearly always provides the most exciting race-within-a-race at a 24 Hours of LeMons, and today was one of the best Class C battles in recent memory. The Rocket Surgery Racing 1978 Checker Marathon spent most of the day with a small edge in the class, but the 1962 Austin Mini of LeMons Legend Spank's LeMini Autosarcophagy (winner of the Index of Effluency and Class C trophies at the Sears Even More Pointless race) gnawed away at that lead and passed the big yellow Kalamazoo machine late in the day.
It's shocking how a tiny front-wheel-drive British car with 998 cubic centimeters of raw BMC horsepower can be so evenly matched on a race track against a 3,600-pound ex-taxicab with 350 Chevy V8 power and a squishy stock suspension, but there was just a single lap separating the two when the checkered flag waved.
With all the glorious on-track action, we also saw plentiful not-so-glorious parts breakage. The '91 Ford Thunderbird of the Inglorious Bastards spent most of the day looking much like this.
The Blue Flag Society's AMC Pacer blew up its Jeep 4.0 engine during the afternoon, but the team didn't seem particularly worried. With all the Cherokees languishing in Colorado junkyards, replacement engines are cheap and plentiful!
As the sun set behind the Rockies, the Blue Flag Society and many other teams got busy with the wrenches while the teams with intact cars fired up the barbecues. What will happen on Sunday? Nobody knows, but you can check in later and find out!
from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com | 
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