The second annual Halloween Hooptiefest 24 Hours of LeMons turned out to be a festival of bent fenders, frozen fingers, and Mercedes-Benz dominance. On Friday, we met the 140-odd teams. On Saturday, we saw the Ziegel Scheißhaus car grab and hold an early lead. On Sunday… well, here's what happened.
Ziegel Scheißhaus never ran away with the race, and a black flag late in the game kept things interesting, but the '86 190E still had a two-lap edge over the Massholes Ford Escort ZX2 when the checkered flag waved. The black 190E was quick and reliable and the drivers were (reasonably) clean, and that was enough.
The Acura Legend presents something of a classing dilemma for the 24 Hours of LeMons Supreme Court, but we really couldn't put Honda's front-wheel-drive wannabe-LS400-competitor with the fast Class A cars. That meant that the LEGENDary Racing '92 Legend— which was about 5 seconds a lap slower than most of the top contenders— crushed the Class B competition and took the class win by a commanding 20 laps. We may need to allow these guys to add a few suspension upgrades to their car, to make it competitive with the big Class A dogs at the next race.
Fans of Class C witnessed a three-way battle for much of the weekend, with the Three Pedal Mafia '71 Sea Sprite and the Speedycop and the Gang of Outlaws Ford Mustang chasing the Chev-itte Where the Sun Don't Shine turbocharged Chevette. The Chevette suffered not-at-all-unexpected mechanical failure, and the very-slow-but-very-steady wing-equipped four-cylinder Mustang finished first in class and 29th overall.
The Most Heroic Fix trophy went to a team that put about 200 man-hours of backbreaking labor into what at first glance should have been a fairly easy swap (but often isn't easy). When the TKE North Korean People's Army Firebird blew up its engine like a Kwangmyŏngsŏng-3 missile during practice on Friday, the North Korean People's Army Team found an engine-donor '94 Buick Roadmaster sedan on Craigslist that night.
Then, of course, a supposedly bolt-in swap turned into a 36-straight-hour slog (of course, the Great Leader could have done it in 90 seconds, with a nail file as his only tool), with much fabrication, rolling around in pools of 38-degree oil, and so forth. In the end, though, Team TKE North Korean People's Army triumphed, turning 50 glorious laps on Sunday.
The I Got Screwed trophy was handed over to Team Rusty Dragon and their BMW-ized Volkswagen Rabbit. This team won the Judges' Choice trophy twice in a row for their endearingly hapless struggles with their VW in previous races, so for the '13 Hooptiefest they decided to ditch all that Volkswagen running gear and drop in a four-cylinder BMW E30 engine and rear-wheel-drive setup. This worked rather poorly. In fact, this didn't work at all, and the team failed to get their cruelly bastardized Golf on the race track. Screwed!
For our race-specific award, we were so impressed with the large quantities of front-wheel-drive Volvos and early-2000s GM sedans that we created the Volvo 850 Versus 21st Century GM Rental Car Challenge award. The team with the most laps from this group would get this much-coveted trophy.
In the end, the '96 Volvo 850GLT of Fully Torqued Racing grabbed P42, 391 laps, and the Volvo 850 Versus 21st Century GM Rental Car Challenge trophy.
When it came time to make Judges' Choice decision, the LeMons Supreme Court had become so weary of spinning, crashing, caution-flag-ignoring, pit-speeding, unsafe-fueling, four-wheels-offing, everything-denying New England racers that we opted to give the trophy to the highest-placing team with zero black flags for the weekend. With nearly 600 black flags thrown on the 133 cars that made it onto the track during the weekend, racking up no bad-driving offenses at all was a rare accomplishment. Somehow, the super-safe-and-sane-yet-very-fast drivers of the Team Pro-Crash-Duh-Nation Alfa Romeo Milano managed to stay 100% clean for 458 laps, finishing in 3rd and just four laps back of the overall winner. Well done, Team Pro-Crash-Duh-Nation!
The Honda "Accordion" of Speedycop and the Gang of Outlaws just had to get the Organizer's Choice award. The Honda Accordion may be played just like a real squeezebox; be sure to check out the official wrapup video later, to see this car in action!
Adding some excitement in the Gang of Outlaws compound was the fact that their mastermind-in-chief had to be rushed to the hospital on Saturday morning for an emergency appendectomy. Note that Speedycop is still wearing his LeMons driver's wristband after surgery (no, we wouldn't let him race on Sunday).
The Index of Effluency, top prize of LeMons racing, became a more agonizing choice than usual once we realized that the 1969 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow of Three Pedal Mafia— they bought the car for $1,000 and sold off some very valuable Rolls parts to get the purchase price down to LeMons-approved levels… not that we're going to look too closely at the budget on a genuine British luxury cruiser like this, anyway— had somehow kept running all weekend and finished in P115. Yes, the Three Pedal Mafia Roller is excruciatingly slow (we prefer the term "stately"), but who could have predicted that a much-abused, 44-year-old British car could be flogged on a road course all weekend and suffer no problems worse than overheated brakes? In the end, we decided that 230 laps was enough to warrant 3PM's fourth Index of Effluency trophy.
The profoundly terrible Team Waahmbulance Dodge Daytona came very, very close to snaring its first-ever IOE award this time, but 76th place wasn't quite enough to pry the award away from the Rolls. Still, we have high hopes that the Waahmbulance will prove us all wrong about members of the extended Chrysler K family in LeMons.
Speaking of Chrysler Ks, it's official: the NSF Racing 1987 Plymouth Reliant-K station wagon, which has been roaming the country in sort of a celebration of mechanical masochism, is the worst race car in 24 Hours of LeMons history. At the '13 Hooptiefest, it finished 214 laps (16 fewer than the continental-drift-speed Rolls-Royce) and ended up in P122. We'll see the "Super K" next weekend at Road America, and perhaps this time it will run perfectly all weekend.
from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com
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