At the end of Saturday's race session at the Chubba Cheddar Enduro 24 Hours of LeMons, the contending cars in each class were locked in every-second-counts battles. If anything, the top cars got even closer to one another as Sunday went on. When the checkered flag finally came out at 4:30 PM, the Class A victor had a two-second lead and Class B was won by ten seconds. One slightly slow pit stop, one sub-par slow lap, a bit of fumbling hooking up a driver's belts— sometimes that's all that makes the difference between P1 and P2.
Team LemonAid and their BMW E30 have been competing in Midwestern LeMons races for a few years, doing respectably well but never managing to take an overall win (though they did win our hearts by converting their car into a rolling monument to Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha). This race, the LemonAid car lurked near the top of the standings for most of the weekend, then its last driver made his move in the final hours. Fuel was running low at the end, the car was sputtering and running on fumes on the checkered lap as the P2 car closed the distance between them, but the lead was (barely) enough. After two full days of racing, the Class A and overall wins came down to a difference of two seconds. Well done, Team LemonAid!
We're sure the anguished howls emanating from the driver of the P2 car, the Landshark Acura Integra, could be heard all the way to Milwaukee as he almost caught the LemonAid 325i in the race's homestretch. Like Team LemonAid, the Landsharks have been trying for an overall LeMons win for several years, and they ran a near-perfect race this weekend. They may not have grabbed the win this time, but they've put themselves on the list of Midwestern teams to watch at future events.
Team We Are Not Really From Iran and their Mazda B engine-swapped Ford Festiva, fresh from their Organizer's Choice win at the 24-straight-hour Gator-O-Rama in Houston a few weeks back, swapped leads back and forth with the Sucker Punch Racing Camaro for the last hour or so of the race, but made a 10-second lead stick when it counted the most.
We assume the driver of the Sucker Punch car was gnawing big chunks out of the steering wheel as he tried to close that tiny gap with the little yellow Festiva on the last lap.
The Futility Racing Mercury Bobcat took the Index of Effluency trophy at the Rod Blagojevich 500 race, a couple years back, but the Mercurized Pinto team had never managed a Class C win. Today, Futility Racing finally triumphed in the toughest LeMons class of all.
The I Got Screwed trophy went to the New York Rock Exchange aka the Cannonball Bandits, for their nightmarish trailer-failure-fraught 2,200-mile tow from California Wisconsin and nightmarish race-car-failure-fraught race weekend that followed.
For fixing every single thing on their 1971 Simca 1204, from a thrown connecting rod to a shattered transmission to a fried wiring harness, Team Le Mopar will take home the prestigious Most Heroic Fix award.
As sort of a lifetime-achievement award for coming so close to victory so many times, the 24 Hours of LeMons Supreme Court awarded the Judges' Choice trophy to Team Fiery Death.
The Oregon Fail covered-wagon-converted Honda Civic looked great on the track, but it made increasingly alarming engine noises as the weekend wore on. Soon after the green flag on Sunday, it sprayed its engine all over the track, causing a lengthy oil-cleanup delay. For this, Team Oregon Fail received a special, created-for-the-occasion You Have Died of Dysentery and Thrown a Rod trophy. Photo courtesy of Eric Rood.
Yeah, we don't like it when a car oils down the track, but how can anyone be angry with a team whose car looks like this?
Race a Ford EXP, win the Organizer's Choice award! At least, that's how it worked out for team RUN-EXP.
For the entire 2013 LeMons season, the 1987 Plymouth Reliant-K wagon put together by NSF Racing of Florida has been handed off from team to team around the country, and it has been incredibly terrible… until now! We'd been promising each K-car team that a top-half finish would be a virtually guaranteed Index of Effluency win, but it took until the Chubba Cheddar Enduro for the "Super K" to get into such a rarefied place in the standings and take home the top prize of LeMons racing.
It's fitting that Majicbus Racing team captain Steve McDaniel, who has suffered more from K-car misery than any other racer, was the guy who drove the Reliant from last weekend's New Hampshire race and made it run better than anyone expected this weekend. Congratulations, Majicbus Racing… and Lee Iacocca!
from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com
Put the internet to work for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment