After Friday's car inspections at the fifth annual North Dallas Hooptie 24 Hours of LeMons, we heard quite a bit of armchair-LeMons-judge controversy about letting a 1987 Chevrolet Corvette compete with zero penalty laps. Well, the Lil' Pecker Racing Corvette finished the first day's race session in P12, 14 laps behind the leader. That came as no real surprise to your LeMons correspondent, but the car— truck, actually— that now sits just four laps back of P1 did come as a big shock. Here's how the day went.
With 191 total laps for the day, the lead team is the Back to the Past Nissan 300ZX "DeLorean." This team won the Heaps In the Heart of Texas race here at Eagles Canyon Raceway, back in 2012, and they've been strong contenders in just about every Texas race during the last couple of years. No black flags, no mechanical problems today, and that's how you win these races.
But then you look a little bit down in the standings and it gets weird. Here's the TGTW Offroad Racing Jeep Cherokee, which has been pretty quick in the past (for a truck with early-60s-technology pushrod L6 power and solid-front-axle suspension) but nothing like this. This truck will start Sunday's race session in second-place overall (out of 67 entries) and a mere four laps out of the lead. This team won Class C with their Jeep Comanche at last year's North Dallas Hooptie, and they're leading Class B by five laps in their Cherokee. Meanwhile, a dozen Mazda Miata and BMW 3-series teams are watching the TGTW Cherokee's taillights receding into the distance. Looks like the most successful Jeep Cherokee in road racing now faces a threat to its supremacy!
The car chasing the Cherokee for the Class B lead is also a member of the "how is this possible?" camp: the Tetanus Racing Volkswagen Passat. We've seen just a handful of Passats in LeMons racing, and every single one (including this car) has been irredeemably terrible. Not this race! Tetanus Racing's Passat finished the day's session in P7.
Leading Class C, we've got the Speedy Monzales Chevy Monza. This 4.3-liter GM V6-powered Malaise Era H-body has had the Class C prize almost in its grasp in several races, only to suffer from some endgame mechanical failure. With a commanding ten-lap lead over its nearest competitor, this team could throw a rod 20 minutes before the checkered flag and still take the class win… assuming that nothing goes wrong before then.
If the Speedy Monzales Monza falters, the Escape Velocity Racing 1964 Dodge Dart will likely be there to pounce on the class lead, Slant-6 engine, pushbutton automatic transmission, and all.
Just a single lap behind the Dart, however, lurks a most unexpected rival for the Class C crown: The Syndicate's 1976 Mercedes-Benz 450 SLC. With three completely flat cam lobes, a thoroughly worn-out suspension, and a 30-pound 1976-vintage car-phone transceiver in the trunk, this C107 is one of the slowest cars on the track… and yet it may just end up tortoising its way to a class triumph.
Meanwhile, the 1976 Honda Civic of The Resistance looked quite good on the track for much of Saturday… right up until the moment when its mighty 60-horsepower engine failed in dramatic, huge-plume-of-smoke-and-steam fashion.
This wasn't a huge problem for The Resistance; the team had brought two spare Honda EB2 engines with them, and the members got to work on the swap job with amazing efficiency. These LeMons rookies could teach most veteran teams a thing or two about team organization and non-panic-stricken wrenching ability, and we expect to see their Civic ready to go when the green flag waves on Sunday morning.
The sun has set on Decatur, Texas, and the teams are partying and/or patching their cars together as a freezing sleet-storm moves into the area. Be sure to check in later to see how all these stories end.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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