151 teams started the fourth annual Real Hoopties of New Jersey 24 Hours of LeMons, quite a few blew up during the first day of racing, and the teams that hadn't scattered their engines all over New Jersey Motorsports Park's tarmac battled for glory on Sunday. Here's the story of the winners.
Getting the most total laps and taking the Class A title, the Near-Orbital Space Monkeys finally achieved a dream they'd been chasing for nearly five years of LeMons racing: a win on laps in a 24 Hours of LeMons race. They'd come close in the past, with plenty of top-ten finishes, but this time their Mustang held off their nearest pursuer— the RealDime Racing Acura Integra— and the Space Monkeys won by just over a lap.
The team started their LeMons career in the bash-and-crash confines of Stafford Motor Speedway in Connecticut, with this BMW E28 5-series, and they did pretty well with that car. The urge to build a winning car out of a Fox Ford colonized the team like a brain-controlling fungus, however, and they ditched the BMW and began the agonizing process of making a Fox Mustang hold together well enough to compete in the very tough LeMons East Region.
These guys built their Ford's suspension using handmade bushings and all manner of junkyard-kludged components, meanwhile developing the team organization needed to run a mistake-free race weekend, and all that work paid off on Sunday when the checkered flag waved over their car. Congratulations, Near-Orbital Space Monkeys!
The volume of sweat and agony expended by the Space Monkeys to get their Class A win, huge as it was, can't approach the suffering endured by Team Farfrumwinnin during their Sisyphean attempts to coax a Class B win out of their wretched Volkswagen Fox. This New York-based team has singlehandedly depleted the stock of Fox parts from the entire eastern half of the United States, as they churned through engines and transmissions the way normal teams go through brake pads. This time, though, they pulled off their class win; after five years and over a dozen attempts, they beat a very tough field and got the win by a nerve-wracking fraction of a lap.
The first appearance of the Farfrumwinnin Fox was at the 2009 New England 24 Hours of LeMons, and the first of many engines went up in smoke that weekend. Nine 1.8 liter Brazilian engines later, the LeMons Supreme Court felt sorry for Team Farfrumwinnin and authorized the installation of a more reliable 2.0 liter 8-valve German engine… which then proceeded to snack on transmission after transmission before throwing a few rods. This time, though, engine and transmission remained intact all weekend, and the Farfrumwinnin Fox triumphed, taking P10 and Class B. Well done, Team Farfrumwinnin, and can you please stuff that miserable car into the nearest crusher now?
In Class C, the painfully stock, quarter-million-mile, googly-eye-covered early-90s Toyota Corolla of Team Little Engine That Shouldn't beat the rest of the parts-shedding, leisurely-lap-time set, grabbing a respectable 29th place in the process.
The Most Heroic Fix trophy went to Team 2 Broke 2 Care, to honor their weekend-long attempts to keep their really-bad-idea turbocharged BMW E30 3-series on the trace track.
The LeMons Supreme Court was displeased by the way 2 Broke 2 Care went ahead with their turbo installation without consulting the LCS justices about the budget beforehand, and so a few penalty laps were handed out during the BS inspection on Friday. This would prove unnecessary, however, because draw-through Holley-carbureted turbocharging installations almost never work in the real world; in this case, the poor abused M20 digested its own pistons within minutes of encountering race conditions.
As part of 2 Broke 2 Care's efforts to rid their car of all that complicated science-contaminated stuff under the hood, they replaced the factory electronic ignition system with an old-school points distributor yanked from a Ford 300 straight-6 engine and mounted via this ingenious shaft-through-the-timing-cover rig. The team hunted down a replacement engine at a junkyard nowhere near the track, then thrashed endlessly to transfer all their 1964-grade technology to it. The new engine didn't run so well and required frequent pit stops to replenish boiled-away cooling water, but the 2 Broke 2 Care BMW was on the track for the checkered flag, and we felt that accomplishment deserved the Most Heroic Fix award.
For the I Got Screwed award, it was hard to beat the weekend of futility and frustration experienced by Three Pedal Mafia and their quartet of race cars. They'd brought a Triumph TR7 with supercharged Buick 3800 swap, a fourth-gen Honda Civic cobbled together from parts found under couch cushions at 3PM HQ, a 1971 Sea Sprite boat mounted on a Chevy S-10 chassis, and a very original (i.e., very tired) Mk2 Ford Cortina. The Buick-ized TR7′s engine blew up during practice on Friday, and the team spent most of a day tracking down a new one and most of another day installing it, only to spin a bearing in the replacement engine two laps after getting onto the track.
Then the Sea Sprite had its bow obliterated in one of many metal-on-metal— or, in this case, fiberglass-on-metal— incidents on the track. The Cortina overheated every few minutes and had to pit for cool-down, and the Civic suffered from various mechanical woes. Screwed!
Team Rotomotosport NJ brought their Merkur XR4Ti to the BS Inspection with a framed portrait of New Jersey governor Chris Christie as an inspirational gift for the LeMons Supreme Court, and so of course we asked the team to hit a thrift store and get us the biggest suit they could find, for use in our planned Bridgegate penalty. Then the boosted Pinto engine in their Merkur got some unexpected holes in the block during practice, but the hunt for a replacement engine didn't stop the team from not only getting the big thrift-store suit but obtaining pillow-stuffing material and hand-sewing it into an amazingly accurate Chris Christie fat suit.
The LeMons Supreme Court then enjoyed the spectacle of miscreant teams closing various choke points around NJMP while The Governor barked orders. For this, Team Rotomotosport NJ took home the coveted Judges' Choice award.
Our special regional award this time was the "Least Like Someone From New Jersey" trophy, selected after an excruciatingly long weekend of dealing with combative, dissembling, other-driver-blaming Penalty Box visitors and watching mangled cars dragged off the track by tow trucks. For this, we selected Tom Lomino, captain of the Class B-winning Farfrumwinnin Racing team. Tom tends to do a lot of anxious pacing around the garages when his Fox is gearing up to drop a bunch of transmission bits on the track, but he has never given race officials headaches from screaming denials of blame for bad behavior in his six years of LeMons racing.
Sinical Racing somehow dredged a Volkswagen Super Beetle with "Pinto Beans" engine swap out of the middle 1970s and brought it to our race, and for that they received the Organizer's Choice trophy. The Pinto-powered Beetle was neither fast nor reliable, but its P127 finish put it ahead of quite a few Porsches and BMWs.
For the top prize, the Index of Effluency, there was no way to beat a Rover 3500 that held together for the entire weekend. Team Super Grover's car suffered from numerous small problems during the course of the weekend, but it spent more time on the track than off and looked great doing so. The team nearly cracked the double-digit-numbers part of the standings, which is excellent for a notoriously flaky British car packed with dodgy Lucas Electrics components and making its racing debut after sitting forgotten for decades. Congratulations, Super Grover Racing!
Be sure to check in for more 24 Hours of LeMons news and features, and we'll see you at the Return of the Lemonites race in Utah.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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