We saw some incredible car debuts when we inspected the 132 entries at the third annual Halloween Hooptiefest on Friday, then watched the top of the standings become strangely free of German machines on Saturday, and then Sunday saw the closest Class A finish since the by-a-whisker South Carolina race. It was one of the better LeMons races in what has turned out to be the best season in series history, and we're here to show you who took home what trophies. Here we go!
Team BAR(F) and their 1994 Honda Accord gradually built up a several-lap lead over the field during Sunday's race session, but then things got interesting when the BAR(F) driver got black-flagged for a pass-under-caution violation with about 15 minutes remaining in the race. This car had won several races in the past couple of years, the most recent being the 2013 Loudon Annoying race.
While the LeMons Supreme Court read the Riot Act to the miscreant BAR(F) driver, the Keystone Kops' Volvo 242 inched back to within about three-quarters of a lap of the BAR(F) Accord.
The Keystone Kops run a Ford 302-cubic-inch Windsor V8 in their Volvo, and this car took its first Class A and overall wins at the There Goes the Neighborhood race in New Jersey, after about five years of trying. So we had two recent winners, neither one much quicker than the other, duking it out with the clock running down.
The Volvo closed some ground on the Honda, but on the final lap it appeared clear that Team BAR(F) had the win in the bag. Then the checkered flag waved… over the Keystone Kops' Volvo! What happened to the BAR(F) car? the puzzled crowd wondered. It turned out that the Honda, having finished its 481st lap, was entering one of the final corners of the NHMS course and heading for Lap #482 when the left front wheel came off and sent the car careening off into the dirt. The Keystone Kops' car passed it and got the checkered flag for its 481st lap. What now?
By the traditions of endurance racing, the car that has gone the greater distance at race's end is awarded the win, and that's how race officials were going to call it. However, the members of the two teams got together and agreed to call it a tie, giving the Class A prize money to Speedway Children's Charities. So, the first Class A and overall-win tie in 24 Hours of LeMons history goes to the Keystone Kops and Team BAR(F) Honda.
While all this was going on, much drama centered around another Volvo 240 team. Swedish Mafia Racing, which had campaigned this damn-near-stock naturally-aspirated 8-valve 245 wagon for many years and has always contended in East Coast races, started out Sunday morning's session in P3 overall and seemed in a good position to finally get a win.
Then, just a few minutes into the session, disaster struck: the Swedish Mafia Volvo got loose, left the tarmac, and plowed into a gigantic decorative boulder (symbolizing New Hampshire as the Granite State, apparently), smashing the veteran race car's chassis structure beyond repair.
Well, Volvo 240s aren't hard to find in New England, and the heartbroken Swedish Mafia guys started talking about where they'd find another 245 wagon to race. At that moment, a race spectator rolled into the paddock in a somewhat battered example of the breed. Just for kicks, the team offered the wagon's owner 400 bucks for his car… and he accepted! We look forward to seeing the new Swedish Mafia Racing Volvo at a future Northeast Region LeMons race.
Another interesting thing about this race was the dearth of German cars in the upper reaches of the standings. We started Sunday's race session with no BMWs, Porsches, Mercedes-Benzes, Volkswagens, or Audis in the top ten, which— given the sheer quantity of cars bearing these marques in every race— was unusual. By the end of the race, a single Deutschland-built machine had managed to squeeze into the top ten: the Scooby Doobies' 1990 Audi Coupe. While saving the honor of the German auto industry, Audi fans— still rejoicing over the first Audi win on laps at a LeMons race— must have directed a certain amount of derisive laughter at BMW, whose highest-ranked entry at the Halloween Hooptiefest was the 16th-place BMW 325iS of Thunder For Days Racing.
The only major manufacturers that have yet to take an overall 24 Hours of LeMons race (that have a chance in hell of pulling off the feat) are now Hyundai and Subaru. The latter marque edged a bit closer to this goal last weekend, when the Magic School Bus Racing Team 1999 Subaru Forester picked up the first-ever Subaru Class B LeMons win, beating the Bazinga Racing Nissan 300ZX by a single lap.
In Class C, the Three Pedal Mafia 1971 Sea Sprite (aka "The Boat"), finally managed to claw out a win, beating the Dirty Penny Datsun 210 by 11 laps. The Three Pedal Mafia Boat— which is based on a Chevrolet S-10 chassis— won the Index of Effluency at its debut in 2012— had been pursuing that elusive Class C victory for at least a dozen races and finally triumphed. Congratulations, Three Pedal Mafia!
The story of the '14 Halloween Hooptiefest Most Heroic Fix award winners has more twists and turns than the plot of a Bulgakov novel. Sputnik Racing, a team captained by a man known to most LeMons racers as "that crazy Russian," went a little funny in the head after being major protagonists in the journeys of the Worst Car of All Time and decided to road-race a 2000 Nissan Quest minivan. There's nothing especially wrong with that idea (vans play an important part in LeMons racing), but Sputnik Racing's glorious Russian fix-the-broken-Moskvitch-by-hitting-it-with-a-big-rock philosophy made things complicated for the team during this race.
Things were going well for the Class C minivan, but then one of the Sputnik drivers stuffed it into a concrete barrier on Saturday afternoon, completely obliterating the front suspension subframe. нет проблем, said the Sputnik crew, and they burned rubber in the direction of the nearest wrecking yard.
Meanwhile, the driver who had emerged unscathed from the Quest's high-speed wreck tried to leap into the back of the van while his teammates removed the bad suspension parts, tearing open his scalp and necessitating a trip to the nearest ER for stitches.
The crew at the junkyard arrived 45 minutes before closing time, found a Quest of not-quite-the-right vintage sunk up to its axles in bitterly cold mud, and proceeded to lift it up with scissor jacks found in nearby cars in order to pull the needed subframe. While this miserable task took place, another teammate attempted to patch the bashed-to-crap transmission oil pan with a mix of welding and epoxy.
Then, very late on Saturday night, the team opted to whip out a Sawzall and hack off the van's entire roof. Why remove a section of the vehicle that was not damaged in the slightest by the crash? Nobody can say. This action did not sit well with LeMons Chief Perp Jay Lamm, and a lengthy debate over crush structure and safety followed.
This was not the first time that Sputnik Racing has gone into an unnecessarily severe Sawzall frenzy on one of their cars, of course. Their Nissan Stanza Wagon was forcibly retired after Sputnik captain Sasha Rashev performed this innovative weight-reduction modification on the car a couple of years back.
Late on Sunday, the team had the Quest's mechanical bits pasted back together and (sort of) ready to race, and the Chief Perp OK'd its return to the track. We decided that all of this warranted a Most Heroic Fix win.
In winning the I Got Screwed trophy, the Cougar Hunters and their 1999 Mercury Cougar once again proved that they have chosen one of the least reliable cars in series history.
For the first few races, the Cougar Hunters' litany of thrown rods, engine fires, and busted suspension parts was the subject of much humor in the pits, but now it's just depressing. Screwed!
The special created-just-for-this-event award was the Most Work To Create An Unrecognizable Movie Car trophy. ERM Racing took a 1991 Ford Mustang, swapped in a Datsun 280ZX engine and transmission, converted the car to right-hand-drive using European Ford Granada parts, added a roof spoiler and parallelogram-shaped heat registers in the headlight openings, and proclaimed the car to be Mad Max's Falcon XB Interceptor.
After all the hundreds of man-hours required to do the right-hand-drive conversion, what really impressed us was the cans of Dinki-Di dog food. We loved this car in spite of its not-so-much-like-Max's-Interceptor appearance (or maybe because it) and felt obliged to give the team a trophy in recognition of their creation.
Bonus points were awarded for this beautiful Lord Humungus jack-o-lantern.
The justices of the LeMons Supreme Court always give out a Judges' Choice trophy to their favorite team at each LeMons race, and this time that trophy went to the Lemontarians and their Chevrolet Citation X-11.
The X-11 Citation is an exquisitely LeMony machine, and the life-sized bride mannequin on the roof made it even better. But why the wedding theme?
It turns out that a couple of Lemontarian team members got married 20 years ago and used the groom's daily-driver X-11 as their honeymoon car. The team found another X-11 and recreated the wedding car as a LeMons racer.
They brought along a full wedding party, with matching bridesmaids' outfits and all.
One team member even cultivated X-11 facial hair.
All of this brought smiles to the judges' normally grim visages and warmth to our chilly lump-of-coal-like hearts, every time we saw the bride on the roof of the X-11, and so we awarded our trophy to the Lemontarians.
From the moment the LeMons organizers first laid eyes on the Mod Squad's mean-looking Volkswagen Vanagon, we knew: here is our Organizer's Choice winner.
This van, which is a Vanagon body with 11 inches of height chopped out, mated to a 2001 Toyota MR2, was about as quick as you'd expect from an MR2 with an extra thousand pounds of heft added (that is, not terribly slow), and it looked amazing.
Another spectacular (if unexpected) sight for the Halloween Hooptiefest audience came at the end of the race, when the cars came off the race track for the traditional post-checkered-flag high-fives-and-congratulations celebration. When was the last time you saw a dead Pontiac Firebird being pushed by a dead Peugeot 405 being pushed by a running Peugeot 405? We're sure there's a potent political allegory in there somewhere.
As for the big one, the top prize, the Index of Effluency, the Futility Motorsports 1989 Dodge Daytona managed to get into the top half of the standings for the first time in its nine races and glommed the award.
This car had consumed an average of 1.5 Chrysler 2.2 engines per race during its not-so-illustrious LeMons career, earning the team multiple I Got Screwed awards. Fires, oil leaks, thrown rods, complete electrical-system meltdowns, the Futility Daytona has broken in every manner imaginable. But not this time— at the '14 Halloween Hooptiefest, Futility Motorsports came in a stunning 59th.
The team members kept their sense of humor throughout all of their four-lap races and endless junkyard trips, and it all paid off last Sunday. Well done, Futility Motorsport!
Be sure to check in for all your LeMons coverage, and we'll see you in a couple of weeks at the Gator-O-Rama race in Houston.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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