You want to race in 24 Hours of LeMons, and you have a perfect car in the garage—say, a Buick Somerset with an LZ9 V-6 swap— but you're afraid to cage it and race it because . . . why? In many cases, potential LeMons teams fear getting their car destroyed by the People's Curse (even though this practice was discontinued in 2009), and they also fear being forced to sell their car to the race organizers via the LeMons Claiming Race rule. In order to explain the latter to those unfamiliar with the statute, and to debunk a few myths circulating amongst the LeMons faithful, we're going to explain the history of the claiming rule in the 24 Hours of LeMons. First, it's been exercised exactly twice, although Chief Perpetrator Jay Lamm has only ever taken possession of one car—he never got around to collecting the other one. So here's the deal:
In the case of a true claiming race—involving cars, airplanes, donkeys, whatever—anyone present may claim a racing machine or creature for a set price. The idea is that it keeps everybody honest, so when you're running your Mitsubishi Sigma at the Outer Oildale Backwards Figure-8 Crashstravaganza you won't be tempted to spend an extra 150 bucks on a hot cam or something. Although that's not to say people don't bend the rules. My uncle Dirty Duck (of Hoot's Panhead fame) used to cheat like crazy in claimer dirt-track races in 1970s Minnesota, by rigging up a hinged steel plate that, with the pull of a lever hidden under the driver's seat, would rub on his AMX's driveshaft for the last lap of a winning race, creating a cacophony of sparks and noise that looked and sounded like the death throes of a blown transmission. But this isn't to say that the idea of a claiming race isn't a sound one.
In LeMons racing, however, only the Chief Perp has the right to claim a car for 500 bucks, and he'll only do so in cases of outrageous, rub-his-nose-in-it cheating and/or super-egregious racer idiocy of galactic proportions. Although, if we're honest, the first and only LeMons car to be claimed and taken away by the Chief Perp didn't fall into either of those categories. Here's what happened with the Pendejo Racing Mercedes-Benz S600 at the 2009 Arse Freeze-a-Palooza at Thunderhill Raceway in California.
Pendejo Racing, a legendary San Diego–based team known for running such cars as a 1980 Maserati Quattroporte and a Jaguar XJS, managed to acquire a genuine 1996 Mercedes-Benz S600 coupe, V-12 and all, for LeMons money. How? It seems that a Paraguayan diplomat obtained the car via some penumbral means, then attempted to use it to smuggle a frightening amount of not-so-legal white powder across the border at San Ysidro. The car then became positively radioactive as far as legal registration was concerned, and apparently nobody would even take it for parts. So, the Pendejo Racing guys removed the interior, fitted a roll cage, and then reinstalled the interior so that they could race in true LeMons luxury.
The M120 V-12 in this car made 389 horsepower, and the sticker price in 1996 was north of $130,000. Talk about depreciation! In any case, we weren't worried about this near-5000-pound, über-complicated car running away with the race.
Sure enough, several deeply-buried engine components let go early in the running, and the Pendejo Racing crew got busy removing several thousand weird German fasteners.
Eventually, the Pendejos had had enough of their finicky, law-attracting Benz, and they begged the Chief Perp to claim it and take it out of their lives forever. So, in a "surprise" announcement, the claim happened. It made for a good story at the time, but then the Chief Perp—who already has a Hammerite-painted Alfa GTV and a painfully original (i.e. slower than a Chevy Aveo) Datsun 240Z cluttering up his parking-challenged San Francisco driveway—was stuck with a not-really-running Benz wanted by every law-enforcement agency west of the Mississippi. So he gave it to a friend who said he'd put the V-12 in some sort of street rod (which never happened), and last we heard it was serving as shelter in a North Richmond hobo jungle.
Fast-forward to 2010, at the Detroit Bull Oil Grand Prix at Michigan's Gingerman Raceway. A famous race shop known for some high-buck projects brought this third-gen Chevy Camaro to the track alongside their LeMons race-winning turbo Toyota Supra. Pratt & Miller has a lot of very cool stuff just, you know, laying around the shop, and when it came time to build their LeMons Camaro, they dug around the dusty corners of the warehouse for a "free" engine.
During the pre-race inspections, it didn't take the LeMons Supreme Court long to determine that the Camaro was just serving as a decoy to distract us from the not-quite-as-cheatified Supra. The so-called "305″ in the Camaro sounded so mean that we just had to pull a valve cover and take a look. Hmmmm… that head doesn't look quite exactly stock.
Of course, the P&M guys claimed that a customer had given them the engine, so it should be classed as a zero-dollar part for the purposes of the LeMons budget (this led to what we call "The Pratt & Miller Rule," which states that any part you get free or cheap because you own a shop/own a tow yard/own a dealership/are president of the car club or whatever should be valued at a "real-world" price for the LeMons budget). Naturally, we handed their Supra some penalty laps, and Chief Perp Lamm was sufficiently irritated by these LeMans-racing sharpsters trying to pull a fast one on us that he claimed the Camaro's engine. The idea was that I'd come out from Denver with a pickup, haul it back, and drop it in a primered-out Chevy Kingswood Estate wagon. That never happened, and so Pratt & Miller still owes me a 400-horse small-block! At this point, after 106 LeMons races, the series claimer record stands at one car "claimed" (but actually donated by the team) and one engine claimed (but never collected).
Not that the organizers haven't been tempted from time to time. This rusty-but-packed-with-parts-of-dubious-budgetary-legitimacy Alfa Romeo Berlina had nicer Webers and a better cylinder head than the one in the Chief Perp's GTV, and he made the team sweat a bit with claimer talk that weekend.
There was NSF Racing's Carrera Panamericana 1951 Chrysler Saratoga (yes, this nice car is owned by the same team that inflicted the horrible K-It-FWD Plymouth Reliant on the LeMons community), which they last-second substituted for their regular LeMons car (which, in characteristic NSF style, wouldn't run) at the 2010 Cain't Git Bayou race, just so they could get some seat time.
Hot damn, 331-cube early Hemi engine under the hood! If we were going to exercise our contractual right to grab some team's pride and joy, this ought to be the car.
Instead, we made NSF take us for some quarter-mile passes down the No Problem Raceway drag strip.
Every so often, I see a LeMons car with just the right engine for my winter-beater 1992 Honda Civic (which runs high-18-second quarter-miles at Denver's Bandimere dragstrip). Here's a B18C1 (the engine used in the Integra GS-R) with turbocharging and lots of associated goodies, a setup that would bolt right into my Honda and solve its power-shortage problem right away. Another great potential claimer victim that we passed over.
Then there's the amazing Launcha Splatos, a Bertone X1/9 with a 190-horsepower V-6 out of an Alfa Romeo 164. This is a very well-engineered car, good enough to take the overall win at the 2012 Chubba Cheddar Enduro at Road America, an excellent example of a car built for less than 500 bucks in parts and probably 100 grand in sweat and skill. If the Chief Perp were going to claim a car for rally and track-day fun, this would be the one.
The Chief Perp, when asked about claiming LeMons cars, always says something like "The last $%&$!@ thing I need is another &*%^$# hooptie-ass car to piss off my @%$#!*(% neighbors." There will be no Launcha Splatos shipped back to California.
The same went for this 2004 Pontiac GTO, which Chim Chim Racing allegedly bought wrecked on Copart for $4000 and then sold off five grand in parts to get it under the LeMons budget. We gave this car a record two billion penalty laps the first time we saw it, and it never occurred to the Chief Perp to claim the thing. So if you're afraid of the People's Curse destroying your car, you have nothing to worry about. If you're worried about your car getting claimed, you have almost nothing to worry about, as the rule exists as a last-resort nuclear option to use against world-class douchebags who ruin the race, not as a means of legal car theft. Or, to put it in the exact words used in the official 24 Hours of LeMons rules:
At the end of the competition, the Organizers—and nobody else, you lazy, better-car-wantin' bastids—may elect to purchase any vehicle from its owner(s) for $500. In 80 races and counting, we've claimed cars precisely twice. Don't piss us off so much that we raise that to three.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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