174 teams started the race on Saturday, and perhaps 90 were still running when the checkered flag waved on Sunday evening. The fourth annual Sears Pointless 24 Hours of LeMons proved to be the engine-killingest, metal-bendingest race we’ve seen in quite some time, which made victory all the sweeter for the teams that went home with trophies.
These days, the mohawk-equipped ’92 BMW 525i of If It’s Not Punk It’s Junk and the Dos Equis-themed ’83 BMW 533i of Cerveza Racing are the cars to beat in West Coast LeMons racing. The Cerveza car was the race leader for most of the weekend, but the Punks grabbed the lead late on Sunday, built it up to two laps, and took the win. Zero black flags, zero mechanical ailments, and some very fast lap times were the keys to victory (again) for this team.
The Flyin’ Hawaiians’ smog-carburetor-equipped Datsun 260Z had proven to be so unutterably terrible in previous races that the LeMons Supreme Court showed some mercy and classed the team in B this time. Next thing we knew, the team had managed to get their battered Datsun into 14th place overall, beating the nearest B competitor (an S10 pickup with 2,000 watts of audio amplifiers and a bed full of woofers) by 10 laps.
Most V12 Jaguars (and V12 BMWs) get put in C Class by the LeMons Supreme Court (for obvious reasons), and this time an XJ12 managed to refrain from blowing head gaskets, spinning rod bearings, stretching head studs, or melting down its entire wiring harness for an entire race. The Flaming A-Holes held off a lot of tough Class C rivals all weekend, finishing in P29 and beating its closest rival (an ’84 Nissan Maxima) by four laps.
The BMW E30 3-Series is the most common LeMons car, and that means that we’re very, very familiar with this car’s Achilles heel: a very fragile engine computer. The ECMs in E30s tend to become unhappy when subjected to the extreme conditions of endurance racing, and just about every E30 team keeps a spare ECM on hand. The veteran racers of Absolute Lemon Motorsports, however, cooked their car’s ECM early in the race, then fried their only replacement. Rather than try to chase down the elusive electrical-system gremlin that was killing their ECMs, they went for the brute-force solution and sent a couple of team members to every self-service wrecking yard within 75 miles, buying just about every compatible ECM in Northern California.
Here we see the hand-stamps from five Pick-N-Pulls on one of the proud Heroic Fix winners.
The Mazdarachis’ RX-7 got caught up in a couple of ugly metal-on-metal incidents during Saturday’s race session, and found that the only available replacement for some off-brand front-suspension part was 400 miles to the south. No problem, they said, and sent one of their drivers off to fetch the part in his rental car. 200 miles later, he stopped for gas… and discovered that he’d left the car’s key fob back at Sears Point, which meant that another team member had to drive down with the fob and rescue him. Screwed!
Rather than fix all the weak points on the Jettaross (which they’d hauled all the way from Texas to California), The Syndicate opted to convert the car to an obsessively detailed tiki bar.
That’s the kind of attitude that makes the LeMons Supreme Court happy.
For our special regional award, we opted to honor the team that most embodied the spirit of the rise and fall of the Bay Area’s dot-com boom. The 1994 Mercedes-Benz S500 of OMG Racing was the sort of car bought with $100,000 pulled from fat stock-option bonuses, and its decline into total hooptiehood and a LeMons-grade price tag symbolizes much of what went on in the area just south of Sears point during the mid-to-late 1990s. OMG Racing managed a 59th-place finish with their tippy, leany Benz luxo-coupe, a most impressive feat.
This bunch of VW freaks stuffed a VR6 engine and some fairly effective suspension upgrades into this ’87 VW Vanagon camper and went racing. The Westafarians’ bus was shockingly quick (for a Vanagon) and finished in 96th place overall.
Sure, the Vanagon broke a few parts, but it still managed to beat 78 other vehicles and looked great doing it. For that, Organizer’s Choice!
1964 Sunbeam Imp. 102nd place. Ran all weekend. Need we say more?
This is the first time that a two-car LeMons team has won both the coveted Class C trophy and the top prize of LeMons racing. Congratulations, Flaming A-Holes!
Because we had way more entries that room on the track, we’ll be running a special one-day LeMons race at Sonoma Raceway on Monday: Even More Pointless. Check in Monday night for the results of that race!
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/caranddriver/blog/~3/l3FlogMRPCo/
Richie Ginther Yves Giraud Cabantous Ignazio Giunti Timo Glock Helm Glöckler
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