LeMons Utah Day One: Volvo 740, VW Golf, Porsche 914 Leading Classes

The quantity of race cars at the first-ever Salt Lake City 24 Hours of LeMons wasn’t so high, but the quality was just stratospheric. We knew we’d be in for a good race session on Saturday, and that’s precisely what we got. Here’s how things stood at the end of the first day of racing at the Return of the LeMonites 24 Hours of LeMons.

Leading Class A and the entire field, we’ve got the Volvo 740 Turbo of Team Too Stupid To Know Better. This team ran a Volvo 740-based birthday cake at Buttonwillow a couple of years back, but that car was destroyed in a wreck last year and this bone-stock red-and-white wagon is its replacement. The Volvo 240 has been quite successful in LeMons, but the 740 has shown a very consistent record of broken parts and DNFs in past races. Things might be different this weekend.

The Model T GT, winner of three previous LeMons races, sits a single lap behind the Volvo. The T GT gets surprisingly good fuel economy, with its two-barrel carburetor and hard tires, but it can’t match the stingy 2.3-liter Swede in that department.

The Too Stupid To Know Better crew took a gamble on fuel consumption as the moment of the checkered flag approached, and that gamble very nearly resulted in the Model T GT grabbing the lead on the last lap of the session when the Volvo’s tank ran dry. Then a Good Samaritan, in the form of the twin-engined MR2/Corolla mashup of Stick Figure Racing, gave the Volvo a push around the track and across the start-finish line.

Photo courtesy of Judy Kiel

Dirty Duck Racing (creators of the judge-pleasing Impala Hell Project diorama a couple of years back), have been chasing a true Class B win with their Volkswagen GTI for many years now. They took home the Class B trophy from the one-day-novelty Sears Even More Pointless race last year, but they’ve never pulled off a proper all-weekend-long class win. This weekend, they finished the first session with the class lead and a single-lap lead over the Model T GT’s Ford Pinto stablemate.

Volkswagens like to fall apart in LeMons, but then so do Pintos. Sunday’s action should be a white-knuckler for these two teams.

In Class C, the Village People Porsche 914 leapt out to an early lead and just kept building on it. By the close of the day’s racing, the air-cooled German owned a commanding 36-lap edge over its nearest pursuer. We’ve seen plenty of 914s in the series, and never before has one performed this well.

36 laps is pretty close to an hour-and-a-half at Class C speeds, which should be comfortable enough for the Village People, but a lot can happen in an endurance race. If the Village People’s Porsche reverts to type on Sunday, the Iron Duke-powered Pontiac Fiero of Team Salty Thunder will be ready to make its move.

Class C always produces the most dramatic subplots in any LeMons race, and that brings us to a couple of heartbreak stories. The Maserati Biturbo campaigned by the Punk Pirates With OCD spent Friday night getting its engine fixed and turbos replaced, only to blow up its engine just two laps into the race. It should go without saying that Maserati engines aren’t easy to find on a Saturday in Utah.

Still, at least the Punk Pirates managed to turn some laps; the 8-Bit Racing Subaru RX Turbo overheated and burned a couple of pistons about 50 yards into the race. Zero laps from one of our favorite cars.

Team Bangers N Mash started the day looking good in their Jensen-Healey, even contending for the Class C lead for a while… but then disaster struck.

Boom! A wayward connecting rod punched big holes through both sides of the engine block; note the “see-through” feature visible in the photo above. This means the end of your race weekend in 999,999 cases out of 1,000,000, what with Lotus 907 engines being about as easy to find on short notice near Salt Lake City as an eight-headed platypus.

However, the octocephalic monotreme in question waddled right into the Bangers N Mash pit a few hours later, with a local racer producing an intact, dust-covered Lotus 907 from his garage at the track. The swap should be finished in time for the green flag on Sunday.

Plenty of teams suffered catastrophic mechanical failures, with several punctured engine blocks among the casualties. Here’s the engine of the Neon Pope Nissan; the connecting rod that did this also managed to break the starter motor nearly in half.

The Flaming A-Holes Rover SD1 suffered the expected series of problems that you get with a first-time British LeMons car, ranging from fuel contamination to an electrical fire caused by Joe Lucas, Prince of Darkness. Still, the once-luxurious British Leyland machine finished the day with 130 total laps.

The most shocking development of the day, however, was what happened with the Grumpy Cat Racing 1950 Dodge pickup. This truck, which not long ago was a long-dead abandoned heap in Denver, ran all day long without a single problem (unless you count a loose throttle cable, which took all of 45 seconds to fix) and racked up 149 very slow but glorious laps. This sort of performance from a first-time LeMons racer of this vintage is utterly unprecedented in the history of the series, and we believe that the Chrysler flathead six-cylinder engine, based on a 1929 design and built well into the 1970s, must be considered the most reliable engine in human history as a result of the Grumpy Cat Dodge’s amazing day at Miller Motorsports Park.

Once all the cars rolled into the paddock on Saturday night, the cooking began. The Dirt Poor-sche Racing team chipped in and hired Salt Lake City’s best taco-cart operator to prepare hundreds of his savory creations for throngs of hungry racers.

As the sun went down behind the mountains, the sounds of Sawzalls, ratchets, and hammers were just starting; we hope to see all the broken cars patched up and ready to race in the morning.

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24 Hours of LeMons Utah Inspections: Rover SD1, Jensen-Healey, and a ’50 Dodge

We’re here in lovely Tooele, Utah, for the first-ever Return of the LeMonites 24 Hours of LeMons, held at Miller Motorsports Park. The air is thin, the weather is warm, and we’ve got just 67 intrepid teams willing to brave the long hauls from places like San Francisco, Denver, and Phoenix. The good news is that the proportion of spectacular cars is much higher than at your typical race, and now we’re going to share some of them with you.

The BRIBED stencil (actually a TITHED stencil) featured a design inspired by the Utah state highway symbol.

Judge Rich, who runs the Rocket Surgery Racing Checker Marathon when he’s not wearing the robes of the LeMons Supreme Court, also supplied a LeMonites TITHED stencil. A rare two-stencil race— collect them all!

For reasons that nobody can explain, we’ve got a good half-dozen GM F-bodies at the Return of the LeMonites race. Our favorite, by far, is this exquisitely detailed second-gen Trans Am reproduction.

Made from parts too horrible for even the most hooptified 100-footer “restoration,” this faux Trans Am, with its Frankensteined details such as this riveted snout, fits in perfectly with the LeMons ethos.

The hand-painted “Screamin’ Chicken” hood looks even better than the original.

Who needs a decal when you can paint like this?

The last time we saw this BMW 320i, it was wearing nondescript rattlecan black paint at the 2011 Goin’ For Broken race at Reno-Fernley. Now just look at it!

This is all pure fiberglass, just like the real box-flared deal. Sure, all the running gear is bone-stock E21 and the car will be slower than most 25-year-old Camrys on the race track, but we love it all the more for that.

We’ve got other German cars that look fast but go slow, such as this Mercedes-Benz S500.

The most successful Chrysler K-car-based racing machine in LeMons history? The Soccer Moms’ Grand Caravan, which now features a van Gogh theme, including severed-ear hood ornament.

Because we’re in Utah, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints provided inspiration to several teams. Dirty Duck Racing and their VW GTI became missionaries for the weekend.

Stick Figure Racing, one of the few teams actually based in Utah, turned a Toyota MR2 into a surprisingly accurate replica of the Mormon Meteor, a car used by to set land-speed records in the late 1930s.

This is the team that built two twin-engined LeMons Toyotas, so we expect a lot from any Bonneville-inspired car they build.

It may not match the speed of the original Duesenberg-powered Mormon Meteor, but it looks just as good.

For reasons we’ve never understood, nobody had ever raced a Jensen-Healey during the first six years of LeMons racing. We’ve seen so many British cars in this race, but never the eminently terrible affordable Jensen-Healey. That changed today, with this car. Class C, of course.

No purity-destroying engine swaps here— this is a genuine Torqueless Wonder under that Jensen-Healey’s hood.

Going toe-to-toe against the Jensen-Healey is another fine British racing machine: this Rover SD1. This V8-powered brute has the torque advantage over the Jensen, but won’t be quite as nimble.

We’re pretty sure that every SD1 came with scorch marks on the hood’s underside.

Speaking of Class C British cars, here’s Spank Worthington‘s Mini Moke, modeled after a land-speed-record bicycle.

Can those Brits beat a frighteningly stock Pontiac Fiero, complete with Iron Duke power? We’ll see.

Some say the key to winning Class C is good old-fashioned Detroit reliability, and by that we mean really old-fashioned. Yes, this is a 1950 Dodge pickup truck, complete with legendarily bulletproof Chrysler flathead six engine.

This truck’s Denver-based owner thought about racing a BMW 3-series at first, but the bad influences on the LeMons forums talked him out of that boring idea and he picked up this thoroughly decrepit Dodge. The engine turned over but that was about the one bright spot. With two weeks to go before the race, the truck had no suspension, no brakes, no rear axle, no safety equipment, no nothing.

Then the generous captain of Speed Holes Racing (the team that runs a Swiss-cheesed Rambler Marlin in Colorado races) jumped in and orchestrated an astoundingly productive last-second thrash session on the Dodge. Other Denver LeMons racers joined in with parts and labor. Soon, the truck had a Jaguar XJ-6 front suspension, a Camaro rear axle, a fuel cell, roll cage, and everything else.

700 miles of towing later, the 64-year-old truck passed the tech inspection on the very first try. How will this vastly underpowered machine fare during the course of the weekend’s racing? Check in Saturday night and see!

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The best of Villa D’Este - picture gallery

The annual Villa D'Este concours on the shores of Lake Como brings together some of the world's rarest and most perfectly preserved luxury cars

Villa D’Este is a concours d’elegance where everything from the grass on which the motor cars rest, the lake and hills that they overlook and the hotel overlooking them seem film-set perfect, with weather to match.

When you arrive, it’s difficult to know what to look at first. Especially as there are cars here that you’ll likely never have seen before in magazines, books or on the web, never mind in real life.

The Villa D’Este concours, named after the hotel whose grounds the event takes place in on the shore of Italy’s Lake Como, has been running for 85 years as a glamorous parade of some of the world’s rarest, most exotic and quite often most expensive cars.

And all of them are presented in perfect condition, although determining just how perfect is part of the point of this event, which is a contest of automotive beauty, preservation and originality.

The outright winner of this year’s pageant was a 1931 Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 Gran Sport by Aprile, whose siren engine note was as captivating as its unusual looks.

It was one of 51 historic cars, 35 motorcycles, six concept cars and a smattering of BMWs, Rolls-Royces and Minis, the BMW Group being the event’s main sponsor.

These were some of the most spectacular machines:

Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 Gran Sport by Aprile

This Alfa started life in 1931 as a Zagato-bodied car, until a crash saw it rebodied by a tiny coachbuilders called Aprile, who gave it rather more modern clothes. It was bought by its current owner Corrado Lopestro in 2008, whose restoration of it involved analysis of old black and white photographs by Milan Polytechnic in order to determine its original colour scheme. This car was the event’s overall winner.

Alfa Romeo 6C 3000 CM Superflow IV

This car has lead four lives, all of them famous. In 1953 it was a racing car, driven to second place in the Mille Miglia by Juan Manuel Fangio. It was then used as a styling platform for Pinin Farina, who produced no less than four different styles for it between 1956 and 1960. The first was a coupe, the second a modified version of that, the third a roadster and the fourth the car you see here. Most versions featured a Plexiglass roof, which slides. The Superflow’s influence on the original 1966 Alfa Romeo Duetto Spider is clear.

BMW 328

The 1936 BMW 328 and its spaceframe chassis marked a major advance in sports car design, this open two-seater winning many major competitions. Just two of the closed variety were produced, this dramatic, streamlined version bodied by Wendler Wagenfabrik for a Hans Klepper, who planned to compete in the Berlin to Rome endurance race. In early tests this two litre, six cylinder car achieved 108mph, giddy for a 2.0 litre of the day.

Ferrari 250 Europa

It might be share its colour scheme with a trifle, but this long, low and elegantly spare Ferrari from 1963 is utterly fabulous. Bodied by Pinin Farina, this car lived briefly in Italy before being shipped to the US, where its V12 engine was brutally substituted for a Chevrolet V8. The car returned to Italy in 1990, then went to Holland, its original engine improbably unearthed in 2007 to complete a total restoration.

Fiat 132 Aster

The Fiat 132 was a fairly large rear-drive saloon best known for an acute understeer habit and the pleasing rort of its twin cam engine. Very few survive, but one lives in the form of this Zagato-bodied Aster coupe from 1972. Novelties of this strange aluminium-bodied two-seater included its triangular quarterlights and polished alloy roof. The prototype was assessed by Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli himself, but considered too expensive to make. There are two Asters in fact, both owned by Swiss collector Patrick Bischoff.

Fiat Abarth 2000 Scorpione

This startling, razor-nosed sports coupe from 1969 barely comes up to your waist, has three doors and a rear-mounted 2.0 four that sits within an Abarth-constructed spaceframe. The Scorpione was designed by Filippo Sapino of Pininfarina, its two seats accessed via a front-hinged canopy of glass, and a pair of tiny side doors. Its megaphone exhaust makes it sound as threatening as the insect that it’s named after. Pininfarina sold this concept to Shiro Kosaka on the understanding that he establish an Abarth museum in his native Japan, which was founded in 1993. This is the first time the Scoprione has returned to Italy since 1977.

Hudson Italia Prototype H01

Hudson is a long-defunct US car company, which in 1952 struck a deal with Carrozeria Touring of Milan to supply 50 of these high-end Hudson Italias. But only 26 were built, the Italia far more expensive than the Chevrolet Corvette and Ford Thunderbird it was built to compete with. Its part-enclosed wheels and chrome tubed taillights would have looked less startling in 1953 than they do today, this Hudson now a fabulous oddity.

Jaguar XK 120

This extraordinary dome-roofed XK 120 is a land speed record car. Built in 1952 to set a flying mile speed record, it was almost immediately beaten by a Spanish Pegaso. Jaguar responded with this aerodynamic Plexiglass roof, tester Norman Dewis driving it to a record 172mph. In later life it was owned by racer Brian Redman and used as a two-seater, a 2009 restoration returning it to its breathtakingly beautiful record-breaking look.

Lancia Astura Type 233

This 1936 Pininfarina-bodied eight cylinder Lancia was restored in the US in 2011, over a seven-month period that was almost around-the-clock, says owner Orin Smith. It has remained in the US since 1947, but lived more precariously before that having been shipped to Berlin in 1938, where it survived the war unscathed. A four-seater cabriolet, it features a split folding windscreen and a dramatic waterfall grille.

Maserati A6G/2000

Maserati’s very successful A6G/2000 sports car, much liked by Stirling Moss, became the basis of a whole series of coachbuilt cars by Zagato, Pinin Farina, Frua and Allemano, many of them regarded as among the most beautiful cars ever made. This Zagato-bodied A6G/2000 is certainly one of those - the last of 14 Zagato-bodied cars, it belongs to a fortunate Claudio Scalise.

Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud 1 Estate, Radford

Rolls-Royce didn’t make anything as lowly as an estate version of its Silver Cloud, but British coachbuilder Harold Radford did, a handful of these rather fine shooting brakes made during the 1950s. And a shooting brake this 1959 example certainly is, its load-bay filled with enough rifles to down a startled flock of pheasants.

Fratelli Frigero Berlinetta effeeffe prototype

It looks old, but this pretty little coupe is almost all new. It was initially born out of a joke, says Fratelli Frigero’s Massimo Grassi, this Italian light-engineering company realising that it had the capability to produce a tubular-framed, alloy-skinned coupe in the mould of the early ‘60s Alfa Romeo TZ1. This pretty car is the serious result of that joke and goes on sale later this year, at a price ranging from £200-250,000. The ‘old’ bit is the 2.0 litre Alfa Romeo twin cam and five-speed gearbox, totally refurbished.

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Ford Recalls More than 1.3 Million Cars for Power Steering, Fires, and Floor Mats

With General Motors resting up for its (inevitable) next recall, Ford picked up the slack in recall-related news this week by flagging down more than 1.3 million sedans and SUVs for power steering failures, electrical fires and trapped accelerators. According to Ford, power steering can cut out on the 2011-2013 Ford Explorer and 2008-2011 Escape and Mercury Mariner. Explorer models have electric motor position sensors that can intermittently shut off due to poor cable connections and disable the power assist. In Escape and Mariner models, torque sensors may produce a low-fidelity signal in which the computer cannot tell the driver’s steering movements and will also disable the assist.

In a filing to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Ford said it knew about the failures in Escape and Mariner models since 2009 and in the Explorer since 2011. Like GM, Ford did not intend to recall the cars since the manual steering was “safe and controlled” despite at least 20 related crashes and eight injuries. After subsequent investigations by the NHTSA and Canadian government, Ford relented. About 919,875 of the 1.1 million SUVs are in the U.S. Dealers will update the power steering software to continue delivering power assist even if a fault is detected in the system. This January, Ford shipped repair kits for the torque sensors, but the recalls do not call for any part replacements.

On the sedan side of things, the 2010-2014 Ford Taurus has license plate lamps that can corrode, short, and catch fire. Ford first found the problem in 2011, and after initially drawing a blank to the cause, it opened a second investigation in May 2013 and redesigned the lamp in February. The fires continued on these new models, however, and thus dealers will now install new lamp assemblies on 196,639 cars, of which 183,425 are in the U.S. Ford said it knew of at least five owner reports of smoking or melting lamps and another 20 reporting fires. Only vehicles sold or registered in 20 “salt belt” states (plus Washington, D.C.) are included, although Ford said it would also notify other Taurus owners of the condition.

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In a flashback to Toyota’s floor mat debacle, Ford is also recalling more than 82,000 all-weather floor mats that were sold as accessories for the 2006-2011 Ford Fusion, Mercury Milan, Lincoln Zephyr and Lincoln MKZ. Shortly after the Toyota recalls began in late 2009, the NHTSA opened a similar investigation into Ford in May 2010. Like Toyota, Ford began to install brake-override systems to kill the throttle as soon as the brake is applied on these models built after October 2010. Despite drivers either stacking the thicker rubber floor mats on their existing mats or leaving them unsecured–which would leave the throttle partially stuck, but not in a wide-open position–Ford said it decided to redesign the mats between September 2011 and March 2012. It’s now redesigning them a second time as part of this official recall.

Dealers will start repairs on all the Ford recalls starting in late July. Now we return you to our regularly scheduled coverage of GM’s recall mess.

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The Koopa Troopa Lights Are Gonna Find Me: Mercedes-Benz GLA to Be Drivable in Mario Kart 8 [w/ Video]

So here’s a bit of product placement you didn’t see coming. Mercedes-Benz has inked a deal with Nintendo to place its new GLA-class crossover in the latest iteration of Mario Kart.

Intersections between real life and Mario Kart are nothing new, of course. A couple of years back, West Coast Customs built life-size versions of game vehicles and displayed them at the L.A. auto show. Earlier this year, Jaxx Pacific announced a drivable, powered kart for the lightweight set to scoot around on. But this time, the move is in reverse, with a digitized, kartified GLA appearing in the game. At least in Nintendo’s home country.

According to a report from Eurogamer , the GLA cart might make its way to other markets. A U.K. spokesman told the site, “The announcement this time was made by Mercedes-Benz Japan regarding their collaboration in Japan with NCL. As for the information relating to the distribution of the GLA kart for MK8 outside Japan, we will be able to announce in the near future.”

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Meanwhile, Nintendo Japan is promoting the crossover with a sublimely weird ad featuring Mario driving the GLA in the Super Mario Bros. 2D, 8-bit environment, then crossing over into some semblance of the real world. But what’s the deal with the male-model type playing Mario? It’s unnerving, jarring, and we dislike it immensely. Captain Lou Albano will always be the real meatspace Mario. This flim-flam sham of a fancy boy just ain’t cuttin’ it with us. Seriously, dude. Your princess isn’t in another castle. Last we saw her, she was at the tanning salon getting airbrushed.

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