We were quite impressed with the wide variety of vehicles fielded by the 87 entrants to the fifth annual Southern Discomfort 24 Hours of LeMons, held at South Carolina’s Carolina Motorsports Park, and the first day’s race session did not disappoint. Once the green flag waved on Sunday and the weather got appropriately sultry, the contending teams gave us even more good racin’ action. Here are the teams that took trophies home.
The team to beat in East and South Region LeMons races has become the RC Spiders, victors of the 2013 New England race, the 2013 New Jersey race, the 2014 Alabama race, and now the 2014 Southern Discomfort race. They took an early lead at CMP and just kept adding onto it as their competitors went down, one after another, with mechanical problems and penalty-box visits. In the end, the RC Spiders took the checkered flag with a comfortable six-lap cushion, taking home the Winner On Laps and Class A trophies. In a class move, the team donated their prize money to LeMons-approved charity Alex’s Lemonade Stand.
The Class B winner shocked the spectators by coming out of nowhere and finishing in P4, racking up a best lap time a half-second quicker than the RC Spiders’ best lap in the process. Team Scrap Iron had been campaigning their 1993 Ford Escort GT for a while and had never taken a Class B win, but this time they ran fast, didn’t break the car, and didn’t get black-flagged for any bad-driving escapades. No Escort has ever taken a LeMons overall win, but these guys might be the ones to pull off that feat in the future.
Class C had an unprecedented 16 competitors this time, but the race quickly turned into a three-way battle between Mock Grass Racing (1998 Kia Sephia), Gotta Go Fast (1996 Geo Metro), and Austin Powerless (1975 Austin Marina). In the end, the Sephia team rode their just-into-triple-digits-horsepower Korean steed to victory over the 70-horse Geo and the 62-horse Austin, beating the GM-badged Suzuki by five laps.
The Most Heroic Fix trophy was earned by the Ayn Rand-themed John Galt Motorsports. Their four-cylinder ’91 Ford Mustang grenaded its engine early on Saturday, and the team found another one and swapped it in. Then the timing belt and timing belt tensioner went out, and they fixed that. Then the clutch and transmission failed, and they fixed that. With all that repair time, the John Galt Motorsports car managed just 134 laps, but the Most Heroic Fix trophy took some of the sting out of an otherwise rough weekend.
The mirror-image of the Most Heroic Fix award is the self-explanatory I Got Screwed award, and this time we gave the not-so-sought-after prize to Emily’s Power For the Cure, after their RX-7 failed the tech inspection due to a bad cage, then blew up the engine seven laps after the team finally fixed the cage. Screwed!
The Judges’ Choice award at this race became sort of a Heroic Fix Lite, going to the B Keepers and their 1973 MGB-GT.
The B Keepers heard a terrible noise coming from their much-raced engine, and it turned out to be the sound of one of the pistons and rod being smashed into steel confetti. Inspired by the story of Apocalyptic Racing and their 3-cylinder Celica, the B Keepers pulled all the bits of shattered metal out of their engine, hose-clamped a piece of leather belt around the empty crank journal (to block the oil hole), buttoned everything back up, and kept racing on three cylinders.
Our special regional trophy this time was the South Shall Not Quite Win Again award, which went to Team SOB—Sick of Breaking. These guys and their 1986 Volkswagen GTI have finished second or third in just about every CMP race they’ve entered over the years (they finished in P3 this time around), but they never give up. We felt that their efforts deserved a trophy.
We also liked the “corral” the SOB guys put together for their families, intended to keep small children from wandering off. We referred to this enclosure as “Andersonville.”
Sometimes the Organizer’s Choice award has nothing to do with anything that happens on the track. Team Terminally Confused brought their two bee-themed Hondas, a CRX and a Civic, and got the two cars into P50 and P36 respectively.
However, it was what Terminally Confused did on Saturday night that won them the prestigious Organizer’s Choice award: they cooked enough food to feed everyone at CMP. In fact, they sent team members around the facility to spread the word that many pounds of delicious pork and side dishes were available to all.
As if that weren’t enough, Terminally Confused also helped fix other teams’ cars, including an exhaust-system repair on the Judges’ Choice-winning B Keepers’ MGB-GT.
That brings us to the Big One, the Index of Effluency. Sometimes a team gets the IOE for getting a fairly out-of-place-on-the-race-track car into the top half of the standings… and sometimes a team gets it for making a car that never belonged anywhere near a race track finish in the top three-quarters of the standings. NSF Racing (yes, that NSF Racing) and their excruciatingly stock 1956 Ford Crown Victoria accomplished the latter feat, completing 235 laps and ending up 57th out of 87 entries.
Three-on-the-tree manual transmission, Y-block V8, squishy suspension and all, the NSF Ford was slow but majestic on the race track.
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