We’re back at South Carolina’s Carolina Motorsports Park for the fifth annual Southern Discomfort 24 Hours of LeMons, having spent the day inspecting the 80 or so entrants, and this race has the highest percentage of Class C cars we’ve ever seen. Class A is for the fast cars (e.g., BMW E30s, Acura Integras), Class B is for the not-so-fast cars (e.g., bone-stock slushbox Accords), and Class C… well, that’s the class for the most important LeMons cars. At the Detroit race, two weeks ago, we just three Class C cars in the whole field. This time we must have close to a dozen! There’s the 1956 Ford Crown Victoria of NSF Racing, of course, and now we’re going to admire its competition.
The 1975 Ford LTD Landau entered by The Tunachuckers boasts 460 cubic inches of Ford big-block power and gets about the same fuel economy as most LeMons RX-7s. Class C!
This “Killer B” MGB has been trying to ride its ancient pushrod BMC engine to a class win for at least three years. Class C!
A street-legal Chevy S10 “fire truck,” complete with ladders and hoses. Class C!
The worst Volkswagen Super Beetle in the history of LeMons (and maybe the world). Class C!
A Morris (actually Austin) Marina, the car that Top Gear endorses as the worst motor vehicle ever built. Class C!
A Pontiac Fiero with Iron Duke. If we had a Class D, we’d have used it here.
The Index of Effluency-winning ’72 Dodge Coronet from Texas was sold to a collective made up of a dozen random racers and moved to the Deep South. Since they own the car together in sort of a weird form of racing socialism, this Coronet is now the Dodge Coronautski.
Super KGB. Class C!
The Team Get To The Choppa Chevy Cavalier ran its last race with four-banger power and was slow even by Class C standards. Now it has a 3.1 liter 60-degree V6, twice the power… and it’s still in Class C.
Sputnik Racing, which was heavily involved in the nightmare story of the K-It-FWD Plymouth Reliant last year, has returned with a Porsche 924 Turbo. Normally, this type of car wouldn’t qualify for Class C, but Sputnik has found a way to make it even worse than a regular 924.
Yes, that’s a Nissan Sentra engine crudely swapped in, and it uses a Hillman Avenger clutch disk (with about 5″ diameter) in order to mate the new engine to the Porsche transaxle. Class C!
The 340,000-mile Spank Worthington Toyota Prius that we last saw at the Sears Pointless race in California was sold to a South Carolinian, who drove it across the country (imagine driving across Texas in a fully caged Prius with California plates and incomprehensible bumper stickers!), now daily-drives it, and will be racing this weekend. Class C!
Perhaps the favorite to take the Class C crown this time is the infamous Slant Six E30, a BMW 325 with a Chrysler Slant-6 engine swap.
Those aren’t all the Class C competitors, but you get the idea. We should discuss some of the faster cars, such as the Molde Carlo Chevrolet, which was the first GM car to take an overall LeMons win. This happened a year ago, at the 2013 Southern Discomfort race, and the car sports a bouncy near-stock suspension, automatic transmission (which is kept in Drive at all times on the race track), and a no-frills approach to racing.
No tachometer. Just an egg timer to let the driver know when his stint is over.
We have several Miatas, a few Supras, a couple of 240SXs, and a half-dozen Mustangs.
Because this is a race track in the Deep South, we were given many jars of acetone-and-lead-enhanced local refreshments.
The LeMons Supreme Court’s BRIBED stencil for this race gets a Trans Am “screaming chicken,” complete with historically accurate font. Collect them all!
Some teams made very compelling cases to be placed in Class B instead of Class A. Here’s a good effort by a Civic team.
This BMW E30 3-series has a pickup bed, GM 4.3 V6 power, and an over-the-roof exhaust system.
Strange and disturbing decorations abounded.
Following up their Index of Effluency and Class C wins at the Alabama race in February, the Knoxvegas Lowballers converted their Ford Contour SVT to a Pontiac police car, to go with their Smokey and the Bandit-themed, Duratec-powered Geo Metro “18-wheeler.”
We’ve promoted the Metro to Class B this time, because the car actually runs more than five minutes at a time, so the rest of Class C is safe from the Lowballers’ amazing power-to-weight ratio. For now.
Check in Saturday night to find out who ends the first day of racing on top of the toughest Class C field in LeMons history.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/RdDdAi
via IFTTT
