For the 24 Hours of LeMons’ fifth visit to the Autobahn Country Club in Joliet, Illinois, we started things off with inspections of some strange-O engine-swapped machinery on Friday, then ran one long race session that started on Saturday morning and finished at midnight. With the lack of a break between sessions, mechanical problems tended to knock cars out of contention for class leads but heightened a near-panic-stricken sense of urgency among the teams that wanted their cars kept on the track at all costs. We saw much madness, much heroism, and much disappointment, and we rewarded nine teams with sure-to-be-cherished LeMons trophy hardware. Here are your 2014 Doin’ Time In Joliet 24 Hours of LeMons award winners.
Only a few Nissan Z-cars have done very well in LeMons racing (though Z-based teams have been very numerous over the years), which tells us that the three teams that have won multiple races (one of which is Saab-powered) are nearly alone in overcoming the reliability problems of the breed. Team Back To The Past just added another win by getting 318 laps with their ’85 300ZX at Autobahn. These guys weren’t driving the fastest car on the track— in fact, 41 teams (out of 96 total) racked up quicker best lap times than did the Back To The Past Nissan— but they raced cleanly, didn’t hurt the car, and practiced impeccable pit-stop strategy, and in the end they’d won by a not-very-comfortable fraction of a lap over the LemonAid Racing BMW 325i. Back To The Past won the 2012 Heaps In the Heart of Texas race, followed by 2014 North Dallas Hooptie race, and now they are the Class A and overall winners of the 2014 Doin’ Time In Joliet race.
In Class B, Point-O-Eight and their BMW-ized Ford Escort GT took the class win by four laps, finishing with 306 total laps and P10. This team has been competing in Midwest Region LeMons racing for a few years now, and they’ve gone from hard-luck parts-breakers to solid class contenders during that time.
The Schnitzelwagen 1972 Volkswagen Type 3 Squareback glommed the Index of Effluency trophy at the 2012 Autobahn race, but that wasn’t enough for those air-cooled Volkswagen fanatics. They wanted a Class C win as well, and after a half-dozen attempts (involving many broken engine components) they’ve reached their goal. Der Schnitzelwagen’s drivers beat their closest class rival, the Windy City Racing BMW 2002, by four laps.
There were several strong candidates for the Most Heroic Fix award at this race, but Milwaukee’s Pabst Blue Racing team out-sweated the rest, the team members shredding their knuckle flesh to the bone in most relentless fashion while patching their rear-wheel-drive-converted, Cadillac Northstar V8-powere Nissan Maxima together in time to catch the checkered flag.
The PBR car broke a connecting rod on the second lap of the race, punching big holes in both sides of the engine block. Many teams faced with a much less severe problem— say, a blown head gasket in a Honda Civic— just pack up and go home at this point. The idea of obtaining and swapping a big, complicated engine in a weirdly fabricated mid-engined race car would seem as difficult as pushing a peanut all the way to the top of Pikes Peak with one’s nose to such a team, but Pabst Blue Racing is made of sterner stuff.
The one bright spot for PBR was the ease of obtaining a junkyard Northstar in the Midwest on a Saturday afternoon. Illinois junkyards tend to be well-stocked with early-90s Cadillacs, and it wasn’t long before an allegedly good engine (the donor car had the word “RUNS” scrawled on its windshield) was back at the PBR pit space. The entire much-modified Cadillac suspension subframe had to be dropped out the bottom of the Maxima, followed by hundreds of large and small tasks to be accomplished in order to get the replacement engine installed.
Nearly 12 hours after the first engine blew up, the Pabst Blue Racing Maxima was ready to go with its new engine. Unfortunately, it overheated just three laps after its glorious return to the track, and the team finished 96th out of 96 entries. So what? A well-earned Most Heroic Fix trophy!
The LemonAid Racing Geo Metro managed to win both Class C and Index of Effluency trophies, three-cylinder engine and all. After the LemonAid guys got an overall win in their BMW 3-series (yes, the one that they made into a rolling monument to Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha) last year, they decided they wanted a tougher challenge, so they opted for a powertrain upgrade in their Metro.
Yes, that’s a BMW M50, driving the Metro’s rear wheels. This beautiful abomination ended up weighing more than the team’s E30 (excess weight tends to be a problem with swaps like this), but the team had high hopes for its road-racing success. Sadly, it suffered many mechanical failures, wasn’t especially quick, and turned a mere 43 laps.
Meanwhile, the LemonAid E30 spent most of the race in P1, but a late-innings black flag for a dramatic off-track excursion gave the lead to the Back To The Past Nissan. For ruining their perfectly good Geo Metro with a backbreaking 10,000-man-hour drivetrain swap and missing the overall win in their BMW due to a single driver mistake, we gave Team LemonAid the I Got Screwed award.
The United Partnership of Pentastar Racers were well on the way to taking home a Most Heroic Fix or I Got Screwed trophy— racers who choose members of the extended Chrysler K-Car family tend to be major players when it comes to those two awards— when their 1992 Plymouth Sundance Duster clanked to a halt early in the race.
The Mitsubishi 6G72 V6 engine under the Sundance’s hood refused to run correctly, due to undiagnosable fuel-delivery and/or ignition and/or cosmic-ray problems. The members of the United Partnership of Pentastar Racers are, to a man, engineers employed by Detroit auto manufacturers, but curing the maddening ailments of their engine controls seemed beyond the abilities of modern science. They tried swapping fuel injectors, then arrived at the junkyard too late to buy a replacement engine computer.
At that point, I offered a terrible suggestion: cut a hole in the flat top surface of the 6G72′s intake manifold and mount a random carburetor borrowed from any team that would loan one out for a few hours. By the same means, scrounge up a low-pressure electric fuel pump and a crappy fuel-pressure regulator and provide the carb with the correct fuel flow. At first, the UPOPR engineers were too fastidious in their engineerdom to even consider such a hair-raisingly crude kludge (keep in mind that these guys scratchbuilt their own digital instrument cluster and then added wireless telemetry for the exhaust-gas temperature of each of the engine’s cylinders), but a combination of race fever and the offer of all the needed carburetor-related bits from the crazy New Zealanders of Apocalyptic Racing did the trick.
In a very short time, the Aisin carburetor was mounted onto a freshly-hacked hole in the Mitsubishi’s intake, the linkage and fuel plumbing was in place, the hood had been sliced to clear the carb, and the team just needed to wait for the RTV to cure in order to get back onto the track.
It worked! Two more laps of racing, with the car hitting 85 mph at one point. Then the RTV sealant began running, causing huge vacuum leaks and sending the Plymouth back to the pits. Still, it was one of the most triumphant moments in all of LeMons hooptiedom, and for that we honored the United Partnership of Pentastar Racers with the created-for-the-occasion Never Listen To Judge Phil award.
The 24 Hours of LeMons Supreme Court justices always choose a recipient for the Judges’ Choice award, and this time the judges (which included Hooniverse writer Eric Rood and radial aircraft engine-powered MR2 builder Marc LaBranche) gave the trophy to a team that didn’t even bring a race car to the track. Team Muenster Energy suffered repeated trailer and tow-vehicle mishaps on their way from Wisconsin, damaging their race car beyond repair in the process. Rather than just give up, they came to the track and watched the race, offered to lend a hand to teams in need of assistance, and generally had a much more positive attitude than we see from most teams who don’t get to race at all. The LeMons Supreme Court justices approve of this, and so we gave Muenster Energy the Judges’ Choice award.
The Organizer’s Choice went to a team that put a lot of effort into making their Mustang into a convincing flying pig, complete with heavy and drag-inducing oil-drum snout and huge plywood wings, even though they often contend with the fastest teams for an overall win. The Flying Pig Racing car looks spectacular on the track, and it generally finishes in the top five (this race, it was P3).
We think that all the quick teams should decorate their cars this well.
The top prize of LeMons racing is the Index of Effluency award, given to the team that accomplishes the most with the least likely vehicle. About halfway through this race, we decided that two teams stood out above all the others in the IOE race: the Sir Jackie Stewart’s Coin Purse Racing Ford EXP, and the Afunzalo Racing Fiat X1/9.
Whichever of those two got the most laps by the time the checkered flag waved, we decided, would get the Index of Effluency trophy.
The Fiat, while very slow, was slightly quicker than the Ford, but the two stayed neck and neck for hour after hour.
Then, disaster struck! Actually, disaster (in the form of repeated mechanical woes) had been striking both teams all day, but the EXP suffered a catastrophic balljoint failure late in the afternoon and came in on the hook with the front wheels pointing in markedly different directions.
The EXP was repaired amazingly quickly, but the Afunzalo Racing Fiat X1/9 built up enough of a lead to beat Sir Jackie Stewart’s Coin Purse Racing by six laps. Congratulations, Afunzalo Racing!
Not enough LeMons coverage to satisfy your hooptie-racing jones? You can check out more photos of the Doin’ Time In Joliet race here, you can follow the updates from LeMons HQ on the 24 Hours of LeMons Facebook page, and you can always keep up with the latest LeMons news at the Inexplicably Presented By Car and Driver LeMons Roundup page.
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