After returning to The Ridge Motorsports Park in rainy Washington for the fourth annual Pacific Northworst 24 Hours of LeMons, we inspected the 63 entrants and sent them onto the track on Saturday, then watched the hard-fought class battles reach their climax on Sunday. It was wet and blustery out and many cars left important bits of their running gear on the tarmac as the race wore on, but some teams persevered and took home property-value-lowering examples of LeMons trophy hardware. In fact, each of the three class winners achieved a long-sought-but-always-denied goal at this race. Here’s what happened.
The Model T GT, which is essentially a Fox-platform Mustang with bullet-riddled Model T and Model A body parts added, has won a few LeMons races since its debut in 2010 (the most recent being the 2013 Button Turrible race). This time, even with the official “Shark In the Aquarium” 5-lap handicap assigned to the team by the LeMons Supreme Court (thanks to the low car count and lack of the usual California-based contenders at this race), the Model T GT’s drivers managed to get the most laps and edge out the ’86 Ford Thunderbird of the Killer Whales by a fraction of a lap.
Having spent years in futile pursuit of overall and Class A wins in their devil-themed (car number 666, of course) third-gen Chevrolet Camaro, the members of Team IWannaROC decided to switch to a Ford for the Pacific Northworst weekend, renting the Model T GT from its owners.
This move paid off handsomely for the IWannaROC guys, whose excellent driving skills had been insufficient to overcome the limitations of the General Motors F-body (it took 94 races before an F-body finally grabbed an overall LeMons win). Switching to the somewhat more reliable Model T GT did the trick.
Class B was even more exciting than Class A, with ONSET/Tetanus West Racing and their 1989 Chevrolet Cavalier taking the class win by four laps and finishing in P4 overall.
The ONSET team has been competing in the 24 Hours of LeMons since the 2007 season, running an increasingly quick Chevrolet Cavalier wagon that seemed on pace to claim an overall win… until the car went into the wall hard at Sears Point and was obliterated back in 2010.
Having no car of his own, ONSET team captain Anton Lovett then became The Wandering LeMons Racer, traveling the country and doing arrive-and-drives with teams in every region (in the photo above, he is the guy on the left with the Texans of Tetanus Racing, at the 2012 Road America race). In fact, Anton did so much racing that he had 50 LeMons races under his belt when he finished the ’14 Pacific Northworst event.
Even with more 24 Hours of LeMons races driven than any other human being on the planet, Anton had never been on a team that got a class win. Finally, he built his new Cavalier last year, dropped a 3.1-liter V6 into it, sorted out the bugs during several California races, and put together a team of good LeMons drivers. This proved to be the winning formula, and ONSET got its first class win. Congratulations! Next on the agenda, a 3.9 swap and a shot at Class A.
The Class B battle was no sure thing for ONSET, however, because the Petty Cash Jeep Cherokee took an early class lead and seemed unstoppable, solid front axle and all. Then the Renault-sourced windshield-wiper motor failed in the rain and the driver lost the ability to see anything. The repair took enough time for ONSET to snare the lead and hold onto it for the rest of the race.
In Class C, we had another team achieve a seemingly impossible goal. The Car Error Panamericana guys have been running their Saturn SL for many years, squishy stock suspension, slushbox transmission, and all, but a class win had seemed as far from their grasp as does a Mars Base for the Bhutan Space Program. When the car didn’t break, the drivers got buried in black flags. When those disasters didn’t happen, some other team squeaked past the Car Error guys for a class win. Finally, everything went right and the Saturn (now equipped with puzzling homebrewed fiberglass body kit) nailed down a Class C win by 16 laps (and a respectable-for-Class-C 29th place overall). Well done, Car Error Panamericana!
For the Most Heroic Fix award, the Transcontinental Drifters took it by resorting to desperate measures to keep their 1960 Chevrolet Corvair in the race.
The Transcontinental Drifters fought transmission-linkage problems for most of Saturday, while hoping that the Corvair’s increasingly catastrophic engine oil blow-by problem would cure itself. Finally, welding the shift linkage in place, giving the team a third-gear-only car, solved the shifting problem… but then the engine threw a connecting rod. Game over, man? No! Borrowing a Sawzall from the fire crew, the Drifters sliced the offending connecting rod (a tactic that sometimes works) and reassembled the engine, donating a cut-off chunk of rod to the firemen.
Earning the I Got Screwed award (and setting the track record for most trips by the wrecker for a single car during the course of a weekend), the Barely Legal Super Lemons squad proved unable to fix any of the dozen problems plaguing their 1980 Toyota Corolla. Last year, this team won the Failure To Fail award for never giving up on their hopeless Toyota; this year, they just couldn’t sort out the bugs and managed a mere 29 laps. On the plus side, they did beat a BMW 325i, a Toyota MR2, a Ford Mustang, a Volkswagen Jetta, and the Corvair.
A team that seemed destined to miserable failure suddenly reversed their screaming nosedive and became examples for the rest of the teams. Dim Sun Racing had problems registering their Datsun 240Z before the race, then had problems getting it through the pre-race inspections, then racked up several spins and four-off offenses during the first couple hours of racing. Most of the time, a team like that will continue to be a source of headaches for the race organizers, but at some point a switch flipped and the Dim Sun Racing guys raced cleanly for the remainder of the weekend. For this accomplishment, we created the We’re Shocked That You’re Not Idiots award as the special regional trophy.
The Judges’ Choice award went to Trouble Brewing Racing and their Mazda RX-7.
Why? Well, first of all, Trouble Brewing converted their RX-7 to a fairly credible replica of Cheech’s Chevy Impala lowrider from Up In Smoke, complete with drum set in the back, dingle balls, MUF DVR California license plates, primer patches, and a car number commemorating the ballot initiative that made cannabis legal in Washington.
It’s the details like this that really impress the judges!
However, the real reason the LeMons Supreme Court opted to issue their coveted award to Trouble Brewing was what happened on Saturday night when another RX-7 team blew up their engine. Trouble Brewing had a spare engine in the trailer, and they just gave it to the Rotary Rooter team, along with the loan of an engine hoist. Pretty easy Judges’ Choice call.
We’ve seen quite a few cars converted to “Barbie’s Corvette” over the years, including a Chevy El Camino, a Honda Civic, and a Dodge Neon, but never an actual Corvette. Silversleeves Racing found an ugly ’84 Corvette, complete with the unloved Doug Nash 4+3 transmission and hated Cross-Fire Injection.
Most teams would be content to just cage the thing and start turning laps until the transmission breaks and/or the Cease-Fire Injection system goes berserk, but not Silversleeves Racing.
Instead, they applied a frighteningly accurate Barbified paint job to the car, then converted one of the drivers into “Barbie’s Racer Friend Kate,” complete with retail box, and another into Racer Ken. For the car, the paint, and the costumes, Silversleeves Racing received the prestigious Organizer’s Choice award (which made up for the humiliation of a Corvette team that finished in the bottom half of the standings, getting stomped by such not-known-for-quickness cars as a naturally-aspirated Peugeot 505, a Dodge Shadow, a ’93 Subaru Legacy with automatic transmission, a diesel 300SD Mercedes-Benz, a Dodge Caravan, and a Ford Pinto).
Speaking of the naturally-aspirated Peugeot 505 that beat the Corvette (by nine laps), we’ve come to the top team of this race, the winners of the Index of Effluency trophy: F.F.L.A.T. (French Foreign Legion Attack Team) and their 29-year-old French sedan. The F.F.L.A.T. car cruised around the track in most comfortable and leisurely fashion, setting the fifth-slowest best lap time of any team in the race, yet finished in a very respectable P35. Excellent work, F.F.L.A.T.!
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