The first day of racing at the second annual There Goes the Neighborhood 24 Hours of LeMons is in the books, and we’ve got a lot of familiar faces high in the standings, a lot of broken engine parts on the tarmac, and a development we don’t see at many races: no German cars in the top ten at the end of the day. In fact, you have to go down to P13 before you spot any car that would make an oompah band strike up Deutschland Über Alles (the NYC Fastest Taxi BMW E30 325i), and even that team is just barely ahead of the wretched Scirocco of Rabbit Pellets Racing. Let’s take a look at the class leaders as of Saturday night.
Leading all 132 entries plus Class A is the Ford 302-powered Volvo 242 of the Keystone Kops. The Keystone Kops have been racing a pair of Volvo 240s at East Coast LeMons events for as long as we can remember (which ranges from five years to several hours, depending on how much starter fluid we’ve been huffing), and they’ve spent quite a bit of race time with one or both of their cars in P1 or P2… yet the Kops have never taken an overall LeMons win.
Part of the reason the Keystone Kops haven’t taken home any Class A trophies is that team captain Irv Stein, aka “Crazy Irv, the Volvo Dealmaker,” tends to get a little excited once the team claws its way to P1, and that generally leads to a visit to a time-consuming visit to the penalty box. Will that happen this weekend? We’ll find out on Sunday!
Right behind Crazy Irv’s team is another Volvo 240, this one the wagon of Swedish Mafia Racing. This team is one of the least likely to screw up and be forced to perform The Robot Dance Penalty for the enjoyment of the LeMons Supreme Court, which means that the members of the Keystone Kops won’t sleep well tonight. Volvo 240s win a lot of crapcan races in their native land, and we expect to see that happening over here as well.
Leading Class B, we’ve got the New Englanders of the Massholes and their Ford Escort ZX2. The Massholes have been racing in this region for years and have never had a class win, so perhaps this could be their weekend. However, when the driver of a car that’s a bit on the fast side for Class B makes a mistake and visits the LeMons Supreme Court for a penalty, said penalty will take much, much longer than your typical first-visit-to-the-Penalty-Box occasion.
Not far behind the Massholes is the— you guessed it— Volvo of Fast Al’s Race Team. Fast Al’s (as in Al Einstein) Volvo 745 has come agonizingly close to a Class B win many times, but some mechanical failure always knocks the car out of the running, usually about the time when the guy at start/finish is starting to limber up his checkered-flag-waving arm. If the Massholes black-flag their way out of the Class B lead on Sunday, the pressure will be on Fast Al’s Race Team to keep all their important mechanical bits in working order for the rest of the day.
The Pontiac Fiero has proven to be one of the worst possible cars for this sort of racing, which doesn’t stop LeMons teams from continuing to build and race the things. In this case, though, things are working out pretty well for DeCuzzi Racing Gulf a Fiero, because the team is leading Class C and sitting at P48 overall.
The relentless pursuer of the Fiero, the Prompt Critical Capri, will never rest until it sits atop Class C. Yes, these two V6-powered machines will battle to the last connecting rod between them.
Meanwhile, of course, many cars have blowed up, crashed out, done fell apart, or otherwise stopped running, and those teams will spend Saturday night feverishly wielding hammers and rolls of duct tape in attempts to get their cars ready for Sunday morning’s green flag. Check in later and find out what happens next!
Photographs by John Abronski and Matt Adair
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1spZ1JA
via IFTTT
