At the second annual There Goes the Neighborhood 24 Hours of LeMons (and our sixth visit to New Jersey Motorsports Park since our first race there in 2011), we saw numerous movie-themed teams and our first four-billion-lap penalty on Friday, German cars pushed entirely out of the upper reaches of the standings on Saturday, and a bunch of teams go home with trophies on Sunday. Here’s what happened.
While cold, hard statistics prove that the Volvo 240 is the best 24 Hours of LeMons car, and many of the beloved Swedish bricks have finished in the top five of the standings in our races, only two have ever stood at the top of the heap when the checkered flag waved: the Mustard Yellow Volvo Doing 45 In the Fast Lane, which took the win at the 2009 Buttonwillow Histrionics with the most dramatic finish in LeMons history… and the winner of the 2014 There Goes the Neighborhood race on Sunday: the Keystone Kops and their ’79 Volvo 242.
The Kops have been around since the very early days of the 24 Hours of LeMons, making their debut at the first-ever East Coast event and the eighth LeMons race overall (we’re now on #117): the 2008 New England 24 Hours of LeMons. They run a 244 sedan with a turbocharged Volvo engine and a 242 coupe with a Ford 302 swap, and they’ve had at least one car in the single-digit portion of the standings in just about every race since they started. Finally, the two-door “Jew-Wop-E” (so named, in very East Coast fashion, because all of its drivers are of Jewish or Italian ancestry) managed to avoid blowing up and/or getting buried in black flags at a race, and the Keystone Cops took the Class A and overall wins by four laps over the Toyota Solara of Team FRS’s Ugly Uncle. After six years, the Kops have done it!
In Class B, we have another Volvo feelgood story: Fast Al’s Race Team, running a Volvo 745 with automatic transmission, had been pursing an elusive class win for years— maybe not quite as many years as the Keystone Kops, but a long, long time.
Every race, it seemed, F.A.R.T. would hold off the Class B challengers by a lap or two for most of the weekend, then throw a connecting rod or scatter a transmission or melt the wiring harness (the Volvo 740 has been far less reliable than its 240 predecessor in our races). Then, finally, the Fast Al’s wagon squeezed past the other Class B cars and stayed there, taking the win by a not-so-comfortable few hundred yards over the Massholes and their Ford Escort. Congratulations, Fast Al’s Racing Team!
Class C went to the team DeCuzzi Racing Gulf a Fiero and their ’86 Pontiac Fiero. This car set down some good lap times, managing to avoid the typical Fiero fate of blowing up and requiring extensive and time-consuming repairs, and finished P35 overall and 10 laps up in its class.
The Most Heroic Fix trophy was awarded to Scuderia Regurgito (Dom’s Racing Team) for repairs made to the thoroughly destroyed engine in their 1992 BMW 325i. In the words of LeMons Supreme Court Justice Matt Adair: “Car is smoking massively on track, they pull over and try to turn it off. It won’t turn off. Track goes red flag while it’s sorted out and towed into the paddock (while running). They end up cutting the battery cables…still running. They cut the alternator wire…still running. They cut the wires to the coil packs…still running. Finally they cut all the wires to the harness…still running. Ultimately they empty a fire extinguisher into the intake and it shuts off. That night, they source a new motor, install it, re-wire the car, and somehow make it back out and run most of Sunday.”
Sometimes the I Got Screwed award goes to a team… and sometimes it goes to an individual. In this case, Team G-Tron hired a local mechanic named Mattie to prep a trio of matching 1995 Audi 90s for the race. When the cars showed up for the inspections, they failed the equipment check on many counts apiece, and so Mattie had to be hired to come back to the track and thrash the cars into sufficiently good shape to pass the tech inspection. Then he had to spend the weekend in an Audi-wrenching frenzy to keep the cars (sort of) running, while the racers— described by Chief Perp Jay Lamm as “a group of Audi Club D-bags”— hovered over him. For this, Mattie brings home the I Got Screwed trophy.
For the Judges’ Choice award, how could the LeMons Supreme Court offer this trophy to any team that didn’t race a 2000 Nissan Quest minivan? Sputnik Racing— yes, the same Sputnik Racing that shepherded the Worst Car In LeMons History for much of its travels around the continent last year— pleased the judges very much with their choice of racin’ machinery.
The Game of Crumplezones Acura Integra and team costumes earned the Organizer’s Choice trophy, for obvious reasons.
For each race, we create a special regional and/or race-specific trophy. This time that trophy was the Best Non-Team Team Theme, for this highly accurate “London Bus” built by a group of race spectators.
The top prize of LeMons racing, the Index of Effluency, goes to the team that achieves far beyond any reasonable expectations with a car that never belonged anywhere near a race track. In this case, Team Prompt Critical Racing managed to flog their 1974 Mk1 Ford Capri (number 235, naturally) all the way up to P44 (out of 126 entries starting the race), nearly taking the Class C prize in the process. Regardless of what European Capri fans might tell you, this is one of the worst possible cars to enter in a LeMons race (especially with the deeply flawed Cologne V6, which is what powers the Prompt Critical car), and a nearly-in-the-top-third finish for this car is thus an astounding achievement. Well done, Prompt Critical Racing!
Photographs by Matt Adair, John Abronski, Murilee Martin, Kim Harmon, and Nick Pon
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/VeA6Ku
via IFTTT
