We were just at New Jersey Motorsports Park a few months ago, and we liked it so much that we’re back again. Yes, it’s the 2014 There Goes the Neighborhood 24 Hours of LeMons, featuring 132 in-your-face, dive-bombing, engine-obliterating East Coast teams! Let’s check out what the justices of the LeMons Supreme Court (I’m taking this race off, so the judges this time are Matt Adair, Matt Yip, and Tom Newman, all veterans of the LeMons Supreme Court bench) saw during Friday’s car inspections.
Team themes based on TV shows and movies abounded. Here are the members of Team Game of Crumplezones, with their Acura Integra.
Team Make It Fast, I’m In a Hurry may be about the 87th LeMons team to do a Smokey and the Bandit theme. Reproductions of the “Screaming Chicken” Trans Am hood decals have become so cheap that we may start requiring them on all LeMons cars.
We also had our 87th Back To the Future “DeLorean” team, in this case a Nissan 300ZX run by TK Autosports (not to be confused with the 300ZX “DeLorean” that won the Chicago race a couple weeks back). Sadly, one of the drivers hit a wall during Friday practice and the car looks like it may be done for the weekend.
Team Four On the Floor converted their Honda Civic into a Flintstones car.
And, of course, Speedycop and the Gang of Outlaws are back, this time with an incredibly accurate replica of the Ford Explorers in Jurassic Park . They picked up the Explorer with a cage already installed, thanks to the folks at Grassroots Motorsports, and they’ll be the first team to race this type of vehicle in the 24 Hours of LeMons.
The Outlaws also brought their Toyota MR2 and some Jurassic-y costumes.
This Integra team calls themselves The Science Project, and their car came through inspections with an active volcano on its roof.
When a team brings a car that both exceeds the official $500 budget requirement by an absurd amount and actually has some chance of being somewhat quick on the race track, the LeMons Supreme Court feels compelled to dish out some penalty laps. Most of the time, a lap penalty in the 50-to-100 range ensures that the budget-busting team won’t run away with the race… but sometimes the numbers get higher.
In fact, sometimes they get a lot higher, usually when the team decides that they’d rather have the glory of being punished big. In this case, the 2004 Mazda RX-8 of the Wankel Wankers Rotary Club got a record-breaking four billion penalty laps, one for every year of the earth’s age. This tops the previous record of 2,000,000,007 laps earned by Team Sensory Assault’s RX-7 at the 2014 North Dallas Hooptie and the 500,000 laps dumped on the Fukushima Debris RX-8. Does the LeMons Supreme Court feel that rotary Mazdas are more suspicious than piston-engined cars? Could be!
Some teams respect the racing tradition of cheating so much that they honor it with their team themes. For example, this Lance Armstrong/Smokey Yunick car.
Some very enthusiastic spectators built this London Bus out of what appears to be a golf cart.
Meanwhile, because it’s New Jersey, many teams ruined their cars during practice and will be spending the night in a wrench-spinning frenzy. Here’s California racer, Spank, helping Three Pedal Mafia put yet another GM V6 in their soul-crushingly unreliable Triumph TR-7.
Yes, they’ll be up all night, but most of the cars will be ready to go on Saturday morning. Be sure to check in later to see what happens!
Photographs by Spank, Judge Matt Yip, Judge Tom Newman, Judge Matt Adair, and Speedycop
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