After the parade through a once-wholesome South Carolina town and subsequent car inspections on Friday, the racing began on Saturday morning. As the day progressed, we saw a mix of the expected and unexpected; here’s how it went.
First, the expected stuff: The one-of-60-built 1960 Ford Frontenac coupe of NSF Racing failed to be ready in time to catch the green flag, but then roared onto the track and looked great. Then it suffered from the fuel-system-contamination problems you get with a car that sat for years and began making frequent pit stops to deal with clogged-carburetor-related hassles. Still, the Frontenac was racing!
That is, it was racing until early afternoon, when the engine lost power, began vomiting choking clouds of smoke, and exhibiting all the warning signs of a blown head gasket and/or bad piston rings and/or bent pushrods and/or bad rod bearings and/or a neutron star forming in the oil pan. Such comprehensive engine failure hadn’t been seen since NSF Racing campaigned the worst car in LeMons history last year, but the good news was that they’d brought a fresh-looking 170-cubic-inch straight-six that they’d found on Craigslist prior to the race. Engine swap time!
This being NSF Racing, the swap process has gone with sub-optimal smoothness, but they should have the new engine in place by the time Sunday’s race session starts. So far, the Frontenac has notched a total of 35 laps, good for P101 out of 109 entries.
Meanwhile, the Renault Fuego Turbo of Interceptor Motorsports also performed as expected (actually, better than expected, at least when you go by the expectations of anyone who has any familiarity with the Fuego). The car wasn’t ready for the green flag, which surprised nobody. Then it clattered onto the track about midday. Hooray!
The Fuego was slow (the slowest vehicle in the race, in fact) and it sputtered to a halt and had to be rescued by the wrecker about every 1.5 laps, but Interceptor Motorsports was competing!
Then the car limped into the penalty box, spewed a vile-looking engine-fluids milkshake out through the grille, and spat its thermostat onto the ground. Now that’s a dramatic breakdown, even in the eyes of the seen-it-all-before members of the LeMons Supreme Court. The Fuego managed nine laps on Saturday, which is about seven more than most of us expected. We told the Fuego guys to go fix the first half-dozen problems they found under the hood and try again in the morning.
Also expected— though more depressing— was the sequence of events that took place with Team SOB and their Volkswagen Golf. This team started out as South of the Border back in 2008, then junkyard-turbocharged their engine and became Screaming on Boost a few years later, and now they’re the all-too-aptly-named Team Sick of Breaking. For six long years, they’ve been coming to LeMons races at CMP, climbing to the very top of the standings at each race thanks to excellent driving skills… and then breaking the car. This time, they grabbed the P1 spot early and began building up a nice cushion as the day went on. Then, a blown tire followed by a leaking oil cooler cost them about ten laps, and they finished the session in 8th place and six laps back of the leader— still in the hunt but in need of some mistakes by other teams to reclaim the top spot. The path chosen by the Volkswagen racer is not an easy one.
Now we’re going to veer off into unexpected territory, with the class leaders at the end of Saturday’s race session. Leading Class A and in P1, we’ve got the Hong Norrth C 1984 Toyota Supra. Hong Norrth has been one of the teams to beat in the LeMons South Region for years now, but their string of victories came with a pair of well-sorted Mazda MX-3s, which the team now appears to have stuffed into The Crusher and replaced with one of the least-reliable cars in the series (two Supras have won LeMons races, but the most recent such victory came in 2009). They’d done very poorly with this Supra since its debut a few races back, but today they’ve managed to inch all the way up to the pinnacle of the standings. Can it last?
On the same lap as the Hong Norrth Supra, oddly enough, is Fast Al’s Race Team and their automatic-transmission-equipped Volvo 745. We don’t know how this is happening, what with the Volvo 740′s propensity for mechanical failure in LeMons, but there it is.
Also with 225 laps, we’ve got the VW Golf driven by Hung South Racing, making a threesome of notoriously breakdown-prone vehicle types within seconds of one another on the lead lap. Sunday is going to be exciting for the spectators.
The Class B lead became the subject of much controversy during the latter hours of Saturday’s race session, with the LeMons Supreme Court attempting to right a perceived classing screw-up by promoting the Halfast Racing Chevrolet Caprice from Class B to Class A (the last few races have been subject to a certain amount of activism from the bench, which has caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth among some racers). After much agonized debate among the justices, the LCS has granted Halfast Racing the Class B/5-lap handicap we gave them at the Alabama race, placing them in P9, where they will begin Sunday’s racing with a five-lap lead in their class.
That means that the long-suffering Duff Beer team and their D-engined ’94 Honda Civic will be hoping for the Halfast Chevy to blow up… which it has done at each of its last six LeMons races.
Even if the Halfast Caprice sprays a mist of vaporized pistons out of its tailpipes on the first lap tomorrow, the Duff Beer guys won’t be able to relax, because just yards behind them lurks the Generar Ree Datsun 260Z. This plot has plenty of twists and turns.
The Class C leader will start Sunday’s session with a comfy-seeming 12-lap lead over its nearest pursuer, but how could any racers feel confident when they’re driving a wretched Cadillac Catera? The members of Cadillac Racing have been in this position before, only to see their dreams shattered by the reality of desperate 1990s GM badge engineering. Their powertrain sounds like a couple of sick bison trapped inside a shipping container full of plumbing fittings, but that’s normal for a Catera.
Somewhat more reliable (but no faster) than the Catera, the Slant-6 E30 (which is a BMW 3-series with a Chrysler Slant-Six swap) will be poised to take slow-motion advantage when if the Catera disintegrates into a fine mist of Opel vapor tomorrow.
The Penalty Box was quite busy during Saturday, with justice dispensed by your LeMons correspondent, Judge Jason Torchinsky, and Judge Steven McDaniel. We had so many spinning/crashing/off-roading Mazda Miatas during the day that we made some of the offending Miata teams celebrate the Miata’s 25th anniversary.
The Speedycop-built Wagon Queen Family Truckster started off strong, but fried its brakes after the first hour and fell down to 78th place. Not that anyone really cares, because just look at it!
The Knoxvegas Lowballers and their Duratec-powered, mid-engined Geo Metro have converted their Smokey and the Bandit 18-wheeler to a terrifying Maximum Overdrive machine. Unlike most LeMons cars of the absurd tiny-car/big-engine genre, the Lowballers have found a way to be (fairly) fast and (sort of) reliable with their Metro, leading Class B for a few glorious moments on Saturday.
There’s plenty at stake on Sunday, so be sure to check in later!
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1wBtIKO
via Agya
