For our 11th visit to MSR Houston last weekend, we had a cold and wet Gulf-Coast-In-the-Fall sort of a setting for the car inspections on Friday and the racing on Saturday. When the green flag waved on Sunday, it began a wild day of lead changes, broken parts, and general drama that was still being resolved down to the last lap. Here’s what happened.
The Team Blue Goose 1984 Audi 4000S Quattro began the Sunday race session with a two lap lead over the team’s closest pursuer, and the Geese increased that lead as the weather got rainier. This team has come within a whisker of taking the overall win at a LeMons race more times than we can remember, and this time it appeared that we’d have our second-ever Audi overall winner (the first Audi win happened at the Colorado race a couple months ago). Sadly for the Geese, their car’s front differential disintegrated with a couple of hours to go on Sunday, knocking them out of contention yet again. Such is life for Audi LeMons racers.
The sidelining of the Blue Goose car was good news for the then-P2 team, though; Bert One Racing and their Volvo 262C Bertone (which features a turbocharged B230 four-cylinder engine instead of the original PRV V6— yes, the same powerplant that went into the DeLorean DMC-12 and Eagle Premier— under the hood) have been chasing a LeMons overall win for many years, with nearly as many tantalizingly-close near-wins as the the Blue Geese. Things looked good for the Bert Ones on Sunday afternoon.
That is, things looked good for the Volvo pilots until one of the the most successful LeMons teams in Gulf Region history made their move. Back To the Past Racing took the overall win in Chicago in July, in Dallas in March, and in Dallas at the 2012 season-ender. In the end, the Back To the Past 300ZX “DMC-12,” stock fuel tank and all, picked up the Class A and overall wins by a single lap over Bert One. Worth noting is that seven of the 85 entries in this race were Nissan Z Cars.
In Class B, the Inglorious Bastards shrugged off their 1991 Ford Thunderbird’s many-race history of misery and broken parts and kept their usually-troublesome MN12 duct-taped together for an entire LeMons weekend, finishing in 11th overall and with a six-lap edge over the ’97 Subaru Impreza of Team Scubaru.
Class C looked to be the most boring class of the race for most of the weekend, as The Syndicate and their 1976 Mercedes-Benz 450SLC built up a half-dozen-lap cushion over the competition by mid-session on Sunday. This car boasts 600-treadwear tires and a completely worn-out 300,000-mile stock suspension, which is just about right for Class C. With about ten minutes to go before the checkered flag, The Syndicate’s crew chief stopped by the penalty box and crowed, “Well, we’ve got this one in the bag now— even if the car blows up, we’ll still win!”
Nope! At that very moment, the Benz did blow up, its tired 4.5-liter V8 clattering to a halt. This turned out to be just the break that TGTW Offroad Racing and their ’93 Corolla needed, and— in a very typical LeMons Class C finale— the door-handle-scraping Toyota took the class win by two laps.
The I Got Screwed award for this race requires a bit of backstory. At last year’s Gator-O-Rama, a Texas-based racer bought four long-abandoned BMC AD016s (badged as Austin Americas in the United States) and had experienced ADO16 racer Spank fly out from California to help build them into a single running race car. He succeeded, winning the Most Heroic Fix award in the process.
Fast-forward a year, and Spank decided to come out from California again (towing a Sacramento-purchased Pinto, bought by a Texas LeMons team, and bringing along his wife and young son) and race the America. The car’s engine was destroyed when freezing temperatures at the 2014 North Dallas Hooptie cracked the block, but the car’s owner said he had three good engines ready to go.
Those “three good engines” turned out to have spent an entire year with the cylinder heads removed in a Texas back yard, and weren’t in such great shape. Spank, in an all-weekend frenzy of wrenching, managed to piece together one semi-usable engine… which dropped a valve and self-destructed before the car completed a single lap on Sunday. Screwed!
It wasn’t a completely lost weekend for Spank, however, because he picked up a Hillman Imp to tow back to San Diego behind his ex-train-track-inspector’s truck.
The Most Heroic Fix award went to Escape Velocity Racing, for performing what should have been an easy engine swap in their 1964 Dodge Dart.
The 225-cubic-inch Slant-6 engine in their Dart blew up early on Saturday (like the Toyota R engine, the Slant-6 isn’t as bulletproof on a road course as on the street).
No problem, said the Escape Velocity guys, we brought this very rusty ’71 Dodge Challenger with a good-running 225 under the hood. Back on the track in 45 minutes, right?
Not exactly. Pulling the engines out of the Dodges wasn’t so tough, but then it became clear that the differences between an A-body Chrysler and an E-body Chrysler were going to cause endless nickeled-and-dimed-to-death compatibility problems.
The crankshaft on the Challenger’s engine wouldn’t work with the Dart’s torque converter, and so the team had to fabricate this spacer to make it fit. Then the engine mounts were wrong. Then the Challenger oil pan wouldn’t fit in the Dart (it took the team four hours of cursing and mashing fingers on Saturday night to figure this out), and swapping the Dart oil pan onto the Challenger engine became a nightmare due to the lack of a good pan gasket. On and on and on it went, but the team managed to get the car buttoned up and on the track with an hour or so left in the race on Sunday.
The created-for-the-occasion regional award was named the Waiting For a Last-Minute Call From the Governor, for reasons that will be made clear in a moment, and the winner was Hoonatic Racing and their electric-powered Datsun Roadster.
In past races, the Hoonatic EV (the first and only electric car in LeMons racing) would do about four very slow laps, run out of juice, and then pit for a many-hour recharge of its lead-acid batteries. For this race, the Hoonatics rigged up their version of a Tesla Supercharger, which involved a couple of industrial battery packs and a lot of shoestring-budget equipment. In theory, the HoonaCharger™ would allow the team to fill up with electrons just as quickly as a Tesla!
In practice, though, the HoonaCharger™ had a few flaws. Using it required that the team members monitor a couple of ammeters and an infrared temperature gun, with one team member sniffing for excessive hydrogen-sulfide-scented venting hydrogen from the batteries, connecting and disconnecting the charger as the car’s batteries got too aggravated.
So, a high-voltage DC system with frantically venting batteries barfing flammable gas and corrosive fluids, in the rain. Ordinary jumper-cable clips connected the HoonaCharger’s cables to the race car’s battery pack, and the on-off switch was this pair of heavy-gauge wires (see photo above). LeMons Chief Perp Jay Lamm took one look at this sketchy rig and banned it from being in the same county as a LeMons race. However, we liked the ingenuity shown here and honored the lack of crew-member electrocution by bestowing the electric-chair-themed trophy upon the members of Hoonatic Racing.
Braking Wind Racing got tired of all the engine problems with their Porsche 914 race car, so they grafted in a ’97 Subaru Legacy’s 2.5-liter boxer four, complete with automatic transmission.
Then, as so often happens with these engines, the car began suffering from maddening overheating problems. The LeMons Supreme Court, having seen it all, suggested the standard formula for this situation (Subaru + LeMons + overheating = blown head gasket), but the Braking Wind guys indulged in a full day of magical thinking— it’s air in the cooling system! the radiator is too small!— but finally accepted the evidence and replaced the head gaskets.
This solved the problem, allowing the team to go back to doing what engine-swapped mid-engined cars do best: spin out. Because the justices of the LeMons Supreme Court liked this engine swap and the team’s willingness to fix their car, we gave the team the coveted Judges’ Choice award.
For the Organizer’s Choice trophy… well, one look at the Despicable Racing 1973 Volkswagen Transporter should make it clear why our decision was so easy this time.
The team had chopped off the van’s roof, moved the driver’s position to the middle of the van, and then installed a roll cage that stretched all the way to the van’s nose. The tech inspectors made the team perform some cage revisions, and then the old VW Bus got onto the track on Saturday morning… and promptly wheezed to a halt after about 200 yards.
The Despicable Racing crew battled fuel-system, ignition, and exhaust problems all weekend and the van was agonizingly slow (so slow that it was passed by the Slow Loris-esque Hoonatic Racing EV at one point, which got a big cheer from the spectators), but the team finished 92 laps, came in 67th out of 85 entries, and had a great time.
The Resistance introduced their 1975 Honda Civic to the LeMons world at the North Dallas Hooptie race in March, and we were overjoyed to have a first-gen Civic competing in the series.
That race, the car ate a couple of engines and The Resistance took home the Most Heroic Fix award.
This time, the little 53-horsepower Honda ran all weekend, and the team’s drivers squeezed out every last bit of performance that the car had to offer. It wasn’t quick compared to more modern cars with three times the horsepower, but in the end The Resistance got their car all the way up to 34th place, beating plenty of teams running lap times a good 20 or even 30 seconds quicker than the Civic’s times and getting close to a class win. For this, The Resistance wins the top prize of LeMons racing: the Index of Effluency. Well done!
Just one more race remains in the 2014 LeMons season: the eighth annual Arse Freeze-a-Palooza at Sears Point aka Sonoma Raceway, December 6-7. If you can’t make it to the track, be sure to check in here for all your race updates and results.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1uBP248
via Agya
