After inspecting the entries at the seventh annual Gator-O-Rama 24 Hours of LeMons at MSR Houston, we braved the chilly, fetid, swampy exhalations of the Gulf Coast in November for the first racing session. At the end of the day, we had surprises in each of the three LeMons classes. Here’s what happened.
Leading Class A and the entire 85-car field is the Team Blue Goose 1984 Audi 4000S Quattro. This team’s members have been competing in LeMons since the very earliest Texas LeMons races, and they’ve come as close as you can get to an overall win without actually taking home the Class A trophy… over and over again. Zero visits to the penalty box, zero broken parts, and lap times nearly as good as the quickest cars in the field; the Blue Goose Audi has done everything right so far and leads the field by two laps. Will some 12-hours-to-fix component fail on Sunday? Will a rainstorm come in and wash away the hopes of the two-wheel-drive competition on Sunday? We’ll know tomorrow.
Right behind the Blue Geese is a team that’s spent nearly as many years in spitting distance from an overall LeMons win: the Vermont-based Bert One and their Volvo 262C Bertone. With a mere two laps separating the Bertone-ized Volvo from the four-ringed German, Team Blue Goose can’t afford a single minor mistake on Sunday.
In Class B, the previously languishing-in-obscurity Inglorious Bastards 1991 Ford Thunderbird somehow managed to scrabble its way all the way up to P9 and a 5-lap class lead.
How? Why? We can’t say, but Team Speedy Monzales and their 1980 Pontiac Sunbird will be waiting for the slightest stumble on the part of the Inglorious Bastards.
For reasons nobody can understand, The Syndicate has taken a big Class C lead with their Mercedes-Benz C107 coupe. This team won the Index of Effluency at the 2014 North Dallas Hooptie, but taking a class win seemed as far beyond their reach as is control of the United States Senate by the Peace and Freedom Party. At this moment, though, The Syndicate owns a mighty 15-lap edge over the nearest competition.
That competition is the door-handle-scraping 1993 Toyota Corolla of TGTW Offroad Racing. Yes, Class C is down to a battle between one of the most prestigious cocaine-dealer cars of the 1970s and one of the most depressing rental cars of the 1990s.
The Dodge Neon campaigned by the Street Outlaws crew did a lot better than we expected (given the very low bar set by automotive TV shows in LeMons), ending the day in 58th place and with just a couple of visits to the LeMons Supreme Court’s penalty box.
Meanwhile, many teams have deposited important engine parts upon MSR’s tarmac and have been traveling the region in search of hard-to-find components. Escape Velocity Racing’s 1965 Dodge Dart spat a connecting rod out the side of its Slant-6’s block, but the team brought a parts car: an original (if very rusty) Dodge Challenger, equipped with an allegedly good 225-cubic-inch Leaning Tower of Power.
LeMons Legend Spank took a voyage all the way out from San Diego in order to get behind the wheel of the Austin America he Frankensteined together last year, but it turned out that most of the car’s components had been stored within a toxic algae bloom for the last 13 months. We heard news that the America‘s engine fired earlier this evening, so we may see it on the track on Sunday.
We can’t tell you what will happen on Sunday, but you can check in later and find out!
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1tWu62I
via Agya
