The Svengalis at the 24 Hours of LeMons have managed to cloud the minds of Race Sonoma‘s management to the point where they look at their beautiful wine-country race track being befouled by horrible, LeMons cars dropping bumpers and spewing oil… and see a real race going on. Maybe the hypnotism has them imagining shiny new Mustangs instead of this and wailing Porsche GT3s instead of, well, this . Whatever the case, we’re doing three races at The Track Formerly Known As Sears Point within a four-month span, and the second one just wrapped up last weekend. The weather was perfect, the battles were hard-fought, and we witnessed more Sesame Street characters driving race cars than anyone had ever seen before. Here are the winners of the 2015 Good Effort Grand Prix.
We’ll start with the least important prize first: The Class A prize plus the win on laps were taken by Eyesore Racing and their hideous-but-quick “ghettocharged” Mazda Miata. The Eyesores were among the earliest teams to develop the puzzling costumes and projects-of-questionable-sanity for which LeMons racing has become known, and— before the team members became parents, got real jobs, bought houses, etc.— were the dominant West Coast team for many years.
They hadn’t won a LeMons race since 2012, however, and so last weekend’s win was (to put it in the East Bay parlance of LeMons HQ) Hella Sweet for Eyesore Racing.
One of the reasons that Los Eyesores have been getting all those P2 and P3 finishes in recent years has been that their strange-o car build offers no safe location for a big fuel cell, limiting their car’s fuel capacity to the factory 10-gallon fuel tank and condemning the team to one more fueling stop than the competition. Another reason has been the rise of the team pictured above, the first LeMons team to figure out how to keep a Porsche 944 from exploding into a million impossible-to-reassemble pieces in our race. Formerly known as Porch Racing and now called Depend, this team ended the Good Effort Grand Prix less than a lap behind Eyesore. The three penalty laps handed to them during the car inspections by a LeMons Supreme Court justice who smelled a hint of cheatonium in their car couldn’t be overcome by Depend’s longer stints, and Eyesore clawed out their first win in three years.
In Class B, the LeMons Supreme Court justices were faced with a dilemma: how can you put a breakdown-prone ’89 Chevy Cavalier with 3.1 liter V6 and terrible suspension into Class A, even after ONSET/Tetanus West Racing won the class in Washington last summer? We couldn’t do it, and then ONSET/Tetanus won the class by seven laps over the John Galt Racing BMW 2002.
Even though ONSET/Tetanus team captain Anton Lovett has more LeMons races under his belt than any other driver and brings his Cavalier to the track inside a former bread truck, that car goes in Class A from now on (unless it gets an Iron Duke engine swap, of course). For more of the great race-car-transporter rigs of this race, check out LeMons Supreme Court Justice Tim Odell’s piece on Hooniverse .
Class C gave the judges another classing dilemma; the Aqua Volvo Volvo 242 has been around for quite a while and had always been miserably slow and profoundly unreliable, but a stock Volvo 240 can be a potent Class B or even Class A LeMons racer in the hands of a team whose members know what they’re doing. Well, it looks like the Aqua Volvo folks finally figured it out, grabbing a Class C victory by a single lap over the POS Angry Bird Datsun 200SX (another pretty good car handicapped by hapless-yet-lovable team personnel). Welcome to Class B, Aqua Volvo!
The created-just-for-the-occasion trophy this time was awarded to Zero Below Racing, for taking a not-very-good-to-start-with Chevrolet Corvair and making it even worse with the swap of a mid-mounted Buick 215 aka Rover V8 engine. In much the same way that the remake of Gone In 60 Seconds was even worse than the incredibly cheezy original, Zero Below has earned the Gone In 60 Seconds Bad Remake Trophy.
We’re sure that Corvair fans around the world are rejoicing at this news.
The Sunday Funday Honda CRX team races with a transvestite/transexual theme, including a pink fringe on the car and the ugliest, most hirsute trannies ever inflicted upon the eyes of race organizers (and, believe me, we’ve seen plenty).
So, naturally, when the transmission failed on their car and the team fixed it, we had no choice but to award the Most Heroic Fix trophy to the tranny-fixing trannies of Team Sunday Funday, just so we could make a clever joke at the awards ceremony.
The I Got Screwed award went to Altar Boy Racing for the purgatorial travails they underwent while attempting to get their 1985 Mazda 626 race-legal and then running.
The team brought about 20 crew members and put together a great “Evolution Is Okay” theme, but the car suffered from a long list of safety problems (including a rear suspension with 0° of camber on the left and about 40° on the right). The team thrashed away at those issues and finally got the car onto the track late in the first race session… at which point the automatic transmission refused to shift out of first gear. That lap didn’t count (the tow truck didn’t pull the Mazda past the start/finish line), the team never did get the transmission working, and so Altar Boy Racing took home the I Got Screwed trophy.
Because LeMons HQ gave admission precedence to teams that weren’t accepted to the overbooked Arse Freeze-a-Palooza race last month, we had more than the usual number of teams known for being a bit too spinny and crashy with their race cars. Because of this, the LeMons Supreme Court’s judges decided that the Judges’ Choice award would go to the best redemption story of the weekend, the team that got their act together and went from black-flag magnet to super-clean racers. That team was Expendable and their BMW E30 3-series, frequent penalty-box visitors and sent-home-in-shame racers at all their previous LeMons events but startlingly clean competitors this time.
It didn’t hurt that Team Expendable’s drivers work at Vintage Electric Bikes and loaned us one of their excellent American-made bikes as pit transportation for the weekend. This bike can haul even the best-fed judge up the steepest hill at Race Sonoma at a good clip, and allowed us to enable Hush Mode and sneak up on unsafe fuelers and jack-stand-less wrenchers for some righteous paddock safety-violation busts.
Team OMShenanigans had some sort of Obama’s Black-Helicopter-flying FEMA Camp Enforcers theme on their BMW E23 7-series last time we saw them, and— apparently inspired by TARP Racing’s Cookie Monster Warlord BMW— this time they raced with a car turned into a gigantic googly-eyed Cookie Monster.
Because OMShenanigans did this, we were able to watch an Alfa Romeo Milano with a giant Pepperidge Farm Milano cookie on the roof duking it out with a 4,000-pound Cookie Monster on a legendary race track. For that, OMShenanigans earned a well-deserved Organizer’s Choice trophy.
The Index of Effluency, LeMons racing’s top prize, went to Spank the Builder for his Mini Moke-turned-Caterpillar backhoe, which finished an amazing 34th place overall and made a credible run at Class C.
This car ran the third-slowest best lap times of the entire 93-entry field, and so finishing so high in the standings is an amazing accomplishment. On Sunday, Spank did an iron-man seven-hour solo driving stint with no stops, which would have been a flag-to-flag run if he hadn’t run out of gas five minutes prior to the checkered flag.
Somehow, Spank and his teammates found the energy to re-theme their car as a John Deere tractor in time for Monday’s race session. A well-deserved Index of Effluency for Spank to add to his large collection of LeMons trophies!
We race again in a couple of weeks, this time at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama, so check in here for all your LeMons news if you can’t make it to the track.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1JfHZ6q
via Agya
