We inspected the cars on Saturday, and on Sunday we ran the first session of the Good Effort Grand Prix, the 2015 season opener for the 24 Hours of LeMons. The struggles for the lead in all three classes (A, B, and C) were closely fought all day, and plenty of teams ended the day in contention for a class win. Here’s what happened.
Class C is where the LeMons Supreme Court puts the most velocity- and/or reliability-challenged machinery, and Class C cars are the nearest to our hearts. We put the Aqua Volvo 242 (formerly the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better car) in C yet again, and this time the team managed to keep their car pointed in the right direction and with nearly all its parts still attached for the entire day. When the checkered flag waved at dusk, the Aqua Volvo held a seven-lap lead in class. That’s not a huge lead for Class C, where things tend to happen at a deliberate pace and routine pit stops often become engine-swap sessions, but Team Aqua Volvo will take it.
The Aqua Volvo is being pursued by the car whose team captain thought up their new team name: the -ing With Additional Bad Ideas Austin Mini, which has spent its LeMons career chewing through every BMC A engine available in California. For reasons nobody understands, the little purple car has not scattered any English connecting rods on the tarmac yet. Since the Aqua Volvo and -ing With Additional Bad Ideas team pit together and share supplies, their rivalry may lack intensity.
To give you a sense of how close all the Class C teams seem to be with one another, the current engine in the -ing With Additional Bad Ideas was loaned to the team by Spank, LeMons Legend and Certified Madman. Probably not coincidentally, the BMC A-engine-powered Cat 416F Backhoe Loader driven by Spank (based on the world’s most cruelly violated Mini Moke) finished Saturday’s race session a mere five laps behind the Mini. Spank put a 21-gallon fuel cell in his fuel-sipping Caterpillar and drove it for something like seven straight hours… before running out of gas and losing his second-in-class spot while waiting for a tow off the track. We look forward to seeing how the Class C war sorts out on Monday.
The Class B lead is being held by John Galt Racing and their BMW 2002. This team has been trying for a Class B win for years and has yet to pull off the feat. On Monday, they’ll start off on the same lap as their closest pursuer.
That pursuer is the ONSET/Tetanus West Chevrolet Cavalier, which spent some team in the Class B lead but then had to spend the last hour or so on Sunday creeping around the track with metal-on-metal brakes. The 2002 and Cavalier are pretty evenly matched in the lap-time department, so this battle ought to stay close all day tomorrow.
If both the BMW and the Chevy break down and/or get black-flagged out of contention (which, based on the past experiences of both teams, could happen), the Harold and Maude “Jaguar E-Type” (actually a Datsun 280Z) of Team 5150 sits just four laps behind its Class B rivals.
Class A, where the fast (i.e., not-so-interesting) LeMons cars compete, has a familiar team at the top right now: Eyesore Racing and their wretched-looking-but-effective “ghettocharged” Mazda Miata. Eyesore hasn’t taken a Class A LeMons win since the 2012 Sears Pointless race, but they’ve come close many times and remain a big threat to any would-be overall LeMons winners.
A single lap behind the Eyesore Miata is the Hella Shitty Racing BMW E30 3-series. Hella Shitty Racing, best known for their anti-sexist grid boys and the worst-sounding Porsche 911 race car in the universe, have never taken an overall 24 Hours of LeMons win, so we can assume the team will spend the night prank-calling Eyesore Racing’s motel rooms to ask if they have Prince Albert in a can.
The team that has won the most California LeMons races in the last year has been Porch Racing, now known as Depend. This race, they ended the first day a mere three laps behind the leader and two laps back of the P2 team, so Eyesore Racing and Hella Shitty Racing have more than just each other to worry about.
How will it all sort out? Come back later and you’ll find out!
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1IZOxnN
via Agya
