Our second annual trip to Barber Motorsports Park near Birmingham featured even better cars and more exciting racing than 2014’s ‘Shine Country Classic. The struggles for Class A and Class B were hard-fought all weekend, while the Class C winner was so spectacular that we were cool with it winning with a 90-minute margin over its closest rival. We’re barely a month into the 2015 season, and already we’re seeing cars that top even the great builds we saw last year. Let’s see who went home with trophies!
It took seven years and 86 races before any GM car took a 24 Hours of LeMons win on laps (we are counting the Geo Metro Gnome as a Suzuki), and that G-body Monte Carlo victory was followed up a few months later by a win for the Save the Ta-Tas 1984 Chevy Camaro in Chicago. Now the Save the Ta-Tas guys and their F-body have done it again, beating the Road Warrior Racing BMW E30 3-series by two laps. Sure, with their driving skills and a more reliable car they’d have at least a half-dozen overall LeMons wins under their belts by now, but let’s not allow that sort of thinking to contaminate the glory of their latest triumph.
Class B ended up being a white-knuckle affair for several teams, with the Knoxvegas Lowballers Ford Countour SVT and the Generar Ree Datsun 240Z stuck on the same lap for much of the weekend. In the end, though, the 17-year-old Ford proved less reliable than the 41-year-old Datsun, and the Z got the class win with an 11-lap edge over the PBR Subaru Outback.
The LeMons Supreme Court (the justices of which take as our role models six-shooter-brandishingly corrupt 1880s-style Wild West frontier judges and cynically corrupt 1930s Moscow Show Trials judges) tend to put crazy, untested new builds using oddball engines in Class C, based on the assumption that such machines will spend most of the weekend in thousands of tiny pieces while the team runs back and forth to the nearest wrecking yard. So, the Morrow’s Racing 1965 Pontiac Banshee XP-833 replica got into Class C… and then proceeded to run nearly trouble-free all weekend and obliterated the field with a 40-lap margin of victory over the Fuzzy Blumpkins Ford Pinto.
Dave Morrow took a BMW E36 3-series chassis, grafted on a heavily modified Opel GT body (the Opel GT was one of several GM vehicles heavily influenced by John DeLorean’s XP-833 Banshee prototype), and then installed the engine that was developed for the Banshee: a genuine Pontiac OHC-6 250-cubic-inch straight-six.
The OHC-6 was a modified Chevrolet 230 or 250 straight-six with a SOHC head and (according to DeLorean) the first use of a timing belt in a production engine; they were available for a few years in Pontiac A-bodies and first-gen Firebirds, but never sold well. We’d never had a plain old pushrod Chevy straight-six in a LeMons race before, much less one of DeLorean’s OHC motors, and the engine’s debut makes it look like it has real endurance-racing potential.
Speaking of new builds that get into Class C despite looking quick on paper, the Knoxvegas Lowballers continued to build on their Legends of LeMons status by revamping one of their existing cars and building a new one from scratch. Just showing up with a pair of matched 1970s custom vans with lemon-shaped bubble windows would be enough to win the Organizer’s Choice— and, yes, the Lowballers did win the Org Choice for these racin’ machines last weekend— but it gets even better.
Their Geo Metro, which boasts a mid-mounted Ford Duratec V6 instead of the original front-driving Suzuki three-banger, looked and sounded amazing on the track, and it was well-sorted enough after ten or so races to knock off a few laps that were right up there with the quickest cars in the field.
Unfortunately for the Lowballers, our race lasts a lot longer than a few laps, and the Metro’s Duratec done blowed up on Saturday. Note the engine-swap technique that involves lifting the body off the rear subframe and rolling it away on the front wheels.
The other half of the Double Trouble custom-van duo was this 2000 Mazda MPV minivan, which sports two Duratec V6s (one at each end), all-wheel-drive, and two 5-speed manual transmissions controlled by a single shifter. We’ve had twin-engined LeMons cars before, but they’ve had automatic/manual combos or twin automatics, so the Lowballers have taken this innovative technology to new, uh, heights.
Even with close to 500 horsepower, we felt comfortable putting the twin-engined MPV in Class C, and the usual first-time-out teething problems limited the minivan to P62 (out of 76 entries) and not-so-quick lap times. Still, we expect this car to claw its way into the faster classes in the future. For now, a well-deserved Organizer’s Choice trophy for the Lowballers!
For the special regionally-themed trophy, we were so inspired by the sight of two red import pickup trucks going wheel-to-wheel that we created the Least Southern Pickup award, the plan being to give it to the truck that finished the most laps. The Three Pedal Mafia Datsun 720 ended the race with 190 laps, pretty good for the truck’s first race.
The Idle Clatter “Toyocedes Hilux” (actually an El Camino-ized Mercedes-Benz 300SD) racked up 224 laps, however, and the team added the Least Southern Pickup trophy to their fast-growing collection of rusty, property-value-lowering LeMons awards.
Now that’s what we call real racing!
Given the capricious nature of the LeMons Supreme Court, there’s no sure formula for the team that wants to take home the coveted Judges’ Choice trophy. Sometimes we like to see a redemption story— which happened with the Grassroots Motorsports guys, who went from the black-flaggiest bad-driving team in the field to one of the cleanest— and sometimes we like to watch a team staggering from one self-inflicted crisis to the next, all weekend long. We opted for the latter choice this time, and it all started when Sputnik Racing tore one of the axles off their trailer in a classic “I’m sure I can squeeze between these poles” parking-lot moment.
Then they showed up to the car inspections with a new addition to the Sputnik Racing fleet: a genuine Toyota AE86, one of the most beloved Japanese cars ever made. Sure, this one is a terrifyingly decrepit hooptie, but any Internet Car Expert worth his salt will proclaim to the world the inherent racing superiority of the Hachi-Roku.
However, the Sputnik AE86 didn’t live up to the hype (in much the same way that every AE86 to have competed in our series hasn’t lived up to the hype), broke down repeatedly, and didn’t quite manage to get around the track as quickly as the other Sputnik Racing entry…
…which was this 1971 Plymouth Fury III, a car that has been so excrementally bad that it is closing in on the Sputnik-affiliated Plymouth that holds the current Worst Car In LeMons History crown.
You’d think that such a simple machine would be all sorted out by now, here in its eighth LeMons race, but you’d be wrong in the case of the Sputnik Fury. It spent much of the weekend looking like this, finishing in 59th place.
The grille and bumper, the one part of the Fury’s body that still looked reasonably intact going into this race, got mangled in a Fury-versus-wall episode on Saturday. For providing the judges with so much entertainment, Judges’ Choice for Sputnik Racing.
The Most Heroic Fix award went home with Fireball Racing, the team running the formerly Nixon-themed purple Ford Escort.
Actually, the Most Heroic Fix award went to one member of Fireball Racing, for heroically fixing his driver’s license. You see, the insurance company requires that every racer have a valid street-driver’s license to race, and Fireball Racing driver Chad Adams discovered that his license had expired the day before the race. So, he jumped in his car, drove 425 miles back to Illinois, slept in his car until the Carbondale DMV opened, got his new license, and drove straight back to Birmingham and raced. Heroic!
The I Got Screwed Award goes to the team that never gives up… and still doesn’t succeed. Fairlylame Racing, the team that won the Index of Effluency at Sebring last summer with their 1964 Ford Fairlane sedan, threw a couple of connecting rods on the second lap of the race, and clanked to a halt in a cloud of smoke.
Ford Windsor V8s are pretty easy to find these days, but the Fairlylame car still had its original 289 and a three-speed manual transmission. The team found a 5.0 engine on Craigslist, for sale by a guy who turned out to have a shack in the woods full of swastika flags and portraits of Adolf Hitler, which made the transaction a bit uncomfortable for the Fairlylame crew.
Escaping the Nazi Junkyard with the engine and their lives, the Fairlylame crew thrashed and thrashed but couldn’t make the various bellhousings, oil pans, and accessories fit their car in time to get it back on the track. Screwed!
The big prize of the race, the Index of Effluency, was an easy call this time: the 1959 Studebaker Silver Hawk of NSF Racing.
The first Studebaker in LeMons history, and it finished 56th out of 76 with a just-dragged-out-of-the swamp stock suspension and a tired Chrysler 360 V8 swap.
The Studebaker had spent at least 30 years sitting in the Florida woods, and there was no getting all the icky stuff out of the fuel system. On Saturday, the Stude had to pit every few laps to change fuel filters, but the team figured out a daisy-chain-of-diesel-filters rig Saturday night, and the car ran quite well on Sunday.
We don’t have space to get into a complete list of the great cars run by NSF over the years, but some of the standouts have been a Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9, a 1956 Ford Fairlane, the world’s rustiest 1963 Plymouth Fury, and a 1950 Mercedes-Benz 170S. The Studebaker continues the NSF tradition and keeps NSF up there with the top teams of the series. Congratulations, NSF Racing!
For more photos of the 2015 ‘Shine Country Classic, take a look at the official Über Gallery. Our next race will be the the North Dallas Hooptie in Texas at the end of the month, so be sure to check in here for all the action.
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via Agya
