-The sixth annual Southern Discomfort 24 Hours of LeMons was one of the most exciting contests we’ve ever seen at Carolina Motorsports Park in South Carolina, with four teams staying within striking distance of the overall win for most of the weekend. Lots of lead changes, lots of fast laps, and the whole weekend of racing came down to the difference in fuel consumption between a Detroit pushrod V6 and a Swedish single-overhead-cam I4. Here’s what happened.
-We’ve seen a good half-dozen Ford Pintos in the 24 Hours of LeMons, and mostly they’ve been thoroughly unsuited for endurance racing. Still, a well-driven Pinto is capable of doing well (if it doesn’t break down or— heh, heh— blow up). A well-sorted Pinto Cruising Wagon won Class B at Sears Point in March, and now the Fuzzy Blumpkins have pulled off a Class C win— by a commanding 20 laps— in South Carolina.
-Taking Class B by 12 laps and finishing an astonishing third overall, the Knoxvegas Lowballers have managed to turn their mid-engined, Ford Duratec V6-powered Geo Metro into one of the quickest cars in the series. Sure, it took them two years and 15 races to get to this point, with the first year a nightmare of exploded engines and shattered suspensions (they won the Most Heroic Fix award their first time out, by cannibalizing a team member’s daily-driver Ford Contour for a replacement engine), but now their lunatic power-to-weight ratio isn’t quite so squandered by sketchy handling and overheating problems.
-Who came in second in Class B, you ask? The Lowballers’ Taurus-wagon-ized Ford Contour SVT, which now has a custom-van theme to match the rest of the team’s machinery.
-Normally we don’t get very excited about who gets the Class A and/or overall wins in these races— Class C is much more interesting most of the time— but last weekend’s race was different. Two teams that have been with us for many years (and come agonizingly close to an overall win on many occasions) spent the race locked in an every-second-counts battle with each other, the Knoxvegas Lowballers’ Geo, and an extremely well-driven V6 Ford Mustang run by the new-to-LeMons Hard Parkers.
-When the checkered flag waved, the Bert One 1981 Volvo 262C Bertone Coupe grabbed the overall win by less than a lap over the Hard Parkers Mustang.
-The Hard Parkers ran a near-perfect race in their embarrassingly stock ’96 V6 Mustang, and it looked like they had the win in the bag with a several-lap lead and seven minutes to go… but then the car ran out of fuel, and the time it took to pit and pour in a splash of gas was all the Bert Ones and their efficient B230FT engine (pulled from a Volvo 940) needed to pull ahead and secure the victory. How long have they been trying for that P1 finish? Six years, two cars, 25 LeMons races (in 10 states), many engines and transmissions, and enough towing miles to drive around the planet a couple of times.
-During those six years, the Bert Ones (originally known as the Vermont Cow Tippers and then the Vermont Maple Runners and a few other names) have accumulated five class wins (two C, two B, and one A), one Index of Effluency, and permanent knuckle calluses from all the incessant wrenching on Swedish steel. It all started with the 2009 Connecticut race and this Vermont-rusty Volvo 245 wagon.
-Painted like a cow and with PVC “legs” sticking up, the Vermont Cow Tippers joined the many Volvo 240s that compete in Northeastern LeMons racing.
-With the rear body sliced off to make an “El Cowmino” out of the wagon, the Cow Tippers took sixth place at the 2010 Connecticut race, then a Class C win at the 2011 Real Hoopties of New Jersey, a Class B win at the 2011 New Hampshire race, and then the big one: the Index of Effluency win at the 2011 Capitol Offense. Things were looking good for the Vermont Volvocheros (yes, another name change) in 2011, but then… disaster!
-At the smashy-and-crashy bullring of Stafford Motor Speedway for the 2011 Boston Tow Party race, the Volvochero got tangled up with the Firebird of Sorry For Party Racing (who later became legendary for their amazing wheel-in-the-window crash) and smashed into the wall hard enough to bend or break just about everything in the Volvo’s suspension and chassis structure.
-A lot of hammering and prying later, the Volvochero limped back onto the track, but it was clear that a new Volvo shell would be needed after the race.
-I’m not shy about reminding teams of great cars we’d like to see in our races, and I’d been talking up the virtues of the 262C Bertone for years. The former Vermont Volvocheros became the Bert Ones by picking up this beige-over-brown 1981 262C Bertone Coupe for cheap.
-The powertrain and whatever else could be salvaged from the wrecked 245 went into the Bertone Coupe, and the wagon shell went to The Crusher.
-Now named Bert One, the team’s debut of their new car at the 2012 Real Hoopties of New Jersey was truly glorious.
-The LeMons Supreme Court figured, hey, new car with a naturally-aspirated B230 8-valve engine, we’ll put it in Class C. And, of course, the Bert Ones finished in P6 and took home the Class C trophy.
-After that… well, the Bert One story has more twists and turns than the driveshaft they destroyed at Sears Point. They swapped in the turbo motor in early 2013 and spent most of that year breaking parts and finishing in the mud of the standings. By 2014, the bugs were mostly worked out and the team continued to travel the country, gathering up a respectable number of finishes in the single-digit part of the standings.
-After all of that, Bert One finally got their overall win last weekend. Congratulations!
-Just a few hours prior to the Bert One triumph, things looked a lot different in the standings. At the very top stood the S.O.B. (Sick of Breaking) guys and their 1986 Volkswagen Golf. This team and their VW have been racing in LeMons since 2010, they’re very nice guys and highly skilled drivers, and it seems that every single race they get knocked out of the running by some minor broken part. Everything was going fine until just after the lunchtime quiet hour…
-…when the Golf’s alternator failed, which caused a very typical German-car cascade of problems culminating in the fuel injectors failing to function. The S.O.B.s had a spare alternator, but they lost a lot of time doing the fix and finished the race in P14. For this, another I Got Screwed trophy.
-If you choose a car knowing full well how terrible it is, you don’t qualify for the I Got Screwed trophy when it breaks down repeatedly. After all, taking my advice about what sort of car to race in LeMons— as NSF Racing continues to do— often ends badly. I suggested the Mitsubishi Cordia Turbo to NSF, and they went ahead and got one for the 2012 Southern Discomfort race. Three years later, the Cordia has proven itself to be irredeemably terrible in every way, and it entered this race as the only NSF Racing car to go without a trophy— and the team has earned plenty— for more than a race or two.
-The Cordia has never run well enough to take a shot at the Index of Effluency or the Class C win, but it hasn’t been sufficiently bad to win any of our trophies honoring the masochistic side of racing. So, this time the LeMons Supreme Court opted to create the special “It’s About Time This Terrible Car Gets a Trophy, Now Crush It” award for the NSF Racing Cordia. The Shredder awaits!
-For the Judges’ Choice, the first-time Beer City Bombers and their 1990 Volvo 940 Turbo took the trophy with ease. These guys, who all work at The Organic Mechanic in Ashevile NC, had everything the judges like to see from a new LeMons team. They raced a completely stock 25-year-old car with automatic transmission, they decorated it with goofy beer barrels and a weird six-armed three-dimensional Volvo-mechanic mural on the hood, they did their best to stay out of trouble on the track, and they had fun all weekend.
-Sure, the Beer City Bombers finished 59th out of 77 entries and their lap times were about 20 seconds off the pace set by the fast cars, but they’re the kind of racers we like to see and we’re sure they’ll be a lot quicker once they get some more laps under their belts. Judges’ Choice!
-For the winner of the Organizer’s Choice, there wasn’t much debate among the judges: Squatting Dog Racing and their 1970 Plymouth Valiant sedan.
-This car was found in a field after sitting for many years, but the engine wasn’t seized and the Squatting Dog team members were able to get the old Slant-6 engine to fire up. A new fuel tank, new brake lines, a tune-up, and a cage installation and the Valiant became a genuine race car.
-As you might imagine, a worn-out 45-year-old car with drum brakes, automatic transmission, and many fewer than the 145 horses it had under the hood when new might not be the quickest thing on a road course. In fact, the Squatting Dog Valiant was the slowest car in this race, but it stayed out for all of Saturday and most of Sunday (when a bad fan belt caused catastrophic overheating and severe engine damage) and ended the race in P49. In a lot of LeMons races, that’s an easy Index of Effluency performance, but this time another team snatched the trophy right out of the Squatting Dogs’ paws with an even more impressive race weekend.
-That team was Collateral Damage and their car is this 1986 Chevrolet Cavalier. Collateral Damage somehow clawed their way up to P33 with their miserable, 86-horsepower, slushbox-blighted J-body— one of the image-tarnishing 1980s cars that helped dig the hole that eventually led to GM’s bankruptcy— and they did this with lap times a good 10 seconds worse than most of the other cars near them in the standings.
-Collateral Damage made their first LeMons appearance at the 2013 Capitol Offense race, and they’ve been regulars at the CMP events ever since. Here’s what their wretched Chevy looked like when they first obtained it.
-Well done, Collateral Damage!
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1GSEmjr
via Agya
