-Here at the fifth annual Real Hoopties of New Jersey race, held at lovely New Jersey Motorsports Park, we inspected the cars on Friday and they put in a long, parts-shattering day of racing on Saturday. Here’s how the first couple of days went.
-The inspections were livened up by the US Air Force Thunderbirds, whose pilots did plenty of stuntin’ over the race track and made the supercharged AMC Hornet of Morrow’s Racing look especially patriotic in its Kenosha racing livery.
-Fortunately, the Thunderbirds’ F-16s proved to be far more reliable than most LeMons cars.
-The car inspections were made much more colorful by Three Pedal Mafia’s rendition of “Springtime For Hitler” from The Producers.
-On the subject of reliability, Toyota has proven to be one of the least reliable marques in the 24 Hours of LeMons, and the MR2 has been even more fragile than the Supras and Celicas. In fact, in our series, the Alfa Romeo Milano has been far more reliable than has Toyota’s mid-engined sports car. Only once in the past has an MR2 pulled off an overall LeMons win, so we’re sure the members of the MR 2 Old To Care team aren’t feeling overconfident right now. This team started on Sunday with a commanding 6-lap lead over NYC’s Fastest Taxi, a relatively new team in a four-door BMW E36 3-series.
-The B-class race has been pretty interesting. Team One Tire Fire led all day in their utterly stock, squishy-suspension, skinny-tire 280ZX 2+2 by running clean and consistent laps. With about ten minutes until the checkered flag, they added an inspection port to their motor about the size of a golf ball. That dropped them from 4th overall to 10th.
-Inheriting the B-class lead is the ’91 Volvo wagon of Swedish Mafia Racing. 3 laps back is Bazinga Racing with their ’85 Nissan 300ZX. Astonishingly, 3rd in class and 8th (!!!) overall is the pretty stock, boring, googly-eye festooned ’90 Toyota Corolla of LOL NSA Racing.
-Class C has been a rout for Team Sputnik and their “big-block” 1.3-liter 4-cylinder Metro, in 38th overall. They’ve been clean and consistent, but not fast. 13 laps behind them and in P47 is the Futility Motorsports’ Daytona, which has— miraculously— not blown up yet. Hot on their heels is the ’96 Subaru Outback of the Carroll County Gangstas.
-Will an MR2 get the first 24 Hours of LeMons win on laps since a team full of Toyota engineers pulled off the feat in 2011? We’ll find out!
Photos by Stef Schrader and Matt Adair.
-from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1EtCY5u
via Agya
