After inspecting the machines of a small but devoted band of racers on Friday, the first race session of the first-ever Humidi TT 24 Hours of LeMons took place on Saturday at Sebring International Raceway. Even though a wild afternoon lightning storm blasted several pieces of track infrastructure and forced the evacuation of the flag stations, we had many hours of good racing. When the checkered flag flew, German and Japanese marques owned the upper part of the standings, with the top five going Porsche, Honda, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Honda. Meanwhile, the Class C battle gave us intense drama throughout the day. Here’s what happened.
Even though Porsche 944s have been extremely frustrating LeMons cars in the past, the first-ever Porsche overall LeMons win last year may have changed the rules a bit. At the end of Saturday’s race session at Sebring, the Floridiot Motorsports 1986 Porsche 944 owned the P1 spot. This team had to rebuild their engine’s cylinder head on the night before the race and went through a last-possible-second tech inspection on Saturday morning. The crew spent the day chewing their fingernails to the quick with worry over their questionable engine, but the red Porsche refrained from dumping its connecting rods onto the tarmac.
On the very same lap as the Floridiots, however, was a team that has spent many years mired in the lower portion of the standings in various southern LeMons races: the Duff Beer Honda Civic. We’d become so accustomed to seeing the Duff Beer crew up to their armpits in broken Honda engine parts over the years that we thought there must be some mistake when we saw the familiar ’94 Civic sweating the overall leader for the race lead. Sure, the Duff guys are good drivers, but all the racing skill in the world won’t help you when your 19th D16 of the year just spun another main bearing. Because the LeMons Supreme Court placed the hard-luck Duff Beer car in Class B, the team is leading their class by an intimidating 8 laps.
Leading Class C is the slow-but-reliable 1964 Dart of Escape Velocity Racing. With 225 cubic inches of Slant-6 power and a pushbutton-controlled automatic transmission, the Escape Velocity Dart holds a 9-lap lead over its 1964 Ford rival.
The Team Fairlylame 1964 Ford Fairlane isn’t much quicker than the Dart around the Sebring course, in spite of its 64-cubic-inch engine-displacement edge, so the Ford racers will need to be ready to take advantage of a driver mistake or mechanical problem on the part of the Escape Velocity team.
The bigger worry for the Dart team, however, must be the Team Idle Clatter 1979 Mercedes-Benz 300SD. Though the big oil-burning Benz is a good 10-15 seconds slower per lap than the Dodge, the team’s black-flag-free driving and the car’s impressive fuel economy have them locked just a single lap behind Escape Velocity Racing. Neither team has ever earned a Class C win, so expect no quarter asked nor given between these two on Sunday.
Meanwhile, the much-anticipated race-within-a-race between the Chrysler Sebring of Speedycop & the Gang of Outlaws and the Chrysler Sebring of NSF Racing sorted out about as everyone expected: both cars suffered multiple mechanical ailments in between bouts of creaking around the course in the fashion we have come to expect from unloved 1990s Chrysler front-drivers. When the checkered flag came out, the Speedycop 2000 Sebring was in P18, with 64 laps, good for a six-lap edge over the 1999 NSF Sebring.
Both Sebrings are depressingly stock, neither team even bothering to change the oil or install decent tires. Still, the Sebring-versus-Sebring-at-Sebring race has diehard LeMons fans worked into a competitive frenzy. Which of the two legendary teams will see their Sebring through to victory in the 12 Hours (actually 14-1/2 hours) of Sebrings? Check in later to find out!
Photographs by Nick Pon and Murilee “Judge Phil” Martin
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