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24 Hours of LeMons 2007
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Motoring J Style’s Toyota MR2 takes 12th place at the 24 Hours of LeMons
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After hours at Motoring J Style World Headquarters, we have been building a race car and race team to challenge the 24 Hours of Lemons. What is LeMons? A pseudo-homage to France’s 24 Hours of LeMans held each June, the 24 Hours of LeMons is an endurance race intended for cars bought and prepared for $500 or less (excluding safety equipment). While this bylaw was rather loosely enforced this year, the race was one of the epic endurance contests of all time. All who attended this spectacle, drivers and spectators alike, will tell you that the 24 Hours of LeMons is like nothing of its kind.
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LeMons is an odd marriage between the intense driving conditions of endurance racing and the utter stupidity and carnage of yesteryear’s demolition derbies. This year, 90 cars took to the almost 1-mile road course, with drivers battling 100-degree heat in their Nomex fire suits. But the point of LeMons, unlike a demolition derby, is to actually complete the race without destroying your car. Drive over your head and you’ll be sure to find yourself losing valuable track time repairing a mangled suspension in the pits. Drive too gingerly and the constant rush of overtaking, careening jalopies will scare the bejesus out of you. See video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyNIGV1xPa0
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Our rattle can spray-painted fluorescent green and yellow 1986 Toyota MR2 was a magnificent, if risky, car choice. The track, consisting of a banked oval and a very tight infield road course, demanded precise and attentive racing strategy. This crapcan MR2’s thin, malleable fenders stood no chance at protecting tires and suspension in the event of virtually unavoidable collisions with other LeMons competitors. Our vulnerable, rust shitbox could not prevail given impacts from American mammoths or gigantic tractor tires, placed strategically around the track to increase carnage when things went awry in the cockpit. We had to drive quickly, avoiding any and all contact. And so, our path to victory was clear: Stay out of mechanical on on-track trouble for 14 hours and out-drive everyone else that did the same.
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We didn’t really bother to think much about what would happen when the car actually came into the pits, needing fuel, oil, or a tire changed. Unfortunately, our neophyte pit strategy dashed our hopes of a top 5 finish. We managed to turn 607 laps, finishing in 12th place less than 45 minutes behind the winning team. Our team of five drivers comprised Motoring J Style Chief Instigator David Swig, Chief Insultant Howard Swig, Mack Murray, Paolo Stevenson, and Larry McKenzie, who at one point thought it was a good idea to race a VW Beetle in the SCCA. Some of the notable competition included Team WTF in a proper $500 Honda CR-X (really, it was only a skeleton of a CR-X, The Holy Rollers BMW 5-series “pope mobile” with a life-sized Pope riding in the back seat ($500? I don’t think so), and the well-driven California Mille team in our old 1979 Alfa Romeo Alfetta.
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On the Motoring J Style front, the second-place finishers drove an extremely clean race in their red ’91(?) Honda Civic Hatchback. Taking third, Car & Driver magazine showed us what a naturally aspirated beater FC RX-7 could do. Unfortunately, neither could beat the yellow Neon that annihilated the field.
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We were pleased upon our arrival to see another ’87 MR2 entered by Drift & RWD Sport Magazine. They drove consistently, if not blisteringly fast, and ended up finished in 11th, two laps ahead of us after almost 15 hours of carnage, dust, and tire smoke.
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Running as high as 3rd at one point, our team, dubbed Equipe MeR deux (or simply Merde), suffered two blown tires in the final 2 hours of the race, costing us some crucial laps. Still, we kept circling for the vast majority of the race and were within 50 laps of the winning Dodge Neon by the finish. Indeed, there were several instances when our survival hinged on narrowly escaping an out of control Camaro (chosen as the People’s Curse and partially destroyed halfway through the race), or anticipating and avoiding the erratic maneuvers of our arch-nemesis, the yellow BMW 325i from the Carnage Racing team.
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Rules for driver etiquette were enforced rather more harshly than last year’s inaugural race, where parts of the event definitely resembled a destruction derby and not an actual race. Any one of a number of punishments, as conjured up by organizer Jay Lamm, was exacted on black flag recipients. One particularly deserving driver in a 1985-vintage Toyota Corolla/Chevy Nova hatchback received the Grille of Damocles, a metal plate with spikes welded onto it, with said spikes pointed towards your radiator. That car did not hit anyone else. Other unenviable punishments included the Al Gore Memorial Carbon Neutral penalty, whereby a smoke-belching vehicle was selected at random and its driver forced to plant a tree while being pelted by the crowd with five pounds of tofu.
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And such is LeMons. Unlike any automotive event, there are no dull moments. No standing around wondering what to do next. Open your eyes; carnage awaits around the next corner. We, thankfully, emerged with only a few battle scars to proudly wear next time. You can bet we’ll be back at the Arse-Freeze-a-Palooza at Altamont on October 20-21, 2007, gunning for the win in our little turd of an MR2.
More video: For more information, see Jay Lamm's web site at |
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For more information call us at 415.479.9930 or send us an email at info@motoringjstyle.com |