[b]The 24 Hours of LeMons/b]
Not rich enough or smart enough for ‘real’ racing? This is the race for you.
By DAVE COLEMAN
AutoWeek | Published 11/30/06, 12:51 pm et
Carburetors are confusing. Were this not so, we might have arrived at the track slightly better prepared. We might, in other words, have driven our race car in third gear before the start.
Not that we hadn’t tried. We had the car running and driving a full week before the race. We had borrowed a truck from one friend, a trailer from another, and taken, collectively, 24 man-hours of productivity away from our employers in an attempt to do an honest, weekday shakedown run. But it was only after working until 3 a.m., getting up at 6, and driving four hours to the track that we realized our carburetors were jetted for our driveway and would have to be re-jetted for the racetrack.
This is difficult when you don’t have any jets, don’t know what a jet looks like and wouldn’t know where to stick a jet even if you had one. So instead of re-jetting, we removed and reinstalled the timing belt three or four times, hit the fuel pump with a rock and finally went home and took a nap.
This was fate telling us not to cheat.
One would think that in a race with only one rule, there would be sufficient creative freedom to avoid the cheating urge, but our creativity knows no bounds. In spite of attracting competitors who clearly aren’t, the race itself is quite brilliant. The race is called 24 Hours of LeMons (and billed as the “first annual”), and the only rule of any consequence states each car must be purchased and race-prepped (not counting safety gear) for less than $500.
If you’ve ever raced unprofessionally, you know the single greatest deterrent to having fun in a race car is the nagging fear of bending something expensive. Pack a racetrack with crap cans, it stands to reason, and you should instantly have the most enjoyable form of motorsport yet invented.
If, that is, you can make your race car run outside your own driveway.
A weeks’ worth of intensive study, consultation and guesswork taught us that we needed to switch to smaller venturis, change our emulsion tubes and drill out our air jets. It did not tell us, unfortunately, where to find these things. So in the end, we simply removed the cheater carbs, cheater cam and cheater cylinder head, which we had borrowed from a CRX-racing friend, and reinstalled the stock cylinder head and tiny three-barrel carburetor that Honda jetted perfectly 23 years ago.
So it was that we arrived at tiny Altamont Motorsports Park outside Tracy, California—itself outside any part of California anybody’s ever heard of—with a 1983 CRX that, in spite of our best efforts, was worth only $475.
The 24 Hours of LeMons’ claim to fame is not the track layout (two tiny ovals sharing a straight and a few strange chicanes thrown in) nor its heritage (ever heard of it?), but rather its sense of humor. When organizers Martin Swig and Jay Lamm, respectively the organizer of serious motoring tours for big-dollar vintage tin and a restless comedian frittering away his life writing for car magazines, approached every single racetrack in California with the idea for their race, only Altamont got the joke. It even threw in a joke of its own, forcing each driver to fork over $75 for a NASCAR license as qualification for competition. If you’ve ever wondered what kind of training a NASCAR driver gets before hitting the big ovals, it’s this: writing your name and social security number on a piece of paper.
When the green flag dropped, the list of things we didn’t know included the following: Are there any working gears after second? What would happen if we turned the steering wheel? If the brakes, which we found in an unlabeled box under a workbench and had to use a grinder to install, would actually stop the car. Whether our air filter, made from a pasta strainer and an old pair of panty hose, would keep anything smaller than linguini out of our engine. And whether it would hurt when we were inevitably killed in the collision between our 1665-pound Honda and the six metric tons of terrifyingly unidentifiable Camaro/Firebird lapping the track with the number H8 spray painted on its door. I H8 U, get it?
All those cheater parts and all that practice time, it turns out, would have been wasted. We would have spent our practice day trying to make our CRX go fast, stop hard and corner well, but with more than 30 junkers sharing less than a half-mile of racetrack, this was less like actual racing than it was like trying not to miss your exit on a Mexico City freeway. All we needed was nimble steering, a loud horn and a suspension that didn’t mind spending time off the pavement. This, coincidentally, described our car perfectly.
In spite of accidentally perfect preparation, we utterly failed to win. Adjusting cable-actuated clutches, it seems, is as elusive a skill as jetting carburetors. We left the cable too tight, causing a death spiral of slipping, wearing and self-tightening that, four hours into the race, turned our clutch disc into something resembling a freeze-dried rat.
Fully engrossed in a late-night clutch swap, we missed the awarding of the People’s Choice Award ($500 in nickels) to the Black Iron Racing team and their Hoosier-shod 1986 BMW 535i. Likewise, we barely noticed when Car and Driver’s expensive-looking Northstar-powered Oldsmobile Aurora was attacked by an angry mob of sledgehammer-wielding women, or when it was gleefully flipped onto its lid by the same crowd that had just voted to give it the People’s Curse award.
The awards, given at the halfway point of the race, were a clever form of mob control. Bang fenders too often and your growing band of enemies will, at one vote per team, soon gain the power to deliver the swift and arbitrary justice of the People’s Curse upon your car.
By the time we returned with our fresh clutch and only six hours left in the race, there was an insurmountable gap to the leading 1982 Corolla driven by a team strictly forbidden to say they work for Road & Track.
A team that had actually tested with a functional carburetor.
A team that had some idea of how much tire pressure to run. A team that knew how to do a driver change in less than 10 minutes. A team that was firmly in the lead for 10 of the 13 hours of the 24 Hours of LeMons (yet another unusual thing about this race). A team that watched in horror as their rear axle seized three laps from the checkered flag.
There’s something altogether more sporting about racing $500 cars than almost any “real” motorsport. This became abundantly clear as the Car and Driver Aurora and the H8 Camaro took turns pushing the stricken Not-Road & Track car around the track to victory.
The 24 Hours of Lemons is open to anyone stupid enough to enter. Go to ww.24hoursoflemons.com, read up, and we’ll see you there next year.
12-01-2006, 01:24 PM
Makes me wonder what kind of "race cars" are available on craigslist for under $500?
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