During the car inspections at the fifth annual B.F.E. GP 24 Hours of LeMons, we saw that we’d be in for an interesting race, what with an unrivaled percentage of the kind of cars we like to see, lots of weird engine swaps, extremely talented drivers on many of the teams, and nearly as many AMCs as BMWs. Here’s how the weekend of racing at High Plains Raceway went.
After winning the Doin’ Time In Joliet race in July and the North Dallas Hooptie race in March (plus the 2012 Heaps In the Heart of Texas race in 2012), Texas-based Team Back To The Past and their DeLorean-ized ’87 Nissan 300ZX came into the B.F.E. GP as the heavy favorite to take the overall win. When Saturday’s race session ended, they had the most laps… but they also had a vaporized transmission and no spare available. That set the stage for a wild Sunday.
The Little Lebowski Urban Achievers hauled their 1986 Volvo 245 a thousand miles out from their Chicago base, and they looked like the new favorites for the win on laps when the green flag waved on Sunday. They’ve placed near the top of the standings at numerous Midwest LeMons Region races, but they had maddening fuel- and ignition-system problems at the last couple of events at GingerMan and Autobahn. At HPR, their engine worked just fine… right up until the moment when it shot a connecting rod through the engine block on Sunday morning. Normally, they’d be an easy I Got Screwed award choice in this situation, but another team had even worse luck.
Dirt Poor-sche Racing and their 928 have been racing in LeMons for three seasons now, and the 2014 B.F.E. GP was their 13th race. In all that time, they’d never managed to climb into the top half of the standings at any race; their car almost always broke and their drivers were unexceptional. Then something unexpected happened on Saturday: the Dirt Poor-sche 928 began rocketing upward through the standings, cracking the top ten, then the top five, and then setting the fastest lap time of the entire field.
It turns out that the team’s regular drivers had gone on a crash course of professional race-driving instruction, and then they’d also gone and recruited a Spec 944 as their ringer. Suddenly they’d changed from the slow guys with the wretched piñata-themed Porsche (that only got noticed when it was clogging up the track and/or causing a full-course caution with a massive 9-quart-oildown engine explosion) to the dominating Wagnerian monster hurling Wotanic thunderbolts at the top teams. And, of course, the LeMons Supreme Court (in this case, your LeMons correspondent) had put the team in Class B, causing howls of outrage from the other Class B teams when the Poor-sche 928 knocked off a lap five seconds quicker than its closest rival. Just as we’d seen at Sebring a few months earlier, a Porsche 928 had come out of nowhere to menace the P1 team.
Then, well, everything went to hell for the Dirt Poor-sche. Just when they’d reached the stratospheric portion of the standings on Sunday morning, the harsh High Plains sun rendered their brake lights (which were the cheapest trailer lights available for the price of two undernourished chickens at an Uzbekistani truck stop) invisible, which led to a time-consuming black-flag-mandated stop to make repairs. The 928 then inched its way back up to P2 and loomed ominously in the rear-view mirror of the leader… and then its engine promptly ate all its bearings and died in a cloud of choking smoke. For this, we gave Dirt Poor-sche Racing a no-doubt-about-it I Got Screwed trophy.
The team that set the second-quickest lap time of the race shocked us nearly as much as the Dirt Poor-sche’s best 2:13 time. The Cardiac Arrest Toyota “MR1000″ (an MR2 with a Honda CBR1000 motorcycle engine in the passenger-seat location, in true LeMons ill-advised engine swap tradition) howled and yowled and spun out frequently, but in the midst of all the madness somehow got around the High Plains Raceway course in just 2:16.
When the Cardiac Arrest car showed up on Friday for the car inspections, we failed it on many counts in the safety department. We gave the team team a long list of items to fix, forcing them to spend the night welding up a heavy chain guard and chassis reinforcements, among other major tasks (we allowed them to keep their Gorilla Tape “differential cover”, figuring that it would be a self-solving problem). They did so, making the green flag on Saturday and then keeping in good spirits even after the LeMons Supreme Court parked them for much of Saturday afternoon when their super-twitchy car kept spinning off into the weeds. We considered giving the Cardiac Arrest guys the Judges’ Choice trophy, but they were beaten out— barely— by Bill & Ted’s Subaru.
This first-time team rolled into our inspections with these Bill & Ted costumes and an only-in-Colorado 1990 Subaru Legacy sedan. As often happens with newcomers to LeMons racing, they collected a fair number of black flags on their first day, but they kept their sense of humor, learned from their mistakes, and had a good time. Judges’ Choice award!
Another group of newcomers made a good impression at their first LeMons race. Team KamiKamry brought what may well be the only V6/5-speed early-90s Toyota Camry left in the United States, all painted up like a Mitsubishi Zero. With a squooshily stock suspension, it looked hilarious on the track, exactly the sort of vehicle we like to see in our race.
Then, (entirely predictable) disaster struck on Sunday: the 2VZ engine shed a connecting rod, ventilating the engine block. As often happens with Toyota engines in LeMons, the car still drove pretty well with an oil-gushing hole in the block and several pounds of big metal chunks rattling around in the oil pan. The team requested that they be allowed to drain the remaining oil and continue racing until their shambling corpse of an engine finally seized up completely. We refused, not wanting to drag a dead car off the track ten minutes hence, but referred them to the LeMons-approved technique for removing broken engine parts and patching an engine-block hole, and the KamiKamry guys grasped the idea immediately and leaped into action.
Within a couple of hours, they’d extracted the offending broken rod, pounded the remnants of the now-useless piston high enough into the cylinder to be out of the way, hose-clamped a piece of leather belt around the now-empty crank journal (to prevent oil-pressure loss through the crankshaft), J-B Qwik’d a license-plate-metal patch over the hole in the engine block, and got the whole mess bolted back together and in running condition.
The KamiKamry smoked and clattered and didn’t have much power from its five abused pistons, but the team finished the race. For this, the Most Heroic Fix award.
In the 116-race history of the 24 Hours of LeMons prior to last weekend’s race, no team had ever taken a win on laps in an Audi. Oh, sure, we’ve seen plenty of the four-ringed Germans in our series, probably over a hundred of them by this time, but we’d just about convinced ourselves that no Audi could ever get the most laps in a LeMons race. Audis can be extremely quick, as quick as anything else on a LeMons track, but they’re fragile and over-complex and take geological epochs to fix when they break. While the team with the Plymouth Neon replaces their busted half-shaft assembly in six minutes with a part they got for $19.95 at the worst-stocked auto-parts store in the time zone, the team with the Audi A4— a car that ought to blow the doors off the Neon on a road course— will need to log 16 hours of knuckle-shredding wrenching in order to replace some deeply buried component so obscure that it doesn’t even have a name in English… and meanwhile, the Neon will go on to take the win. Not this time, though! Miraculously, the Team Copyright Laws 1993 Audi 90 broke zero parts all weekend, and the team grabbed the Class A and overall wins by five laps.
The Copyright Laws Audi (which is campaigned by a group of dealership mechanics from Audi Denver) wasn’t anywhere near the quickest car on the track, with its naturally-aspirated V6 engine and non-Quattro drivetrain; in fact, nine cars (out of 42 total) turned quicker laps than did the Copyright Laws drivers. However, it was very reliable (in stark contrast to its performance at last year’s B.F.E. GP, where it finished in P35 after suffering numerous typical-for-Audis-in-LeMons mechanical woes), the drivers avoided black-flag-attracting screwups, and the competition gradually melted away as the race wore on.
Congratulations, Team Copyright Laws! Well done, Audi! Subaru now replaces Audi as the marque under the most pressure to notch its first LeMons win. We say it’s time for Fuji Heavy Industries to step up with some factory sponsorship.
All was not well for Audi fans at this race, however. The Black Dog 2000 Audi A4 1.8T looked positively evil during the inspections, with 178 horsepower, a big turbocharger to compress the thin mile-high air that would have the naturally-aspirated cars gasping for breath, Quattro all-wheel-drive (with the forecast calling for a good chance of rain), and a team made up of Audi experts from a local German-car-specialist speed shop. Things looked good for the Black Dogs.
That is, things looked good until about 15 minutes into the race, when the A4′s power steering pump failed. No big deal, right? Unfortunately, the power steering pump on the ’00 A4 drives the water pump, which means that the engine in the Black Dog car overheated instantly, warping the cylinder head and (probably) causing several pounds of flame-spitting Spirochete Wasps to fly straight down the driver’s throat. Even this group of seasoned pro Audi wrenches couldn’t make the car right, and they ended up packing up and going home after about 12 hours of fruitless face-pounded-against-brick-wall effort. Six laps, dead [redacted] last place, for nice symmetrical Audi bookends of the standings.
Worth mentioning is the fine performance of Team GTIwish and their 2002 Volkswagen Golf. The GTIwish drivers ran the race of their lives, threatening to pounce on the lead all weekend long, generally keeping things interesting at the top of the standings, and finishing in fourth overall.
Team Sheen, a Michigan-based Integra outfit that almost always contends for the win in our Midwestern events, spent time in the lead last weekend and appeared to be the best bet to take the Class A victory. The team finished the race in a still-impressive P3 after a combination of broken parts and pit-stop strategy later undermined (in a fashion too complicated to explain here) by the LeMons Supreme Court’s promotion of the Copyright Laws Audi from Class B to Class A midway through Sunday. They’ll be back in action next month, at the Where the Elite Meet To Cheat race, where we expect to see them going toe-to-toe with the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers Volvo wagon in the struggle for the win.
Just as the Dirt Poor-sche and Copyright Laws Audi had never done well at previous B.F.E. GP events, the Car Wars—Return of the Junkers ’87 Honda Prelude had amassed an undistinguished record in LeMons. The LeMons Supreme Court decided to show some mercy and assign this ugly, quarter-century-old Prelude to Class B. Stock engine, loose suspension, Jeep-style ride height, history of failure— what could possibly go wrong? In this case, the Car Wars Honda obliterated the rest of Class B, finishing in P2 and achieving a best lap time nearly two seconds quicker than the overall winner. Classing these cars is more art than science.
Speaking of car-classing-decision dilemmas, the Wine-O Racing Team Toyota Solara won Class C rather handily, beating its nearest rival by a gigantic 47-lap margin. Their placement in Class C was due to the Texas-based Wine-Os’ execrably bad performance at each of their previous races (first in Class A, where they got creamed, then in Class B, where they were merely stomped), and by the calculation that they would have lost Class C by many laps at any of those events. At the B.F.E. GP, though, the Wine-Os stepped up their game and raced to a big win through sheer force of will… well, no, to tell the truth, they just kept their sloth-like car running while the other five Class C entries spent the weekend in a whirlwind of flailing tools and sweating crew members.
Which isn’t to say that those other Class C teams felt the sting of failure. Not at all! Zitronen Racing made their debut with the first-ever Opel Manta in LeMons history. The “German Camaro” (honored in an iconic German film) was sold through Buick dealers in the United States and was the deadly rival for Americans driving Ford Capris. In other words, an ideal 24 Hours of LeMons car.
The Zitronen Racing Opel suffered from the litany of mechanical ailments that everyone expected from a Malaise Era Opel during the course of the weekend, starting off with undiagnosable overheating and then branching out into weird fuel-delivery and electrical problems. The team persisted, however, and the Manta finished the weekend with a respectable 160 laps and P31 to its credit. For this accomplishment, we issued the prestigious Organizer’s Choice trophy.
Another inspiring Class C story came out of Grumpy Cat Racing, winners of the Index of Effluency at the Utah race a few months ago. The flathead six-cylinder engine in the Grumpy Cat ’50 Dodge pickup seemed tired, but the team hoped it had enough life to make it through one more race weekend.
Just in case that old 218 flathead didn’t survive, the Grumpy Cats bought this ancient-but-still-functioning ex-TWA airport tug as an engine-donor vehicle.
Sure enough, the 218 breathed its last early on Saturday, and so the Grumpy Cats threw themselves into the task of pulling the 230 flathead out of the tug, making all the modifications needed to get it to bolt into the truck, and doing all the thousand little tasks necessary in a swap like this. With a great deal of help from members of other teams and many problems solved, the Grumpy Cat Dodge returned to the track on Sunday morning.
Is it possible for a sub-2,000-pound car with 190 mid-mounted horsepower and a 5-speed to squeeze into Class C? Yes, if it’s the sort of tiny-car/big-engine abomination that tends to have overwhelming teething problems during its first few races, which is the case here. The Sordik Racing Renault R5 Turbo (actually a Renault Le Car with Infiniti I30t engine/transaxle in the back) did indeed have many teething problems at its debut last weekend, but it also showed hints of great road-course potential.
Just a week ago, the seat wasn’t installed, the wiring wasn’t done, the fuel system didn’t exist, the clutch linkage didn’t work, the brakes weren’t plumbed, and it appeared that the Sordik “R5 Turbo” would never make the green flag.
Swapping a computer-heavy mid-90s Nissan engine into a super-primitive Le Car is not for the faint of heart. This is some of the tangle of wiring, sensors, and scary-looking black boxes involved… and the wiring was the easy part.
Team captain Bob Harnsberger is an old hot-rodder and expert fabricator, however, and he was able to summon the help of the equally skilled members of Speed Holes Wrenching (Class C Rambler Marlin), Down and Out Race Team (Class C supercharged AMC Pacer), and Rocket Surgery Racing (Class B Checker Marathon) and get the Sordik R5′s build completed in time to start the B.F.E. GP.
The car had some brake-balance and engine-control headaches during the weekend, but it finished 156 laps and ran an amazing-for-the-first-time-out 2:22 best lap time. We foresee Class B and Class A promotions for the Sordik R5 in the near future.
Another first at the ’14 B.F.E. GP was the appearance of two Hyundais. We’ve seen the occasional single-o Hyundai here and there in previous races, but two showing up in the same small-turnout race indicates that this Korean marque should be making more noise in the LeMons world soon enough. This time, the Hyundais were both bone-stock 2002 Accents, run by utterly unrelated teams, and they proceeded to spend the entire weekend locked in a riveting, lead-swapping intra-marque war.
We decided, midway through this very exciting race-within-a-race, to create a Best 2002 Hyundai Accent of the Race trophy (the Hyundai Accent Cup name was already taken) and award it to the team whose Accent finished the weekend with the most laps. The #19 Pit Road Pro team pulled off the feat, beating the rival Accent by a single lap… but then packed up and went home before the awards ceremony.
Thing is, we practice a “must be present to win” policy for awards, and so the members of The Farmers #27 Accent team were given the Best 2002 Hyundai Accent of the Race award by default, to the accompaniment of a huge round of applause from their fellow racers. Perhaps they’ll go on to found a Spec Accent series.
The top prize of LeMons racing is the Index of Effluency, which is the award given to the team that achieves heights considered unreachable with their deeply flawed race vehicle. For the IOE at the 2014 B.F.E. GP, the twin-engined, manual+automatic-transmission-equipped Volatile RAM 2 Toyota “MRolla” was about as easy a decision as we’ve ever had to make. This car (which is an unholy marriage of the front half of an AE92 Corolla GT-S and the rear half of an early MR2; for full details of the build go here) has eight cylinders, four-wheel-drive, a 5-speed manual in front and an automatic in back, some very strange handling characteristics, and a tendency to overheat one or both of its 4AGE engines. In its three years of racing, it had never performed particularly well, but this time was different. Very different.
For an hour or two on Saturday, the MRolla was, incredibly, the race leader, and the Volatile RAM drivers kept it in the hunt for the duration of the B.F.E. GP. A couple of black flags and high fuel consumption pushed the MRolla down to P5 by the time of the checkered flag on Sunday, but this is an accomplishment akin to a two-headed yak winning the Kentucky Derby. Good work, Volatile RAM!
You’re probably thinking there’s no way to top this race right about now, but we’re going to do just that this weekend, when we set the all-time world record for the largest endurance race in history at the Vodden the Hell Are We Doing 24 Hours of LeMons, on Thunderhill Raceway’s new five-mile course. If you can’t make it to Northern California, you can follow the action here.