There’s nothing that gets a 24 Hours of LeMons fan’s heart pumping like a good old race car flying a patriotic red-white-and-blue flag.
That flag could be the Union Jack on an MGB or the French Tricolor on a Citroën ID19, but in this case we’re talking about Old Glory and genuine Detroit Iron, built in the Golden Age of the American Car: the 1960s. Yes, back when General Motors was in real danger of being broken up for being a near-monopoly in the eyes of the Department of Justice, when Toyota was an edge-case marque peddling a few thousand Coronas a year, and when the best-known German car symbolized a culture of diminished expectations. You hear a lot about 1960s Detroit cars being worth absurd sums these days, but LeMons racers know that searching for the phrase “ran when parked” on Craigslist will unearth any number of 50-year-old American cars for scrap value or close to it. Let’s admire some of these fine racing machines.
The first of these cars to race in LeMons was the Size Matters 1967 Plymouth Fury, which competed at the fourth-ever LeMons race: the San Francisco Fall 2007 event at Altamont Motor Speedway. Later that year, the team won the Index of Effluency trophy at the 2007 Arse Freeze-a-Palooza. The Olympia, Washington–based Size Matters guys then dragged their car all the way to Ohio for the 2008 Toledo race.
The Fury became increasingly battered as the years went by, using up numerous small- and big-block Chrysler V-8 engines along the way. Finally, the structure just plain gave out and the car was retired after the 2010 season.
That wasn’t the end of the Size Matters LeMons efforts, though—the team (which consists of employees of a Chrysler muscle-car restoration shop) then put together this 1964 Plymouth Barracuda, complete with slant-six engine. The Oly Express car took the Index of Effluency award (the top prize of LeMons racing) at the 2012 Sears Pointless race, finishing 44th out of 172 entries and beating plenty of BMWs and Porsches.
The Size Matters car wasn’t the only 1960s Plymouth Fury to race in our series, however, and it also wasn’t the only one to win an Index of Effluency trophy. The NSF Racing 1962 Fury, a staggeringly rusty car dredged from the vile depths of a cottonmouth-infested Florida swamp, made its debut at the 2010 season-ender at Palm Beach International Raceway, then went on to win the IOE at the 2011 Southern Discomfort race, thanks to a weekend-long never-say-die effort in South Carolina.
This Fury had a 340-cubic-inch Chrysler LA V-8 engine, which rattled and leaked and burned mosquito-abating quantities of oil, but NSF managed to keep their Plymouth from breaking in half on the track.
NSF loves old Chryslers, and so they also raced this ’65 Plymouth Barracuda at the 2011 Heaps In the Heart of Texas race. This “Barracuda Swim Club” car ended up taking the Class C win at that race.
Speaking of old Chryslers that win major 24 Hours of LeMons trophies, here’s the Escape Velocity Racing 1964 Dodge Dart. This Texas-based team drove their Slant-Six-engined A-body to Index of Effluency victory at the 2013 Gator-O-Rama race. Are you starting to notice a pattern yet? Race an old Chrysler in LeMons, take home trophies!
Perhaps the best-known 1960s Chrysler in the series, the Faster Farms Racing 1966 Plymouth Belvedere, has been competing since the 2008 Arse Freeze-a-Palooza race. The Faster Farms Chickens have yet to win an IOE, but they’ve been awarded several other trophies and continue to be strong Index contenders.
The Coming From Behind 1966 Dodge Dart managed to come close to winning Class B at the 2013 Arse Freeze-a-Palooza race, thanks to its healthy tunnel-rammed 318, but was beaten out by a Crown Victoria Police Interceptor when it failed to restart after a pit stop.
While we’ve seen many American Motors products in LeMons racing over the years, only two were originally built in the 1960s. The first is the Speed Holes Racing 1966 Rambler Marlin, which boasts Chevy 454 power and a Jaguar XJ6 rear suspension. This is the only LeMons car to use dual superchargers, a rig that didn’t help performance but sounded incredible (until it exploded). The members of Speed Holes Racing have won two Judges’ Choice trophies and two Organizer’s Choice trophies in four LeMons races with this car.
Of course, sometimes leaving your old American Motors car completely stock makes it more successful in endurance racing, as Panting Polar Bear Racing learned with their 1961 Rambler Classic at the Sears Pointless race in March. Index of Effluency, naturally!
196 cubic inches of AMC straight-six power, three-on-the-tree transmission, original California black license plates, and all purchased for just $450.
Elderly Fords are well represented in LeMons racing, too. The first 1960s Ford product to compete in the series was this extremely rough 1965 Ford Mustang, campaigned by Team Armageddon. This car appeared in the 2007 Arse-Freeze and continued racing in California for a year or two after that.
Of all the 1960s Fords to compete in the series however, none was more notorious than the Speedycop and the Gang of Outlaws 1963 Ford Thunderbird. This car began its career in 2010 with don’t-even-ask quantities of Bondo on the body and the original 390-cubic-inch V-8 engine under the hood. At its debut race, the team fixed a nuked transmission by converting it to a single-speed direct-drive gearbox, and things just
went downhill
got better from there. Later in the 2010 season, the Thunderbird received a BMW V-12 engine swap (which didn’t work so well but looked great) and then a BMW turbo-diesel engine yanked from a 524TD (which worked well enough to win the team the Index of Effluency at the 2010 New England race, thanks to lots of diesel torque).
The following year, the magical appeal of a big, cheap Ford plus a few cubic feet of body filler inspired the Gang of Outlaws to build this replica of the Parnelli Jones 1967 Ford Galaxie NASCAR racer. OK, fine, so Parnelli actually raced a Fairlane that year, but the Galaxie looks just like a somewhat bigger Fairlane.
This car competed for several seasons and racked up many street miles, eventually being sold off to fund more ambitious LeMons builds.
Speedycop and the Gang of Outlaws, in between building projects such as the ’56 Cessna and the ’79 Bonneville Donk, also put together this 302-powered 1960 Ford Falcon coupe.
On the West Coast, the Salton Sea Speed Shop ’64 Falcon, which was found abandoned in the Mojave Desert and put back into running condition by the team, has won a couple of trophies in the last two years.
The Team Fairlylame 1964 Ford Fairlane spent a few races in 2013 trying to beat its archrival, the Escape Velocity Racing 1964 Dodge Dart, and finally did so at the Sebring race in July. For taking P13 at that race, Team Fairlylame earned the Index of Effluency trophy.
No doubt because General Motors sold so many more cars than Ford and Chrysler in the 1960s, more GM cars from that decade have competed in LeMons racing than those made by The General’s competitors. The first was the Procrastination Racing 1969 Chevrolet Nova, which raced in cross-marque General Lee livery during the first couple of years of the series.
It was only a matter of time before some team raced that most LeMony of GM cars, the Chevrolet Corvair. Captained by Hooniverse‘s UDMan and including an extremely young Blake Z. Rong, Team Trailing Throttle Oversteer introduced this 1963 Corvair sedan to the LeMons world at 2009 New England race. As you might expect, the aptly named team’s drivers spun out frequently and the car had some mechanical issues, but the team brought home the Index of Effluency trophy in its very first attempt.
That same summer, the Unsafe At Any Speed 1965 Corvair coupe began its California racing career. This car has had some mechanical issues (all too common with this affordable-for-good-reason classic Chevrolet) and is something of a handful to drive on a race track (never lift!), but still races five years later.
Just a few months ago, the Transcontinental Drifters mashed up the suspension and running gear from a 1965 Corvair with the shell of a 1960 Corvair and won the Most Heroic Fix award at the Pacific Northworst race. Their Chevy boxer-six engine was a write-off after that weekend, so the Drifters are planning a no-doubt-ill-advised engine swap of some sort.
GM A-bodies can be on the pricey side these days, but a beat-to-hell ’64 Buick Skylark sedan may be found for Corvair-grade prices. Old Farts Racing ran this car in a few West Coast races during the 2009 season.
Back in 2011, Speedycop had a plan to show up a day or two early at the 2011 Detroit Irony race, buy some sort of frightening six-wheeled El Camino project car for sale on Craigslist, and convert the monstrosity to a LeMons-legal race car in a panic-stricken 48-hour thrash. That deal didn’t go through, but Speedycop spotted this 1965 Chevrolet Impala rotting in a yard near GingerMan Raceway and decided—perhaps with some influence from me—that he would rent this car, cage it, and race it.
The Tale of the Rented Rustwagon contains far too many plot twists and turns to recount here, but the old Chevy managed to turn some laps without obscuring all of western Michigan in a red cloud of dust particles.
In any case, the king of all the LeMons GM cars was, it should go without saying, a Speedycop-built machine. This oligarch-grade 1961 Cadillac Fleetwood competed at the muddy, surreal 2009 Lamest Day race at Nelson Ledges, where it turned more laps than anyone expected, in spite of bashing into a tire wall at high speed.
The Fleetwood grabbed the first of many Organizer’s Choice awards for Speedycop and the Gang of Outlaws (then known as Team Police Brutality) and raised a bunch of money for breast-cancer research to boot.
Given the low, low price tags on “distressed” 1960s Detroit trucks, you might expect to see legions of them on 24 Hours of LeMons tracks. Sadly, such has not been the case. The Sanford & Son 1965 Chevrolet pickup showed up at the Fall 2010 South Carolina race—and got hammered with vast quantities of penalty laps for its LS engine and custom-built suspension.
Built within LeMons budget restraints, the 1964 International Harvester Scout of Troop 302 Racing was pasted together using bits of a Fox Mustang and a Ford Aerostar van, winning the Organizer’s Choice trophy at this year’s Sears Pointless race.
What’s next? Well, we know of several supremely cool 1960s Detroit cars in the works for upcoming LeMons races—and those who come to the LeMons South Fall race at Carolina Motorsports Park on the weekend of September 20–21 just might witness the very first Canadian Detroit car in LeMons history.