LeMons Southern California Day 1: Almost Every Car Broken, BMW 5-series Ahead of Scattered...

With the high Saturday temperature for Buttonwillow barely reaching 98 degrees F, LeMons racers reveled in weather roughly 400% cooler than the previous year’s sweat-fest.


Despite the chilly weather, mechanical attrition was high: A random spot check at the five-hour mark revealed that nearly fifty percent of the 120-car entry list was paddock-bound.


For some teams, though, being hella blow’d-ass up was merely a temporary situation. Take, for example, the OMShenanigans BMW 735i. The racing gods, evidently not impressed with the general excellence of the team’s decision to road-race a frickin’ BMW 735i, cursed them with a blown engine just a few hours in.


No worries, said the group: This other dude on our team brought his 735i street car, and we can just take the motor out of that!


Even ignoring the short-term logistics issues (such as, “how does that dude whose car that is that we ripped that motor out of get home?”), tearing apart a perfectly good street car to help your LeMons heap get back on track is, simply, just a remarkably bad idea. Undaunted, the OMShenanigans crew swapped the motor out in surprisingly short order, and hustled the big Bimmer back on track.


In the battles for class trophies, Cerveza Racing found itself in familiar position atop both the Class A and Overall standings at the end of day one. This result came despite getting hit with four BS laps on Friday (“Jay doesn’t love us anymore,” one Cerveza pilot glumly stated)—that disadvantage was gone quicker than the contents of the Free Flowmasters Bin at the National Mustang Convention.


n Class B, the Super Troop Mercury Zephyr hung on to a couple-lap lead over the Chevy Aveo of Red Hot Chili Poopers.


While internet mouth-breathers may ponder why the LeMons Supreme Court put a V8 Fox-chassis Ford in Class B, the Judges clearly recognized the classing leeway given to teams with stupid cop outfits and a homemade stuffed bear.


Also, they’re still barely beating a Chevy Aveo. And also, the Fox-chassis Ford kinda sucks.


Class C provided some midday excitement when it was discovered that the Hella Shitty Subaru-powered VW Beetle was 1. Leading Class C, and 2. Was supposed to be in Class A. Once the Beetle was correctly classed (“I knew that must have been a clerical error,” said Hella Shitty captain Philipp von Weitershausen), the question became, Who the Fudge is Leading the Best Class in LeMons? A quick scan of the standings revealed that car 122 had inherited the lead, but which car was that? After trying unsuccessfully to spot the car from trackside, LeMons staff started back toward the paddock to check the registration paperwork. Then, a spectator new to LeMons casually remarked, “Oh, the 122 is the car with the big letter K on the roof.”


No wonder the staff couldn’t find it—it’s about the furthest thing from anyone’s mind to look for the &^%$@! K-Car when trying to find a class leader. Naturally, in the waning minutes of the Saturday session, the K-Car found itself in its natural habitat—in the paddock, with the hood up, surrounded by a bevy of befuddled individuals—and the utterly atrocious Porsche 914 of La Honda Bandits Racing took over the top spot in Class C.


Will the 914 take home a class win? Tune in later to find out! (Or, if you don’t want to, we can go ahead and say, uh, probably not.)



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