24 Hours of LeMons Alabama: The Winners!

We had 68 teams show up for the 2014 ‘Shine Country Classic 24 Hours of LeMons, held at the ritziest race track we’ve ever befouled with our leaky, parts-shedding hoopties, and there was plenty of action on the track. When it was all over on Sunday night, Mercedes-Benz cars had won the first two classes, and a Ford-powered, Suzuki-built GM car with Freightliner sheet metal had won the third. Here’s who won what.


The RC Spiders (formerly known as Team Ziegel Scheißhaus) and their 1986 Mercedes-Benz 190E won at New Jersey last year and again in New Hampshire, so they went into the ‘Shine Country Classic as one of the several top contenders. After the lead swapped back and forth among four cars during the first half of Saturday’s race, the RC Spiders squeezed into the front and stayed there until the checkered flag on Sunday night. Six teams turned quicker best laps than did the Spiders’ 2.3-16 Benz, but raw speed doesn’t count for much in endurance racing (the quickest car finished in P63) and the RC Spiders ended the race with a comfortable 12-lap lead over the second-place team. Some of you might ask, “How is it possible to get a Cosworth W201 for the LeMons-mandated 500-buck price limit?” The answer lies in the tremendous resale value of Cosworth-only interior and trim parts for these cars; sell them off and you can get the purchase cost below $500 in a hurry.


Class B looked like a battle between the Halfast Racing ’95 Chevrolet Caprice and the Knoxvegas Lowballers Ford Contour SVT for most of the weekend, but somehow the Squirtin’ Coronas’ slushbox-equipped Mercedes-Benz 300E inched past its competition late on Sunday and took its class by eight laps. Even with the automatic (plus a past history of parts-breaking terribleness and penalty-box-clogging on-track misbehavior) the Squirtin’ Coronas were able to get their big Benz around the track as quickly as some of the Class A cars, so they’ve earned a promotion to the fast class at their next race.


In Class C, the Cadillac Catera of Douchebag Racing and the Zero Budget Racing Chevy Chevette Diesel spent the weekend in an erratic-hare-versus-drugged-tortoise demonstration of the relative benefits of performance and reliability… but then a 1991 Geo Metro with rear-mounted 200-horse Ford Mondeo V6 and a body design lifted from The Snowman’s Freightliner in Smokey and the Bandit kept all its parts duct-taped firmly in place (for the first time in its racing career) and roared to a Class C win. Yes, the Knoxvegas Lowballers and their nightmare FrankenCar pulled off an improbable class win, beating the Catera by three laps.


For the Most Heroic Fix award, we considered quite a few teams that performed agonizingly difficult engine swaps and multi-state parts runs, but the field-expedient cylinder-head decking techniques that Team OK-Speed executed on their ’96 Mazda Miata ended up taking the prize.


You’re not going to find a machine shop open on a Saturday night in Birmingham, so what to do when your Miata’s cylinder head gets warped? Why, you go to Wal-Mart and buy a cheap mirror and a large economy-size pack of sandpaper, tape sandpaper to the flat (you hope) surface of the mirror, and spend the night rubbing the head back and forth until it’s (sort of) decked. It worked well enough to get OK-Speed back on the track on Sunday.


We almost gave the Most Heroic Fix trophy to Eagle Racing and their Cherry Bomb-themed 1995 Eagle Talon, and their achievement was impressive enough to warrant the awarding of our special regional trophy.


The 420A engine in the Talon exploded in spectacular fashion, filling the crankcase with several pounds of ex-pistons and ex-rods, but the members of Eagle Racing had heard an urban legend that the engine from a Neon was a close relative of the one in the Talon and could be swapped with ease. So, they found a Birmingham wrecking yard with a suitable Neon and headed over to pick it up. A junkyard employee called Steak Knife Steve— so named because he uses a steak knife to cut all belts, wires, and hoses during engine removal— helped extract the engine… which turned out to share the short block and nothing else with the Talon’s powerplant. That meant that the cylinder head, oil pan, and all accessories had to be swapped onto the Neon block prior to installation in the Talon. With minutes to go before the checkered flag, the swap was complete and the Eagle rattled onto the race track. For this, we awarded the team the sure-to-be-legendary Best Alabama Junkyard Nickname award, in honor of Steak Knife Steve.


The I Got Screwed award went to RetroRacing and their 1973 Volkswagen Super Beetle. RetroRacing set the record for most appearances on the race track without getting an official counted lap: seven! You see, the track exit used by the wreckers at Barber is before the timing loop, which means that a car that craps out and gets towed before completing an entire lap doesn’t get counted. The very dapper gentleman-racers of RetroRacing killed three air-cooled engines, attempting a depressing amount of mixing-and-matching among half-busted parts and experiencing abject failure with each attempt. Screwed!


The Swamp Shack Maniacs showed up with this extremely horrible 1986 Honda Prelude, which apparently gets stored in a drainage ditch full of cottonmouths in between races. They won the Organizer’s Choice award at the 2011 Cain’t Git Bayou race in Louisiana, for this apocalyptically difficult engine swap, and no improvements appear to have been made on the car since that time.


In fact, the car was made much worse for the ‘Shine Country Classic, thanks to the installation of a very rare twin-carburetor CVCC setup. Naturally, the Swamp Shack Maniacs failed the tech inspection, and then they couldn’t make the car run. But they never gave up, kept beating on the car with rocks and sticks and chanting voodoo imprecations, and were rewarded for their efforts by a late-Sunday track entry and an 11-lap total for the weekend. For this, the LeMons Supreme Court awarded the Swamp Shack Maniacs the Judges’ Choice award.


We’ve been trying to cajole some team into running a Chrysler Cordoba in LeMons since the very beginning, and only in the ninth season has our wish come true. Zero Budget Racing, of Diesel Chevette and Isuzu I-Mark Diesel fame, managed to find a somewhat rusty 1975 Cordoba, cage it, and honor the memory of Ricardo Montalban by racing it.


As is so often the case with an old car that sat for years before becoming a race car, the rigors of being thrown around a road course knocked loose a lot of schmutz in the fuel system and kept the Cordoba’s stints fairly short.


Still, Zero Budget Racing persevered, and their 318-powered Chrysler raced for a respectable 162 laps and 56th place in the standings. For this, we awarded the team the coveted Organizer’s Choice award.


For the top prize of LeMons racing, the Index of Effluency, we didn’t have much choice but to hand it over to the Knoxvegas Lowballers and their 1991 “Geo Metro SVT.” Most teams that go a little haywire in our series choose either a goofy engine swap or an amazing theme, but the Lowballers decided to do both!


They started out with a Geo Metro, did some cutting and pasting, and ended up with a 200-horse V6 out of a Ford Contour SVT in the rear of the car. During the 2013 season, this combination worked even more poorly than you might expect, alternating hours of repairs with the occasional brilliantly quick lap.


For the ‘Shine Country Classic, the team decided to blow all those lame-O Supra-with-Screaming-Chicken-hood-decal Smokey and the Bandit-themed LeMons cars into the weeds, and this “Freightliner” was the result. Jaws dropped when it showed up for the inspections at Barber.


The Western-themed mural on the side of the “trailer” was similar to the one on The Snowman’s rig, but featured the likenesses of your LeMons correspondent and LeMons Chief Perpetrator Jay Lamm as the victims of the stagecoach robbery. We thought that was a nice touch.


It appears that the Lowballers also put some work into the engine, transaxle, and suspension problems that plagued them in previous LeMons races (or they just got lucky), because the Metro SVT ran for most of the weekend, put down some laps just a few seconds off the pace of the Class A cars, and finished 25th out of 68 entries. Congratulations, Knoxvegas Lowballers!

Photos by Nick “Smokey 4 Shanxx” Pon and Murilee “Judge Phil” Martin



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