24 Hours of LeMons North Dallas Hooptie: The Winners!

At last report, the class leaders at the fourth annual North Dallas Hooptie 24 Hours of LeMons made up a Ford-Jeep-Jeep trio. When the checkered flag waved on Sunday, the Class A-B-C winner lineup had changed to Ford-Mercury-Jeep. Let’s take a look at the teams that took home trophies on Sunday night.


LeMons racing has been going on in California since the very beginning, and the races that take place under the Bear Flag tend to get 120 to 180 teams per event. That makes California LeMons races brutally competitive affairs for teams shooting for an overall win, meaning that the top California teams are tough to beat when they venture east of the Sierras. The Model T GT (which is based on a much-modified Model A frame and features Pinto front suspension, Fox Mustang rear suspension, and Ford 302 V8 power) has won just a single California LeMons race in its two years of racing, but it generally gives the dominating BMW 5-series-based teams of Cerveza Racing and If It’s Not Punk It’s Junk Racing plenty to worry about. The T GT spent most of Saturday chasing the Mazda Miata of Team Miagra and the Lambo-door-equipped, El Camino-ized BMW 325iS of Pulp Friction Racing… but then the Mazda lost its engine, clutch, and one wheel hub in a cascade of mechanical failures. Meanwhile, the BMW sprang a massive fuel leak that took hours to fix. Once that happened, all the Model T GT guys had to do was stay on the track and avoid breaking parts, and that’s just what they did. Overall and Class A wins followed, after which the team donated their prize money to charities helping out in West, Texas and then drove their car— that’s right, no trailer for the Model T GT, unless you count the one that it tows— 1,800 miles back home.


When one is assigning classes to LeMons cars, as your correspondent does, what does one do with a Mercury Capri XR2? The Australian-built, Mazda 323-based Capri has a not-so-illustrious career of busted parts and broken hearts in the 24 Hours of LeMons, meaning most examples belong in Class C, but the Mostly Harmless Racing Capri has some very good drivers and solid team organization. Class B seemed to make sense… and then Mostly Harmless drove a trouble-free race with some excellent lap times (just a few seconds slower than those of the quickest Class A entries), finishing in P3 overall and winning their class by five laps.


The Class C win went to TGTW Offroad Racing and their Jeep Comanche. TGTW— under the influence of the Petty Cash Racing Cherokee— cut about 6″ out of the four-wheel-drive, AMC 4.0-powered Comanche’s springs, installed a roll cage, and went racing.


The Jeep’s clutch failed right away, so the team jammed its Peugeot BA10 transmission into fourth and left it there all weekend, bump-starting the truck as needed and using crew muscle power to move it around the pits. When the race ended, the Comanche had finished a startling 20th overall (out of 66 entries), beating its nearest Class C rival by 22 laps.


Winning the Most Heroic Fix award were TARP Racing and their Toyota MR2-based “Simca 1100″. The Haribo-themed car looked very LeMon-y on the track, but it turned out to be equally LeMon-y under the skin.


First, there was this small problem with pistons lightly tapping some valves. So, the TARPers spent the night putting together another engine from parts scavenged from various garages. Hooray, back in the race!


Well, no. Not many minutes later, the Simca spit a connecting rod through the oil pan. In honor of TARP’s efforts, we modified the trophy to become the Heroic Temporary Fix award.


Strangely, just before the TARP car threw a rod late on Sunday, your LeMons correspondent noted that this was the first LeMons race (in the 80 he has attended) in which no car had experienced a connecting-rod failure. Right after the chance to have the first rod-throw-free LeMons race was blown, the 302 in the Property Devaluation Thunderbird did this. We’re still not sure exactly what happened, but the entire rear section of the engine block was gone. We’re sure some rods were involved.


Blown-up engines are commonplace in LeMons, so we didn’t give Property Devaluation the I Got Screwed award for their mishap. Instead, the poor saps on the Ratsun Racing team took home this not-so-coveted trophy.


This car, a Datsun B210 with 1980-vintage “210ZX” body kit, turned a miserable six laps at the 2012 Gator-O-Rama race, and we had high hopes for the car this time. Sadly, engine failure limited the Ratsun to a mere 19 laps— better than last time, but still screwed.


For our event-specific special trophy, we decided upon the Lost Cause Award, given to Team OK-Speed team captain Justin Howe. Justin took delivery of the NSF Racing 1987 Reliant-K wagon (which is being passed from team to team around the country as part of the “K-it-FWD” program) to enter this car in nearly every LeMons race in 2013) a week before the race, then thrashed on it nonstop and fixed many of the K’s problems.


Unfortunately, the Reliant still ended up losing an engine (it has now consumed four 2.2 engines in four races) and requiring another junkyard swap at the track… on top of the OK-Speed Tape-R Civic also needing an engine swap. Justin earned his trophy the hard way.


Team Starfox, which spent the entire weekend fixing problem after problem on their 2.3-powered ’93 Mustang, had such a good attitude in the face of adversity that the LeMons Supreme Court gave them the Judges’ Choice trophy.


Sensory Assault, the rotary-loving Texans who brought us the exhaust-powered moonshine still and represented LeMons on French TV, decided that a burned-to-a-crisp FD Mazda RX-7 would make an excellent recipient for the turbocharged 13B out of their now-outlawed collapsed-barn find 1972 RX-2.


In fact, this setup worked about as well as Sensory Assault’s garbage-disposal-based margarita machine (i.e., messy, noisy, and icky), and the RX-7 finished 36th overall. However, during the several minutes when everything came together, Sensory Assault managed to set the fast lap of the race, a 2:08 time that beat the Model T GT by a full second. For entertaining us so well, Sensory Assault wins an Organizer’s Choice trophy.


For the top prize of LeMons racing, the Index of Effluency, the choice was quite easy: the 1974 Porsche 914 of Team Gravy Racing. These LeMons newcomers brought an excruciatingly terrible 914 with a hooptified carburetor conversion on its 1.7 engine and proceeded to turn slow lap after slow lap all weekend.


With a 2:46 best lap time, the Gravy Racing Porsche didn’t do a lot of passing— in fact, only the Reliant-K and the Ratsun 210ZX were much slower— but the drivers did the best they could, raced clean, and beat nearly all the Mustangs and Camaros by finishing in P27. Congratulations, Team Gravy Racing!

Not enough 24 Hours of LeMons action for you? Check out the Car and Driver LeMons roundup page!



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