Southern Discomfort 24 Hours of LeMons Day 1: Cessna Road Racer Doing Well, Some Other Stuff...

When we saw that Speedycop and the Gang of Outlaws had raised the bar to stratospheric heights with their race car made from a Cessna 310 fuselage affixed to a Toyota Space Van chassis during the Southern Discomfort inspections on Friday, almost everybody at the track thought that the Spirit of LeMons would explode, or flip over, or something terrible as soon as its tires touched the race track on Saturday morning. Not so! As you can see in the above photograph of the Spirit of LeMons dueling with the Cessna-wing-equipped Our Lady of Perpetual Downforce Civic, this thing actually functions as a reasonably competent race car. Not fast, of course, but the Spirit of LeMons finished the day’s race session in 63rd place out of 86 entries. We’ll revisit this fine racing machine later on, but for now let’s take a look at the other cars that did well (and not so well) today.

When the checkered flag waved this evening, the P1 car was the extremely rusty G-body Monte Carlo of Molde Carlo racing. Yes, that’s no typo— a hideous, small-block-Chevy-powered car beat out all those BMW 325s and Acura Integras and Dodge Neons today. The Molde Carlo has done fairly well in past races here, finishing as high as second place in LeMons CMP events, but some nickel/dime problem has usually knocked the car out of the running at the last second. If they hold on to win on Sunday, it will be a hard-earned and well-deserved triumph for the Moldes Carlo team.

Just a single lap behind the Chevy is, fittingly enough, a Ford. The V6-powered Mustang of Grim Reaper Racing has been climbing the ranks of Southern LeMons racing for several years now. The Grim Reapers and their car were just terrible when we first met them, but they’ve gotten a little better with each passing race, and now they’ve parlayed error-free driving and a reliable car into contention against an extremely tough field. Once again, a team that’s paid its dues.

Two laps behind the Reapers, we’ve got the Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.3-16 Cosworth of Ziegel Scheisshaus Racing. Yes, you can get the price of a real 2.3-16 below 500 bucks if it starts out as a basket case… and you sell off the valuable interior parts for several thousand bucks. This car has always been quick, but busted parts have held it back in prior races.

The top three cars in the standings race in Class A, the class for the fastest (and thus least interesting) LeMons cars. The Class B leader, the Ford Escort of Questie’s Racing Team, finished the day in fourth overall and just a single lap behind the Cosworth W201 Benz. This is a regular Escort with the 1.9 Ford engine, not the Mazda-fied Escort GT, so this performance is quite impressive.

Leading Class C is “the world’s slowest Subaru” of Team PBR. This slushbox-equipped Outback singlehandedly depleted nearly the entire stock of Subaru head gaskets in the Deep South during its previous LeMons races, but this time the PBR car ran all day and finished the day with a 13-lap lead over its nearest Class C competitor.

The battle between the ’64 Ford Fairlane of Fairlylame Racing and the ’64 Dodge Dart of Escape Velocity Racing ended up being a rout for the Dart; while the Fairlane racers battled overheating woes all day, the 170-cubic-inch-Slant-Six-powered Dodge kept racking up steady (and very slow) laps. End of the day, the Dart had 100 laps and the Ford had 31. Sunday is a new day, though!

The NSF Racing Plymouth Reliant K wagon had a freshly rebuilt 2.2 engine to start the weekend, and all looked well for the first few hours of Saturday’s race session.

Unfortunately, the Chrysler 2.2/2.5 engine hates being nice and fresh in LeMons racing, and we’ve seen plenty of these engines blow up just hours after being freshened up. Nasty, grimy, 300,000-mile junkyard engines fare much better in our races, for reasons nobody understands. One thrown rod for the NSF Reliant, coming up!

The good news here is that junkyards are packed to the rafters with nasty, grimy, 300,000-mile junkyard Chrysler 2.2s, and so NSF went to a self-serve yard in Columbia and returned with a very tired-looking engine that should be perfectly happy getting hammered on a road course. Here are the drivers in the K’s engine compartment, prior to the swap.

NSF Racing wasn’t the only team to nuke an engine, of course; here’s Mock Grass Racing dropping a replacement engine into their Kia. Such scenes will be repeated all over the pits at CMP Saturday night, as teams try to bash their cars into shape for Sunday’s race session. Check in Sunday night to see what happens next!


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