Question of the Weekend – Will you ever participate in a 24 Hours of LeMons Event?
This weekend, we here at Hooniverse will have a reporter on the ground – Marc Sketchler, better known as A Strolling Player – to cover the Laissez Les Crapheaps Roulez 2010, currently running near New Orleans, Louisiana. He will be providing updates as he can, which depends on his internet connectivity.
We have a lot of the commentariant, as well as some of the editorial staff who compete in various events that make up the rolling circus that is the 24 Hours of LeMons. The teams are epic, the cars are beyond awesome, and the crowds that gather are all incredible.
So the question is this: If you haven’t participated in one of these events, will you ever? We can all understand the economics of starting a team (God knows Tim and I do), but it shouldn’t stop you from going to the 24 Hours of LeMons Forum and finding a team that needs a wrench, a helper, or even a driver, with a budget that almost anyone can afford.
However, I will also open this line of questioning to those that have competed in one of these events. Why did you enter, and tell us your most enjoyable event. Was it when you were awarded the most likely to go home in an Ambulance? Was it when you were sideswiped off the track by a BMW? was it the fact that your heap made it all the way to the end? This should be a great filler between the post that Marc will be providing all weekend.
All Images Courtesy of 24 Hours of LeMons
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Time and money, if I have one I don't have the other. I do want to at least ATTEND an event which is a good possibility. As for participate, maybe….someday…..
I've got mixed feelings on LeMons.
Sometimes I wish the emphasis was more on the racing and less on the circus. But of course if that was the case, it would be hard to keep it from spiralling out of control money-wise. I really, really want to love it unconditionally. I just need to get to an event and see it for myself. I'm pretty sure that would sway me to one way or the other. But I also need to look at BABE, Chump, and a local series or two.
How's that for a non-answer answer?
This is how I feel. I’d like to race at LeMons but it is clearly more about dressing up and being an idiot than it is about getting automotive disasters around a track without blowing up.
I understand ChumpCar is more like that, and also less of an ego fest for the organizers.
I don't want to knock on anybody's good time, I'm just not sure it's right for me.
It may seem that way, but the most flamboyant teams often get the most coverage. There are plenty of automotive disasters under the radar in Lemons. Acting silly, being creative and having a sense of humor is just part of the fun.
I would do anything in my power to participate in a LeMons event, from just spectating to building a car and fielding a team. Time and money are the limiting factors, of course. Given the fact that there are plenty of interesting lawn monuments that are fairly well preserved here in Southern AZ, I'd be going for IOE rather than a full-on win. I'm still kicking myself because I've let a '53 Packard and a '64 Comet slip through my fingers. They would both have been legendary, and being a Tombstone resident, the theme for the car and team would have been easy to come up with. Some kind of Old West cheese thing, with all of us in our cowboy hats and carrying our single action Colts and the like. Maybe bring a jackass along as a team mascot. One of these days, I'll get it together and make it happen. There are plenty of other interesting cars slumbering away in the weeds around here, and if I can get my buddies to sober up for a minute or two, maybe I can talk them into forming a team.
I hope so. I've pitched it to my autocross buddies, who generally don't think it's a cost effective way to go racing. Too bad, because two of them are very good drivers.
I'm going to try to go to the Portland race next year and I'd like to field a car at some point but before that can happen I need to get ready access to a trailer and tow vehicle… and money… and time… and talent.
I live in an area which is simultaneously great and horrible for the automotive enthusiast, we have no emissions or vehicle inspections. On the plus side, that means you can run whatever you want; unfortunately it also means that running beaters are massively over-valued. A car that might be given away after having failed emissions elsewhere will still go for $1,000 here. That means any LeMons car is going to either need to be a non-runner (and thus be trailered) or I'm going to have to drive 100+ miles to go get it (in which case it needs to be driven or trailered back).
Rent a trailer (and tow vehicle, if necessary) to get a non-runner home, then keep it street-legal for driving to the race. Several teams do that and it's certainly my plan.
Well, actually, my plan has an extra step: (1) Rent a truck and trailer to drag home a car recently removed from a farmer's field. Done. (2) Get it running and use it as a daily driver until its engine loses a piston. Done. (Bonus: I got to limp it home on the freeway with only two pistons! Fun!) (3) Prep it for racing and drive it to the track. Pending.
See? Easy. Well, so far….
(3) Enlist crazy fools to join team.
I'd love to participate, if I can – problem is, as far as I know, there's no races in Canda, and I don't have a passport yet. Maybe I should just suck it up, do it, then see what happens…
I've taken cars to two of the Concours d'LeMons and "raced" in the LeMons Pinewood Derby at the last Sears Pointless, so now I'm putting together this:
http://forums.24hoursoflemons.com/viewtopic.php?i…
with an eye towards having it ready for next year's race in Grass Valley, Oregon. What could possibly go wrong?
i was one of those guys that bought a seat for a race. i drove in this year's Goin' for Broken at Thunderhill, and I will be racing with the same team (Pit Crew Revenge, aka the hummer honda) at Buttonwillow. I did autox for years with a few track days here and there, but nothing compares to Lemons. it is certainly a circus, but it is still about the racing too. and getting your doors blown off by the Eyesore Starship Enterprise is a very entertaining (and terrifying) experience. i recommend doing a lemons race to every car guy i know.
I would definitely enjoy an opportunity to turn a few laps in that Corvair, if only so I could say that I've done it (are you reading this Jim?). In terms of actually prepping a car, putting a team together etc., I think I would get more fun per buck (and have an intact and stock car at the end of it all) doing something like the California Melee.
LeMons race number 8 for me will be in two weeks. So…. yes!
My first race was actually spawned by my divorce. I was in a bit of a funk and needed to do something to lift my spirits. i read about LeMons in some car magazine and thought it was the best idea ever. And it just so happened that there was a race coming up. So I searched around online for a team that was looking for a driver. I found a Saab team (Saabs Gone Wild) that had an open slot and joined them. July '07 at Altamont was my first race and I was hooked.
I did one more race with the Saab team and then decided to start my own. So some friends and I got together (and also got in contact with a guy from Jalopnik who was looking for a team and ended up becoming a very good friend), put together a crappy E30 with a decent theme (The Porcubimmer), and raced at the last Altamont race.
We blew our clutch and flywheel (car wouldn't run because the crank position sensor tab broke off) so the first event didn't go so well. Second event at Thunderhill went better, with only one electrical glitch (bad relay) to deal with and we finished in 30-something place. Third race at Buttonwillow went great with the exception of the throttle cable getting unhooked from the pedal and we finished 9th. Last race at Thunderhill was nearly perfect with the exception of one black flag for an off track excursion and we finished 6th. I'm hoping we do well at Buttonwillow this time around, but of course we know that LeMons racing is a crap shoot!
Earlier this year I ran at the Sears Point event driving in my friend's car. That was a lot of fun other than him choosing cheap ass brake pads that had to be changed 3 times during the race, heh.
Been there.
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Done that.
Will certainly do it again.
I will most definitely go see an event but the cost is prohibitive unless you can get a good size 'gang' together. LeMons is cheap racing but there are a lot of required equipment and entry fees that typically go unmentioned whentdiscussing the event.
I have had some fun tailing my buddy around to local autocross events. Now that's how I would go about racing on the cheap. I would love to get a car I could devote to autocross. The hearse is a little obscene though I've been urged to try to enter it.
You should. The last one I went to, an early sixties full size Ford wagon and a retired cop car competed for people's choice. Neither was competitive but they were entertaining to watch. Judging from the smiles on the driver's faces, they must have been fun to run, too.
LeMons has ruined autocross for me. As my friend likes to say, autocross is the handjob of motorsports.
Hey man, I'll take what I can get…
You owe me a new keyboard.
Myself and two friends are heavily debating buying a car to enter in either Lemons or ChumpCar. However:
A) Minneapolis is a terrible place to be looking for a crapcan, as rust has eaten any of the fun or interesting cars long ago. This has the byproduct of inflating the prices of the crapcans that remain. I think I found a decent $500 '86 CRX Si, though…
B) The huge emphasis on "themes" is a bit of a turnoff. We just want to go and race a shitbox, and we're going to have trouble finding the time and/or money just to get the car into shape, much less creating an awesome theme. ChumpCar basically FORCES you do a theme: 5.5.3; "vehicles without obvious attempts at theme and engineering will not be eligible for ChumpCar’s trophy, cash or credit awards." On the other hand, Lemons doesn't force you to have a theme… but it sounds like they get many more applicants for races than they can handle, and what are the chances of "Our team is five chumps who've never gone auto racing" getting accepted? Heaven help us that the only auto experience we have is two of our members have worked on EVIL ELECTRIC CARS.
Maybe that will be our theme?
Ooh, or a '75 Volvo 245.
I dunno. I will definitely follow Lemons, and if they had a race near here I'd go. The thing is, since the end of the Curse, the cheatiness has become both less funny and less entertaining. That just leads to epic newbkilling, which really sucks for the newb. Just sayin'.
/Have an 80 Cougar in the back yard that was aimed at Lemons, but there's no way of winning these days so I'll just enjoy the disco-roller on the street.
The curse is no more? What's up with that?
Just reread that last post of mine and I realized that it comes off like a sore loser wrote it. Totally not my intent. However, since that team ran to escape the curse I don't think there's been a car killed. (I could be wrong about that, I'm not the historian of the series.) There's been at least one claimed, sure, but the pressure to keep the cars cheap seems to have lessened.
Now, don't get me wrong. Lemons is still interesting, and it's definitely fun, but as a way to get into racing it's not really an option now. The Coog fits the Concours d'Ignorance better anyway.
The curse has not ended. It's still up to team vote. If a team gets more votes than "nobody deserves it," they get crushed.
I would love to, but alas, stuck in Canada, I am stuck without. What would it take to get the Iblewarod?
A map, and maybe a translator.
Only in something more improved than a Corvair. (Sorry, Jim.)
Since I live approximately nineteen hours from the nearest LeMons, and Canada has virtually zero beaters at $500, entering is not really an option for me. I would, however, like to join a team as a driver. I have zero wrenching skills but I can work duct tape and a mallet and steer my way out of a brown paper bag. Anybody need volunteers?
The idea of $500 race cars appeals to me but I will not participate in the 24 hours of Lemons series because I can't stomach the approach of the sanctioning body. I will not waste one dollar or one hour of my time in the presence of people who bend rules because they want to make the events more interesting by including 8-wheeled parade floats that just changed hands for close to $4,500 or custom show cars dressed as eastern European clunkers. I'll look into the alternative $500 series, but I am repulsed by people who think that excetions should be made and subsidized. They're nothing more than symptoms of a civilization in decline.
wow.
There's no bending of the rules– a reading of rules 1.1 and 2.1 (particularly the penultimate sentence) makes it obvious that the rules have a great deal of wiggle room built into them by clearly stated intent. Essentially, if something looks like it'll be hilarious for the organizers, participants, and spectators, it can [doesn't mean "will"] be allowed.
This particular "8-wheeled parade float" is the gapingly eccentric work of a deceased visionary who left it in a tantalizingly incomplete state. If it can be brought to a track, its mere presence will be a testament to backyard ingenuity (and, more important, it should be hilarious). If it didn't have all of those things going for it, there wouldn't be nearly as strong a case for making the exception. (I don't know anything about your "custom show car" example, so I won't address it.)
If you want to be so melodramatic about it, I'm of the opinion that the promulgation of increasingly rigid rules is a much surer symptom of a civilization in decline because such a practice means the people in charge no longer have to be sensible.
I'm not interested in performance art. A road racing series for people with limited means on an even playing field is a great idea. It is an idea that has yet to be realized.
What happens when the 8-wheeler wins the IOE while costing as much as the next 9 contenders and having been granted a free entry? We've lost the democratic principle of egality. Rule makers picking winners because of their own whimsy is nothing to celebrate.
It's all for "fun" and not serious.
Also, you're not supposed to "win". You're supposed to survive, and possibly just have a good time. Or try to anyways.
So yeah, Lemons is not right for you. People like me will be there, smiling, dressed like giant bugs and contributing to the end of civilization with 500 or so like-minded friends.
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If I was 30 years younger and 7 stone lighter, I'd definitely want to try a Lemons event. Especially since at that time I still had access to a pair of '66 International Travelalls with half a billion miles on them which would have made excellent racers. Dang, they were red, too.
I'd like to go watch a race, but the closest one up in Willows is in the middle of summer, and I can't take the heat like I used to.
I've attended two races as a spectator a couple of years ago. After the first race I bought a caged car that is not going to win on laps or contend for IOE, intending to fix a fuel delivery problem and then race the car, but then my potential team fell apart and otherwise got sidelined. I don't think 2011 will be any different from 2010, but perhaps I'll be on the track in 2012.
God I want to. I now live in SoCal, and I will be in a much better position to attend an event. Money isn't an issue, but time certainly is and I just haven't had a chance to actually think about getting something going, or joining up with one of the teams looking for teammates online.
Have done it twice and plan to do a lot more next year. Lots of options here in California!!
The moment somone organizes LeMons in Australia i'll be on it like a fat kid on a cupcake.
Hell, me and friends have considered *(if we had the time, money and commitment) starting it up over here
LeMons at Bathurst. Count me in.
My most enjoyable moment was returning to the track 6 months after this
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I am not self-loathing enough, sadly. In 2 years time, I will be ready.
The most I've done so far involved helping push that Corvair for two days, but I'd love to be involved for the New England race in a year or two.
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I know I'm not the only one here. I'm only passable at wrenching, but I'm an okay driver, so that has to count for something.
This December at Buttonwillow will be my 5th LeMons race. I wouldn't trade the experience for a lifetime of autocrossing. My favorite moment was my team's first race – at Buttonwillow in 2009. Achieving Least Horrible Yank Tank was a trip!