It’s generally no surprise that imported cars tend to make up the bulk of the field at 24 Hours of LeMons races because most Japanese and even some German cars depreciate into $500 territory. If you’re somehow unfamiliar with irreverent low-dollar endurance racing series, the basic premise is: Bring a $500 car to go endurance racing for 14 to 24 hours over two days. The hooptier the better, so long as it meets fairly stringent (and budget-exempt) safety requirements. If you imagine most races to be made up of beater Hondas and long-depreciated BMWs, you’d be right.
But race organizers and racers get giddy when big American iron rolls onto the racetrack. and what better venue is there than Michigan’s Gingerman Raceway—almost equidistant between the Motor City and Chicago—to display the road racing (in)capabilities of two forgettable cheap Mopar personal luxury barges and surprisingly competent piece of General Motors machinery? At Gingerman last fall, these three V8 machines reanimated and stole the show from whatever piece of precision German engineering won, because, truly, winning a LeMons race is overrated and style matters. Follow the jump for details on these three behemoths, at least two of which should be returning to Gingerman in just over 10 days, when this correspondent heads up there to cover the race.


Can You Dig It?—a team that includes several Detroit engineers who at one time raced a turbocharged Ford Focus—spent most of a year scouring the Internet for a rust-free 1971 or 1972 Pontiac Grand Prix. Finding a rust-free anything in Michigan is no small feat, but Jeremy Butts of the team wanted one from those specific years because “They are really goofy-looking” with the John DeLorean-penned and Duesenberg-inspired three-prong nose, round headlights, and a boat tail.
Butts eventually found a clean car that a desperate CraigsList trader had scored for a broken fourth-generation Trans Am under the dim hope for “any running car.” That optimistic trader posted it for sale after a single white-knuckeld drive, during which he  discovered the limitations of the Grand Prix’s one working brake caliper, bias-ply tires with a 1980 manufacturing date, sieve-like power-steering system, and steering rack with a half-turn of slop in it.

The classifieds trader’s loss was Butts’ gain. The ‘72 was originally an SJ-trim car, though the Pontiac 455 had been replaced at some point with a 400 and a two-barrel carburetor. Starting that model year, all Grand Prixs were sold with a three-speed Turbo Hydra-matic transmission and the SJ trim meant it came with a 12-Bolt limited slip differential, although the rear end has seen better days.
The busted rear air suspension had at some point been replaced with aftermarket springs that lowered the car, so the front was given similar treatment with replacements. The team picked up a $15 Trans Am front sway bar because they’d been told it was a direct fit. It was not at all direct fit, but a few hours of fabrication made it work in true LeMons fashion.

Can You Dig It? couldn’t race it as it appeared, surely, so they bolted on a pair of mixing bowls to make “headlights,” built a custom grille, and added foil-tape stripes to approximate Youngblood Priest’s ‘71 Cadillac Eldorado from the blaxploitation film Super Fly, which came out the same year their Pontiac was built.
In theory, this car should have been fast and—unlike many a lot of LeMons cars—it met those expectations. The car turned a 1:43 lap at Gingerman Raceway, which is only four seconds off the race’s fastest lap (clocked by a hooked-up third-generation Chevy Camaro).

The Grand Prix suspension was soft enough that drivers scarcely felt any of the racing surface’s rough spots, but the 400 struggled all weekend with fuel issues. When it ran, it burned 15 gallons of fuel in about 40 minutes, an absurd number and possibly the highest fuel burn ever tracked in the series (though Butts mentioned it was running rich). However, the car experienced intermittent stumbling, which they discovered in the race’s final few minutes was due to a line-clogged fuel pump at the engine. With that sorted, this should become a supremely fun car to watch in the series in 2015.

As most Hooniverse readers are surely aware, the muscle-car era faded quickly after the 1973 oil crisis and the decade that followed has recently come to be known as the “Malaise Era,” a time when fuel mileage concerns and crude smog controls neutered automotive performance. The resulting comfort-first American coupes were long considered unmitigated disasters and brand orphans, but since this is the 24 Hours of LeMons, orphans are roundly celebrated.
And what could be more lemony than this pair of Malaise Mopars like a 1975 Chrysler Cordoba and a 1981 Dodge Mirada?

Zero Budget Racing—a team who have run such memorable cars as an Isuzu I-Mark Diesel—race this first-year Cordoba, whose original owner four decades ago ticked the box for the optional Chrysler 360 under the hood. That small-block V8 is now fed by a reconditioned two-barrel Edelbrock carburetor. The smog-choked V8 put out 180 horsepower when new, but this tired Cordoba surely makes considerably fewer ponies to the wheels and what power it makes is handicapped by the granny-geared Torqueflite transmission.
The team purchased the Cordoba for $800 from an Ohio Buy Here Pay Here lot in running condition from the previous owner, who was happy to see the Cordoba would continue driving in any capacity.

Naturally, the performance of a car like this—forever associated with Ricardo Montalban and soft “Corinthian leather” (whatever the hell that is)—has little to do with horsepower figures. This was an ultimate personal luxury coupe with a hovercraft-smooth ride, fine interior appointments, and decadent exterior styling that included a Landau top.
Of course, by the time you pull a car like this out of the car lot forty years after its construction, all of those plush appointments are gone. The Landau has completely crumbled, the interior left a lingering funk, and the polished ride translates to racetrack cornering dynamics governed by maritime law.

Nevertheless, the 360 ran like a top all weekend and the team were plagued instead with brake problems, which is not terribly surprising given that they run a stock brake setup on the two-ton middle finger to gas shortages. A stuck caliper ended one brake pad’s life in just three laps and, at its best, a set of pads would last three or four hours before the already-squishy pedal would plummet to the floor.

The Cordoba will be back in 2015, the team assured me at the track, with improved brakes to run alongside the team’s other fantastic cars: a 36-horsepower Chevrolet Chevette Diesel to which the team is adding homemade turbocharging and That Damn K-Car.

Like both prior teams mentioned, Team Sheen are veteran 24 Hours of LeMons racers, though they have nearly won a couple of races in a third-generation Acura Integra. That’s all well and good, sure, but they recently added to their race stable one of the strangest-looking Mopars of the Malaise Era: a 1981 Dodge Mirada. The car had been the project of a younger owner who simply ran out of time to work on it. He posted it on CraigsList for $900, a best offer, or a sweet snowboard. (Team Sheen paid cash for it.)
Depending on the angle at which you look at it, the Mirada can look stunningly modern(-ish) or like a boxy relic, but Team Sheen spared no amount of time improving its looks. After all, this car was definitive of the automotive era when looks mattered and, well, maybe engineering will catch up to EPA regulation eventually.

The car got a heavy dose of bondo and a deep maroon paint job with color-matching on the wheels (which wore old 15-inch race tires from the team’s Integra). They spent so much time on the appearance, actually, that the car was leaking seven different automotive fluids and sat without a rollcage just three days before the race’s technical inspection.
But it looked great doing so.
In the week leading up to the race, Team Sheen enlisted the help of four different local (and not-so-local) teams to plug the leaks, build a rollcage, make it run, and reinstall the full interior. It came together in three full-day thrashes, including last-second preparations up until the moment it rolled into technical inspection.

Like the Cordoba, the three-speed TorqueFlite transmission’s gearing isn’t really suited for road racing, nor really is the sad output of its Chrysler 318, which made 130 horsepower when new. Even with an Edelbrock four-barrel carb on it, the 318 couldn’t overcome its granny gearing and the transmission’s constant insistence on jumping to third gear (a 1:1 overdrive) and staying there. Straightaway performance was less-than-inspiring and the massive body roll actually ground one of the side-exit exhaust pipes down throughout the race.

Aside from nuking the rear brakes, though, the Mirada ran almost flawlessly, finishing second in Class C, the slowest class (A Volkswagen Type III Squareback ran almost 25 more laps than the Mirada). The improbable finish earned them the Index of Effluency trophy, the highest honor in LeMons for the team that does the best with the worst equipment.
Like the other two behemoths, the Mirada will return in 2015 with bigger brakes and all of the normal creature comforts of a fine personal luxury coupe.


We already heard from at least one more team at the race that they are planning on building a mid-’70s Mopar for 2015, so expect some more words on that once it rolls around. Until then, this trio should be ripping up the Midwest’s LeMons circuit and leaning heavily on the series’ 4,200-pound weight limit.
[All photos 2015 Hooniverse/Eric Rood]