There’s some kind of big race happening in France this coming weekend, but real endurance connoisseurs know that the real action this weekend is in Deer Trail, Colorado, for the 24 Hours of LeMons‘ B.F.E. GP at High Plains Raceway. Yes, beautiful High Plains is primed for a weekend of pot jokes, drone hunting, and penalties doled out by the one and only Judge Phil at his “home” race well out in the middle of nowhere.
How good will this race be? Of the 49 cars registered, the General Hooptiness Index (GHI) of them is showing at an unbelievable 74.1! This is unbelievable, of course, because I just made that number up. And GHI. I made that up, too. So much for credibility.
Anyway, follow the jump for more literary headdesk than you can possibly handle!
74.1!


Rather than give you a full rundown of the classes in which I’d expect the 49 cars on the entry list (unofficially found here) to compete, I have a better (or possibly much, much worse) idea: Group the field up into semi-logical subgroups with little to no actual meaning.
Naturally, the perfect way to describe cars racing in meangingless groupings is to borrow heavily from Buzzfeed, in this case an “article” that is simply “51 of the Most Beautiful Sentences in Literature.”
Because simplifying great works of human achievement into one plucked sentence isn’t demeaning enough, all car descriptions for the entire field will bastardizations from the above-mentioned Buzzfeed article, replacing some part of the quotes in a way that makes some (or no) sense relevant to the LeMons car in question.
Got all that? Here are the races within races within races.
 

EFFLUENCE BATTLE ROYALE

This is really a four-way battle of effluence between a pair of “Renaults” and a pair of “AMCs,” and who knows how the “winners” will be defined. Actually, the mere fact that these four cars exist at all means we’re all winners. Let’s have pizza trophies!
#69 Sordik Racing (Renault Le Car with mid-mounted Infiniti J30 VQ30 V6, above) – “At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved by a great flood into something hooptie and scary.” Willa Cather, My Antonia
#72 Rocket Surgery Racing (Renault 4CV with Volkwagen Fox engine) – “In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old French cars into unrecognizable racecars.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
#666 Speed Holes Wrenching (Rambler Marlin with Chevy 454) – “The engine wasn’t doing a thing I could see, except flailing on the frame rail, barely holding itself together.” J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew
#131 Down and Out Race Team (AMC Pacer) – “I took a deep breath and listened to the old tick of the timebomb of an engine; I am, I am, I am scattered everywhere.” Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
 

MOPAR OR NO CAR

Well, there’s one Mopar in the whole field and it’s a 1964 Dart. I’d call this an easy win, but there’s a reasonable chance Escape Velocity will somehow lose this race.
#13 Escape Velocity Racing (Dodge Dart, above) – “Beauty is an enormous, unmerited Dart driven randomly, stupidly.” Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
 

METRO-SWIFT GRUDGE MATCH

Blue Falcon Racing is, I believe, a new car and hopefully a stock three-cylinder Metro at that. They’ll be racing Elephorce, who have have turbocharged a Metro. I’ll wager on the stock Metro in that fight.
#128 Elephorce (Suzuki Swift, above) – “Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the boost of all the air pressure I’m overusing.” Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
#4 Blue Falcon Racing (Geo Metro) – “Isn’t it pretty to think slow?” Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
 

AUTOMOTIVE PUNCHLINE PLAQUE

A Fiero, a Camry, a Pinto, and an Accent crash into a bar. The bartender is pinned under a bunch of flaming wreckage.
I’m bad at jokes.
#27 The Farmers (Hyundai Accent, above) – “A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it. Just kidding, this nightmare is real.” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
#90 Salty Thunder Racing (Pontiac Fiero) – “He stepped down, trying to look at her as if she was the…Oh, damn. We’re on fire again.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
#47 Wine O Racing Team (Toyota Camry Solara) – “‘Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be running every minute of every hour of this race.’” Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
#111 Inglorious Bastards (Ford Pinto) – “The words from your lips rewrite the history of cursing.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
 

BATTLE FOR FOURTH BEST COMPACT CAR

In the 1980s, the Japanese were building compact cars light years ahead of their American counterparts. By the 1990s, that distance had shrunk to a few thousand miles and so these two cars will decide which American compact of the era was least crappy. Advantage: Geezer Escort Service, because their car was really a Mazda platform.
#157 Geezer Escort Service (Ford Escort, above) – “As Estha changed the half-shafts again he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these: a) Anything can happen to anyone and b) It is best to be prepared.” Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
#144 Factory 144 (Chevy Cavalier) – “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same: Crushed to a speck by this incomparable chunk of s***.” Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
 
 

WINNING THE DEPRECIATION WARS CUP

Yurpean cars lose lots of value. Then, they end up in LeMons and all is right with the world.
#169 Mustache Ride (Volvo 240, above) – “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio than are broken on this Swedish car, but not many more.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet
#140 OMG Racing (Mercedes S500) – “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be crushed by this massive tribute to Teutonic luxury.” W.H. Auden, “The More Loving One”
#928 Dirt Poor-sche Racing (Porsche 928) – “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be mediocre, maybe a bit worse.” John Steinbeck, East of Eden
#7 Extreme Danger Zone Racing (Saab 9000) – “And in that moment, I swear we were infinitely screwed.” Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
#211 Nader Safety Administration (BMW 2002) – “America, I’ve given you Bavarian sportiness and now I’m nothing.” Allen Ginsburg, “America”
 

TOYOTA TROPHY

This is a whole bunch of Toyota Corollas and MR2s and one racecar where the twain have met and been welded together.
#8 MaRtini2 (Toyota MR2, sportbike engine, above) – “How wild it was, to let it race.” Cheryl Strayed, “Wild”
#15 Pit Stain (Toyota Corolla) – “It might be that to surrender to hooptieness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.” W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
#98 Luchadores (Toyota Corolla) – “There is a car in which we are all each other’s consequences.” Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things
#32 Volatile RAM Racing (Toyota FX32) – “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at building strange racecars.” Ann Frank, The Diary of Ann Frank
#44 Stick Figure Racing (Toyota MR2) – “At the still point, there the car is on jack stands.” T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”
#31 Rod Throwin’ Fools (Toyota MR2) – “Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a car, and its laughter was a question that had to spend his whole life answering.” Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
#71 Dropped Packet Racing A (Toyota MR2) – “Let the wild rumpus bumpstart!” Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
#9 Victorious Secret (Toyota MR2) – “The pieces I am, she gathers them and gave them back to me in all the right order, albeit with pieces more and smaller.” Toni Morrison, Beloved
 

PRELUDE CHALLENGE

No Prelude has ever won in LeMons, though the Car Wars Prelude finished second last year. The Prelude is a car that, on paper, should be great in LeMons, but Prelude teams often find themselves with long interludes between racing to fix their hoopties. Still, it’s rare for more than one or two in a given field and rather bizarre to see four of them in a 49-car field.
#99 Planeteer Racing (Honda Prelude, above) – “He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild, stray Honda connecting rods when they ejected from the engine block.” James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
#17 Cookie Bitch (Honda Prelude) – “Do I dare / Disturb the LeMons Supreme Court?” T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
#36 IGOTTAP (Honda Prelude) – “She was lost in her longing to finish a race.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
#57 Car Wars – Return of the Junkers (Honda Prelude) – “She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that common sense which we assume like a garment with which to make sound life decisions.” Kate Chopin, “The Awakening”
 

CLASS A SNOOZEFEST

Alright, maybe this is exciting to some. This may actually be a good race. Team Copyright Laws became the first Audi team to win a LeMons race at High Plains last year and they’ll be hard pressed to defend against Back to the Past, who are four-time winners with a whole slew of Top 10 finishes. Team Sheen and the Lebowski Volvo both are towing out from the Midwest and stand an excellent chance of winning.
About half the rest of these Class A cars have Top 10 finishes and could potentially win. Also, Pyongyang Globetrotters is the kind of theme to which all BMW E30 teams should aspire.
#21 Weapons of Grass Destruction (Volkswagen Golf, above) – “We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing new to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered.” Tom Stoppard, Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Not altered)
#183 MadagasCAR (Mazda RX-7) – “Only connect(ing) rods fail.” E.M. Forster, Howard’s End
#323 Snot Rocket (Ford Mustang) – “The half life of Ford V8s is about seven minutes.” Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose her
#41 Lederhosen of Fire (Audi Coupe?) – “I celebrate myself, and singe myself.” Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
#501 Dropped Packet Racing B (Acura Integra) – “There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights. The check-engine light.” Bram Stoker, Dracula
#11 Fay Myers M/C World (Acura Integra) – “You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live for 14.5 hours, which might as well be forever.” Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
#511 Inglorious Bastards (Ford Thunderbird) – “Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet. Yet.” L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
#30 BMWed to the Future (BMW E28) – “I could hear the rattling noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the track went cold.” Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”
#198 GTI (BMW E30) – “I would always rather be grime-caked than dignified.” Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
#18 Blew Bayou (BMW E30) – “Stay gold, Ponyboy.” S.E. Hinton, The Outsides

#212 Pyongyang Globetrotters (BMW E30, above) – “I have spread my dreams under your wheels; / Tread softly because those tires are pretty much corded.” W.B. Yeats, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
#972 Intrinsically Unsafe (Mazda Miata) – “It frightened him to think what must have gone into the making of this Miata.” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
#156 MX787b Not (Mazda RX-7) – “For apex seals are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.” Langston Hughes, The Big Sea
#5 Jetti Knight (Volkswagen Jetta) – “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. Ugly, however, endures.” John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
#141 Team Copyright Laws (Audi 90) – “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the paddock.” F. Scott Fitzgerals, The Great Gatsby
#181 Team Sheen (Acura Integra) – “Journeys end in Total Domination.” William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
#186 Little Lebowski Urban Achievers (Volvo 245) – “And the Volvo is rust and Star Specs.” Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
#880 Back to the Past (Nissan 300ZX) – “Everything was broken and nothing worked.” Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
 
You can follow the race via live timing on Specialty Timing’s website or on the Race Monitor app for smartphones and devices.

Some mildly important information
Friday inspection time (MT)	1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Saturday session (MT)	10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
Sunday session (MT)	9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
LeMons Lap Record	2:13.999 – Dirt Poor-sche Racing (Porsche 928)
Overall winners	2010  – Ghetto Motorsports (Mazda RX-7) 2011 – Ghetto Motorsports (Mazda RX-7) 2012 – Ghetto Motorsports (Mazda RX-7) 2013 – Raized Crazy (BMW E30)                              2014 – Team Copyright Laws (Audi 90)
Class B winners	2010 – Owdee (Audi 90) 2011 – Plan B Racing (Mazda 626) 2012 – Colorado Cone Killers (BMW E28) 2013 – Volatile RAM 2 (Toyota FX16/MR2) 2014 – Car Wars Return of the Junkers (Honda Prelude)
Class C winners	2010 – Little Buckaroo (Volkswagen Baja Bug) 2011 – Time Travelers of Doom (Pontiac Fiero) 2012 – Pit Road Pro (Hyundai Accent) 2013 – Rocketsurgery Racing (Checker Marathon) 2014 – Wine O Racing Team (Toyota Camry Solara)
Index of Effluency winners	2010 – Rocket Surgery Racing (Renault 4CV) 2011 – NASA (Ford LTD Country Squire) 2012 – Speedycop & The Gang of Outlaws (AMC Pacer) 2013 – Rocketsurgery Racing (Checker Marathon) 2014 – Volatile RAM 2 (Toyota MR2/Corolla)

 
[Photos: Murilee Martin]