The 24 Hours of LeMons have been visiting the home of SLABs since 2008. Like Carolina Motorsports Park last week, MSR Houston has been a staple of the annual LeMons calendar. This weekend’s “Texas Tippin’” race is the 14th visit there for LeMons and the first of two this year. Fun fact: This author will be among the guest judges along with Houstonian auto journalist Sajeev Mehta. Keep your eyes peeled on the LeMons Facebook page for updates. Here’s what you can expect from this weekend’s race in Houston.


Here’s the unofficial entry list, which includes four teams with multiple cars. We’ll give a few cars the spotlight and in honor of the big holiday at the month’s end, we’ll include some special inspirational quotes. That holiday is, of course, Towel Day on May 25th. Yes, the celebration of quirky SciFi humorist and humanist Douglas Adams means you should remember your towel wherever you go. So enjoy a few of that frood’s quips and quotes from his writings paired with several effluent teams.
#0 Despicable Racing (Volkswagen Transporter) – “Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
#401 Team Lowball (AMC Gremlin) – “It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression ‘As pretty as an airport.’”
#911 Cheap Saloon Racing (Buick Century) – “…a very similar phrase was invented to account for the sudden transition of wood, metal, plastic and concrete into an explosive condition, which was ‘nonlinear, catastrophic structural exasperation,’ or to put it another way–as a junior cabinet minister did on television the following night in a phrase which was to haunt the rest of his career–the check-in desk had just got ‘fundamentally fed up with being where it was.’”

#52 Braking Wind Racing (Porsche 914/Subaru EJ25) – “It was a battered yellow Citroën 2CV which had had one careful owner but also three suicidally reckless ones.”
#84 Le Money Maker (1980 Mercedes 500SLC) – “…he had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his ‘Zen’ method of navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it.”
#98 Team Radicus (Oldsmobile Ninety Eight) – “Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted like it.”

#539 Hungry Pillagerz (Buick LeSabre) – “The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.”
#164 ORCA Racing (Cadillac CTS) – “We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”
#94 Fruit Basket (Dodge Shadow) – “‘So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly, then?’ I asked.
He blinked at me as if I were stupid.
‘Well what do you think you do?’ he said. ‘You die of course. That’s what deadly means.’”
#13 Escape Velocity Racing (Dodge Dart) – “‘Space,’ it says, ‘is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.’”

#78 Ratsun Racing (Datsun B210ZX) – “Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?”
#100 Cowabunghole (Geo Storm) – “What a depressingly stupid machine.”
Tetanus Racing (4 cars) – “The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.”
The Resistance (2 cars) – “The chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied.”

In a non-snarky way, we should mentioned that the Tetanus Racing Neon and the #66 Shelia and the Sheikhs Ford Mustang have been racing LeMons at MSR since 2008. Pretty amazing stuff.
Who’s gonna win this thing? This race is probably more open than others. The #555 Car-B-Q Nissan 300ZX and the #36 Comickazies have each won a race before. However, Ginger Racing has started to find their cars in the Top 10. With four cars at this race, they might come loaded for red-headed bear. Or they might step on their own dongs. Either/or.
You can follow along with the race on Race Monitor’s app or on SpecialtyTiming.com. Check Roadkill.com for more coverage next week after the race is over. Here’s some semi-relevant information.

[Photos: Murilee Martin]