This weekend, the 24 Hours of LeMons rolls into its favorite Southern playground at Carolina Motorsports Park near Kershaw, South Carolina, for its annual “Southern Discomfort” spring race. The bribe tables tend to fill with actual moonshine and those crazy hill folk who’ve hoarded bizarre cars (and pieces of cars) for decades turn up with alarmingly competent automotive frankensteins. Early weather forecasts call for decent weather, which will be a welcome sight after the region has been soaked all week. The usual bevy of BMWs will show (nine of them: four E30s and five E36s) and the Class A race will probably be competitive as ever. However, the real treat is that Southern LeMoneers know how to do Class C right: British cars, late-model smugmobiles, power-sapping swaps, stately American luxury cars, and mosquito-shooing diesels. Follow the jump for the full rundown and check out the full unofficial entry list here.
CLASS C
Ordinarily, this preview would begin with a discussion of Class A and Overall win competitors, but this race will have a deep and entertaining bottom class (Class C), so that seems the natural beginning point. There’s a lot to discuss in C, so let’s start with some unique territory: six-cylinder, Class C BMW E30s. Yes,half of this race’s Ultimate Driving Machines should find their way into Class C. E30/6 is a well-known team in LeMons lore, having replaced their E30’s high-strung Bavarian straight six with Chrysler’s Leaning Tower of Power, the Slant-6, of similar inline cylinder arrangement (above). They’ve come close to winning Class C and should be an Index of Effluency contender, having made their Bimmer a steady mid-pack finisher. The Slant-6, oddly enough, tends to be one of the more reliable LeMons engines. Go figure. However, newcomers of No Business Racing are offering a different take on the American-six-cylinder E30. Theirs is registered on the entry list as an E30/Chevy Astro Van. It’s not quite as crazy as it originally sounds, but it’s plenty bonkers: The team have swapped in the 4.3-liter GM V6 (aka 75 percent of a Small-Block V8), but have “cleverly” dispensed with fuel injection, opting instead for the valvetrain and carb setup from a Mercruiser 4.3L. Naturally, this will be mated to a PowerGlide automatic transmission from a 1964 Chevy Nova that the team have set to manual operation. Glorious, isn’t it? If we must discuss actual potential class winners, Mock Grass Racing’s Kia Sephia should head that discussion. They finished P2 in class last fall and Korean beaters have performed well in LeMons. As usual, General Motors will represent strongly in Class C. Speed is Bliss and Rubbin’ is Racing both bring Pontiac Fieros. They’ll be joined by Collateral Damage’s 1986 Chevy Cavalier and Gotta Go Fast’s Geo Metro. For the Anglophile, the former Class C and Index of Effluency winner Austin Marina from Austin Powerless returns for more glory. The Marina seems bad enough to be completely outclassed in any other class, so I’d expect it’ll remain a C car. The B Keepers MGB-GT is likely the same Gormless Racing/Jubilee GT (above) that’s romped around the East Coast races for a few years. Consider both legitimate Class C cars. Some may remember that LeMons West Coast madman Spank prepared a 340,000-mile Toyota Prius for the most recent LeMons race at Sonoma Raceway. One of Spank’s drivers bought it from Spank’s used LeMons lot/paddock space and proceeded to drive it cross-country to its new home South Carolina. It will run as Chariots on Fire’s second entry alongside the team’s Mazda MX-3 painted like an Aston Martin GT car.
If you’re looking for a rolling small fortune in scrap iron, check out famed LeMons oddballs NSF Racing, who will run their chopped-top 1956 Ford Crown Victoria. With a column shifter and laissez faire drivers, the NSF boat’s pace was stately at its debut last fall. They’ll be joined by the Tunachuckers, who return to LeMons after a year’s absence. Their mid-1970s Ford LTD (above) might rival NSF’s for pure tonnage and should the two run in proximity for any length of time, they could cause a highly entertaining traffic jam. Also look for the 1972 Dodge Coronet of Team Comrade Coronautskis; the car has raced twice before in Houston but its new owners will debut it at CMP. Elsewhere in C, Idle Clatter’s diesel Mercedes 300 took home IOE honors in their debu. Diesel Mercs are built like tanks and perform on track like them, too, but they could potentially plod a path to Class C glory. They’ll be joined by Class C cohorts from this year’s race at Barber, the spectularly failing Retro Racing Volkswagen Beetle that started several laps but never made it all the way around without breaking. Because they never reached the timing loop on their tows in to the paddock, they never registered a single lap, so a single lap will be an infinity-percent improvement.
CLASS A/OVERALL
The outright favorite for the overall win will be RC Spiders (above, formerly known as Ziegel Scheißhaus), who typically drive fast and clean in their Mercedes 190E. They won at the season-opening race at Barber Motorsports Park, their third victory in less than a year. They’ve not yet won at CMP, but they finished P2 there last spring. The RC Spiders crew have shown the ability to run three-hour stints, which should let them run with only two stops during Saturday’s 8-1/2 hours. The mandatory quiet hour Sunday morning splits the day into two sessions of two and four hours, respectively, so their advantage will be somewhat lost with other teams also running only one in-race stop Sunday. CMP hosted two races last season with two different LeMons winners, each of which followed a very different design philosophy. Moldecarlo won the race last spring with their G-Body Chevy Monte Carlo. It was the first overall win for a GM product and the burly V8 plowed the big American bulk to the winner’s circle. The fall winner was Racing Nemo, whose nimble BMW E30 was the picture of consistency, running fast-but-not-the-fastest laps and taking an overall win by six laps.
Six-time LeMons winners Hong Norrth haven’t won since the fall CMP race in 2012, although they did take a ChumpCar victory last November in their Mazda MX-3 (above). Expect them to hang with the best of the field in that car while they also debut a 1985 Toyota Supra. It’s a big departure from the usual Hong Norrth philosophy of small, nimble cars, but if anyone can keep one of these brittle Toyotas together, I’d wager on a team that’s won six times. A fifth former winner will also appear at this race: Back to the Past will tow their Nissan 300ZX from Texas, hoping to capture their third win and their second of the year after winning the snow-shortened Eagles Canyon race in March. They’ve towed the car to Colorado and to Wisconsin in the past and they’re always competitive. Only once did their car fail to finish in the Top 10 and that was at the team’s 2011 debut race. They’ll have Team Toxic Waste tagging along, whose Pontiac Firebird may be the best GM F-Body team in the country.
LeMons regulars Keystone Kops head from their home base in Pennsylvania for Southern Discomfort. The popular Volvo squad have run in the series since 2008 and come painfully close to winning several times. The Volvo specialists will bring a turbocharged 244 (above) and a 242 with a Ford V8 under the hood. With a little luck, they just might come out on top. Speaking of the Blue Oval V8, Grim Reaper Racing have also come extremely close to winning with their SN-95 Ford Mustang. They’ve struggled with the Mustang’s quirks but still managed a half-dozen Top 10 finishes. Their sister team Radioactive Racing are seldom anywere near as good, but I’ve a feeling they might perform well at this race.
One more team has finished runners up and they might be my favorite of the bunch. Smokey Unit have gone and done what so many people have thought a winning solution for LeMons: Take a light chassis (Fiat 124, above), add an extremely fuel-efficient motor (Volkswagen TDI), and make it handle. In theory, it’s perfect, but it took several races of frustration before the chopped-top Fiat came in P2 at last fall’s race. It blew black smoke throughout the race, but its diesel-sipping nature means that the car is probably capable of fuel that will outlast a driver’s endurance. I’ll be interested to see what becomes of it. Hung South Racing are associated with Hong Norrth in some way, shape, or form and their Volkswagen Golf has two Top 10 finishes in as many races. The top-heavy field could make it hard to break into the Top 5, but they’ve shown some. Terminally Confused also deserve a mention not only because their Honda Civic cracked the Top 10, but also because a team member or two helped Speedycop & The Gang of Outlaws prepare their race-winning Honda Civic before the Gingerman race. Team SOB have been around LeMons since 2009 and are an interesting story. They started as Team South of the Border and eventually changed names to Team Skating On By. Under those team names, they nearly won with their Volkswagen Golf several times, scoring four Top 5 performances including two P2 finishes. Naturally, they decided that what they really needed was more power, so they slapped a turbocharger on the car and rechristened their squad Team Screaming on Boost. Naturally, their best finish since adding forced induction was P66 and it’s been all downhill since there. They return as Team SOB – Sick of Breaking, so we’ll see what the nomenclature change does, if anything.
Our handpicked longshot are an interesting team whose best finish actually came in their first race, a P6 three years ago at CMP. Wattree Renegades have since finished somewhere between P10 and P20 in every race save one, which was a 29th-place finish. Their Mazda Miata is anything but fast, but they always stick around long enough to make it interesting. I’m not sure they’ll have enough pace to win outright, but look for a solid result from the plucky little Miata. More longshots: Theoretical Racing (Ford Taurus), Junkyard Racing (BMW E30), B&W Racing (BMW E36), Irritable Dad Syndrome (Ford Thunderbird).
CLASS B
Class B, as ever, is difficult to foresee because the nature of at-the-track classing, but attrition usually factors into the middle-class battle (There’s a life lesson in there somewhere). If they end up in Class B, expect Howard J Turkstra Motorsports’ 1980s Toyotas (a Celica, above, and a Supra) to not only win the class, but to also be the best Toyota(s) in the field. Similarly, former class winners Questie’s Racing Team run a very good Ford Escort GT. They quietly racked up Top 10 finishes in each of their three races last year (plus a ChumpCar Top 10 to boot), so even if they’re in Class A, they could be a quality longshot bet. The Team Scrap Iron Escort is somehow peripherally related and so should be competitive wherever they’re classed. At Gingerman two weekends ago, the mid-engined, V6 Geo Metro of Charnal House ran away with the Class B win. Earlier this year, Knoxvegas Lowballers’ own V6 Geo Metro won Class C and Index of Effluency while the team’s Ford Contour SVT (with the same-ish engine) finished P2 in Class B. Both cars should be in the Class B hunt and expect their wailing V6s to play a part in any success they find.
The PBR Subaru Outback (above) is another former Class C winner that should hang around in Class B. They’re not fast and Subarus generally aren’t reliable, but stranger things have happened in LeMons. Junk Male’s old Subaru Legacy should also have a fair chance in Class B. If you like your B competitors strapped into heavy American iron, then keep tabs on Team Tortoise via live timing. The Ford Crown Victoria team hasn’t run LeMons since 2011, but their last three races were all Top 10 finishes. If they wind up in Class B, consider them a solid entrant. On the big GM side, Mullet Racing’s Chevy Camaro regularly finishes in the Top 5 in class while Midlife Crisis’ Chevy Monza could be a good Class B sleeper. Final Gear’s Pontiac Grand Prix GTP has all of the speed to be competitive, but they struggle to keep all of the pieces of the car intact.
Just as Team SOB headed the wrong direction in the last year or two, Fast Al’s Race Team have similarly gone the same way in their Volvo 740 (above). They were at one time a Top 10 team on the East Coast, but since I pointed that out in a race preview last year, they’ve had nothing but problems. They’ll hope for better breaks this time around. [Photos: Murilee Martin]
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