Movie- and television-car replicas are a favorite subcategory of cars in the 24 Hours of LeMons and the series has seen some doozies (The Homer springs to mind as the best to date, possibly ever). But LeMons legend Jeff Bloch, known around the Interwebs as Speedycop, has built a picture-perfect replica of Jurassic Park‘s automated tour-guide Ford explorers. It lacks the outright head-scratching qualities of the Upside-Down Camaro and The Spirits of LeMons, but it’s still a head-turner. And yeah, Knoxvegas Lowballers executed a terrific Jurassic Park parody theme on their Ford V6-powered Geo Metro last year, but Bloch replicated the film cars down to the tiniest details on his usual shoestring budget. The Explorer will race at LeMons There Goes the Neighborhood at New Jersey Motorsports Park, which we previewed here Wednesday.


Speedycop purchased the 1997 Explorer on eBay from Grassroots Motorsports Magazine, who had bought some time ago and put a rollcage in it, ostensibly to be raced in LeMons. That never came to fruition, so Speedy swooped in and bought it, then towed it home after racing a Chrysler Sebring at Sebring in LeMons.

Those SUV aficionados will know that the 1997 Explorer is a different generation of the truck than the ’93 Explorers featured in the film, but the difference is most pronounced with the front fenders and fascia. Speedycop obtained the necessary bits from two early Explorers to “bolt on.”

Unfortunately, the bodywork doesn’t actually “bolt on,” meaning that some suitably LeMons-grade work went into making a go of it. Custom brackets abound under the Explorer’s skin, but it really looks the part from the outside.

As the race in Sebring was only a month ago, work was on a tight timeline, but the truck got done with the help of Bloch’s trusty Gang of Outlaws. The correct early Explorer wheels were sourced and the paint was finished earlier this week in Speedycop’s Maryland driveway. As this is being written Friday morning, the final touches like the roof-mounted light bar are being added to roll through LeMons tech inspections.

How will it perform? Trucks have performed reasonably well in past LeMons races with most being built to take the abuse of being work vehicles. However, who can really say? The real work likely has gone into the paint and appearance, which is really what matters most anyway.
[Photos: Jeff Bloch/Speedycop]