We inspected the 76 entrants at the ‘Shine Country Classic 24 Hours of LeMons, held at Barber Motorsports Part near Birmingham, too late on Friday night to do our usual same-day coverage, so we’re combining the traditional car-inspection post with the equally traditional first-race-session update. With so many outstanding racing machines having their debuts this weekend, we’re not sure where to start. Might as well get the story of the Class A struggle out of the way first, eh?
Road Warrior Racing, who have won several LeMons races with their Mad Max-ized BMW E30 3-series, ended Saturday’s race session with a sweatily narrow lead in Class A.
Just seconds behind the Road Warriors, we have the only GM F-Body to do very well in LeMons racing: the Save the Ta-Tas 1984 Chevrolet Camaro. This Midwest-based team has a couple of LeMons wins with this car.
An E30-versus-third-gen-Camaro race is fine if you’re into that sort of thing, but the Class B battle offers a more interesting story for the true LeMons aficionado. The three-car Knoxvegas Lowballers team ended Saturday with a Class B lead… and they brought a pair of 1970s-style custom vans that would have made Greg of Akron proud.
This “van” is a Geo Metro with Ford Duratec V6 mounted in the rear, and it can be very quick when everything is working correctly. This car raced a year ago as The Snowman’s Kenworth from Smokey and the Bandit, then it became the Happy Toys truck from Maximum Overdrive, and now it’s half of the three-Duratec Double Trouble racing van team.
Yes, we said three Duratecs, because the Lowballers’ 2000 Mazda MPV minivan has one Duratec V6 driving the front wheels, and another one driving the rear wheels. That’s twelve cylinders, six liters, all-wheel-drive, and well over 400 horsepower!
It gets better, though; both of the MPV’s engines are hooked up to 5-speed manual transmissions, operated via an incredibly complex linkage mechanism and controlled by this crazy-looking shifter.
The installation is well-engineered and looks great, but the car spent Saturday bedeviled by a cascade of nickel-and-dime teething problems and has yet to show us what happens when all those horses are applied to the tires. Right now, the Lowballers’ MPV is in 71st place out of 76 entries, with just 31 laps completed.
That performance is better than what the MPV’s Geo Metro twin accomplished today. When the water-pump drive belt failed early in the morning, the car did five laps with no cooling-water circulation and cooked the engine. The team found a replacement in an ’04 Taurus in a Birmingham wrecking yard, but (as you can see in this photo), engine replacement is a non-trivial task with this car. Right now the Lowballers’ Metro is in P74, with seven total laps, but we expect those numbers to improve on Sunday.
Any team that makes custom lemon-shaped van bubble windows is a bunch of winners in our book, regardless of how well those vans do on the race track.
Oh yeah, Class B. In addition to the three Duratec V6 engines in the Double Trouble vans, the Knoxvegas Lowballers also have this Duratec-powered Ford Contour SVT (you Europeans knew this car as the Ford Mondeo ST200), and by some miracle this car has refrained from exploding (the way it has done in all its previous races) and now leads Class B by a single lap.
The Generar Ree Datsun 280ZX, Hitachi SU carburetors and all, has been just about as unreliable as the Knoxvegas Lowballers’ Contour in the past, but is now locked in a gripping Class B war with its crypto-British Ford rival.
The BRIBED stencil for the race celebrates the long tradition of informal/unregulated spirits distillation in this area.
In Class C… well, just look at the leader. This is the 1965 Pontiac XP-833 Banshee of Morrow’s Racing, and it ended Saturday’s race session with a mighty 33-lap lead (that’s close to 90 minutes at Class C speeds) over its nearest rival.
We are forced to admit that this car didn’t start life as a genuine XP-833. It’s a replica, built on one of the several GM cars inspired by the design of the Banshee: the Opel GT.
Under the hood, the Morrow’s Racing Banshee has the correct engine, which is the Pontiac overhead-cam six-cylinder. Pontiac developed this engine from the Chevrolet 230- and 250-cubic-inch sixes, under the supervision of John DeLorean (yes, that John DeLorean), and installed it in Firebirds, Le Manses, and Tempests for the 1966 through 1969 model years.
Of course, the team brought a white-powder-coated John Z and a posse of equally powdery DEA agents to bust him.
The thing about Class C is that no lead is safe. If the first Pontiac OHC-Six in LeMons history shoots all its connecting rods through the car’s custom-made fiberglass hood early on Sunday, the Three Pedal Mafia 1983 Datsun 720 pickup might make up those 33 laps (eventually).
The Three Pedal Mafiosi have themed their truck and team according to the content of the novel that gave me my pen name. That’s all I’m going to say on the subject here.
Waaaay back in Class C, we’ve got the Sputnik Racing 1971 Plymouth Fury, which is too big to fail.
Beating the Sputnik Fury by 36 laps is the too-small-to-fail Triumph Spitfire of British Invasion Racing. This is only the second Spitfire to compete in our series.
The Idle Clatter “Toyota Hilux” (actually a Mercedes-Benz 300D with major body modifications) might manage to catch the Three Pedal Mafia truck, since just two laps separate the pair of red pickups.
The biggest star of the race has logged a mere 47 laps, but nobody cares. NSF Racing, a Florida-based team with a LeMons rap sheet too long to list here, dredged this 1959 Studebaker Silver Hawk out of the fetid swamp in which it had mouldered for 31 years, made it run, caged it, and brought it to the track.
It’s a little rusty, but it looks stunning on the race track.
The car had so many rats living in it prior to being rescued by NSF that even the radio was packed with rat poop.
The fuel system is having some rust and varnish issues, so the NSF Studebaker needs to pit every few laps to unclog the fuel filter and carburetor. Here’s what came out of a fuel filter after about 15 minutes of racing.
There’s no telling what will happen on Sunday, so be sure to check in here for updates!