This weekend’s 24 Hours of LeMons South Fall event is the 100th race in the history of the series, and we celebrated by gathering one of the greatest collection of old, weird alleged race cars ever seen… and taking over a quiet South Carolina town and parading all these hoopties right down Main Street. Let’s admire some of the machinery that the stunned populace of Camden encountered in their downtown.
Before we clanked into Camden, however, we did the tech inspections back at one of our all-time favorite tracks, Carolina Motorsports Park. There, we saw some great things; for example, the Homer Sexuals, the Malibu-driving team with a giant Homer Simpson head on their car, picked up this ’73 Plymouth Cricket after your LeMons correspondent made its existence known to the LeMons community.
Thanks to Chrysler’s ownership of the Rootes Group, Americans could buy a rebadged Hillman Avenger in the same showrooms as the Valiant, Satellite, and Fury. This Cricket, which sat in a field for a decade or three, is for sale, cheap, to anyone who promises to cage it and race it.
Best of all, it has a Warshawsky brand (aka JC Whitney) FM tuner that feeds into what appears to be a Chevy Corvair AM radio.
The geeked-out engineers of the Cessna-wing-equipped Our Lady of Perpetual Downforce Civic decided that what they really needed for this race was a gigantic geodesic dome for their cars, built out of scrap metal and covered with ex-billboard plastic purchased from BillboardTarps.com.’
So, that’s exactly what they did!
The Ford Duratec V6-powered Geo Metro of the Knoxvegas Lowballers is back for another shot at racing glory (they’ve suffered spectacular mechanical failures at both previous races). The car looks good.
Its Contour SVT engine looks even better, with this snazzy clear cover.
Unfortunately for the Lowballers, the steely-eyed tech inspectors pointed to the part of the LeMons rulebook that mandates some sort of metal engine cover. No problem! The team scavenged up a spare hood from a Mercedes-Benz team, did a little metal-trimming, and are now LeMons-legal.
At the Capitol Offense race earlier this year, the Dr. Feelgood Dodge Shadow team won the Judges’ Choice trophy for their (not so successful) J-B Weld head gasket repair. For this race, they’ve turned their Mopar into a sort of hallucinatory locomotive. These guys get it!
The last time we were at CMP, the Fairlylame ’64 Ford Fairlane lost the Class of ’64 trophy (created for that race) to the Escape Velocity Racing ’64 Dodge Dart. They’re back to try again, and they claim to have solved the chronic overheating problems in their ancient 289 engine.
We of the LeMons Supreme Court often get bored by BMW E30 3-series racers, since we see so many of the things. This race, however, we’ve got the Chrysler Slant-Six-powered E30 and this El Camino-ized E30…
…which boasts a patriotic red-white-and-blue GM 4.3 liter V6 engine and a two-speed Powerglide automatic transmission. As we often say in LeMons racing, this car is going to dominate!
Legends of LeMons NSF Racing has brought their supremely terrible ’83 Mitsubishi Cordia Turbo back for another shot at Class C glory.
However, nobody was paying much attention to that NSF car, because they also brought this: a 1956 Ford Crown Victoria, which received a convertible conversion and the application of what must have been a 55-gallon drum of Bondo.
272 cubic inches of vintage Y-block power.
Three-on-the-tree manual transmission, of course.
But that’s nowhere near the end of the surprises from NSF Racing this time. How about a gigantic 1972 Plymouth Fury III coupe, complete with very tired 360-cubic-inch engine?
Admittedly, the NSF Fury is a bit rusty, thanks to 40 years of swampy Florida weather.
Like the ’56 Ford, the Fury has four-wheel drum brakes. According to NSF, disc brakes are as overrated as floor-shift manual transmissions.
The Austin Powerless 1975 Austin Marina, winner of the Index of Effluency at the Washington DC race, is in the house, and it’ll be battling the three NSF entries for Class C bragging rights.
When afternoon rolled around, everybody drove the 20 miles from CMP to Camden, and that’s when we rolled the parade of all 117 cars to the combined street party (complete with live music) and BS Inspection.
LeMons Legend Speedycop and his famous Upside Down Camaro will be going wheel-to-wheel with the likes of the Austin Marina for the Class C prize.
We love 1990s Japanese luxury!
We didn’t have the heart to tell this diesel Mercedes-Benz W123 team that a Colorado team had beaten them to the Futurama theme, mostly because this bunch had such a great Nixon’s-head-in-a-jar outfit.
This terrible Honda Accord just got a lot worse (and by that we mean a lot better) with the addition of this all-junkyard Turbocharging Tower of Power. How many laps before internal engine components become external?
We’ve got an extensive history of weddings and marriage proposals in LeMons racing— we’re up to three weddings actually performed at 24 Hours of LeMons events— and two members of this Eagle Talon-racing team decided that they’d tie the knot during the BS Inspections in Camden.
Here’s Minister Jay doing his sacred duties.
Man and wife… and a racetrack honeymoon filled with wailing engines and the scent of burning brakes awaits them. Check in Saturday night to see who’s leading in the standings!
