24hrs of Lemons
The Race. Carolina Motorsports Park, Sep09.
The Build. Darwin Wrenching's BimmerWorld World Challenge Circle Track BMW 325.
A Lemons race is a race for junk cars. And it's incredibly fun. It's a
real race on a real race track, albeit often shortened to reduce peak speeds. Most
of the cars have “themes”, and the more elaborate and silly the better. In
contrast to a demolition derby, contact between race cars and going off track is
aggressively punished so the rule of the day is squeaky clean racing.
You are only allowed to spend $500 for a Lemons car. You find some reasonable candidate with mechanical problems for not much money, fix the problems, sell the parts that you don't need and keep the cost <$500. But the safety budget is "free", so you can spend as much as you want. By the time you have a cage and seat installed, have bought brakes pads and tires, and have replaced what worn out hoses, belts and bushings you are inclined to, inevitably you’re > $3k.
The organizers are serious about the $500 limit. They reserve the right to buy your car from you. For $500.
Judges, wearing black gowns and white wigs, evaluate your car and if they think you’ve got a pretty good one, they start adding penalty laps. If they are unimpressed by your $500 build documentation, they start adding penalty laps. If they have a hangover, slept alone last night, or just don't like your smirk, they start adding penalty laps. A good theme, bribes of food and alcohol, and a good smirk can all help minimize the damage.
Sunday morning everyone votes on the most hated car. Then during lunch
on Sunday they move the "People's Curse" award winner over to a steam shovel and
to the delight of the crowd, crush it.
There's a number of things that make a Lemons race particularly fun.
It's huge racecraft training. The density of race cars on the track is 3-4X a normal race. Think >100 cars on a track little more then a mile long. This means that your situational awareness is strained like never before. It's a furiously concentrated effort at reading everyone's minds around you. You have to make guesses at what the guys behind you and beside you might try, and plan to either defeat or accommodate them. You have to make also make guesses about the guys in front of you and turn that into predictions re. opportunities that you might exploit. That situational awareness, mind reading, guessing, predictions and planning all has to be done at a furious rate because you're virtually in a swarm of cars every minute.
There's a huge variety of car and driver capabilities. There's cars
from the 50's and cars from only a few years ago. There's luxury cars and econoboxes. 5000lb cars and 1500lb cars. Cars with 50hp and cars
with 500hp. And there's drivers that have never been on a track
and
there's pro drivers. The result of this broad range of driver and
car capabilities is that anything can happen. One minute you can be
battling with a 400hp 5000lb early '70's Ford LTD that can only brake and turn
well in the novice driver's imagination. But jeez can it accelerate.
The 30' LTD might be painted as the USS Enterprise complete to a runway
and little planes on it's hood. And the next minute you're fighting with a
stripped Vega that has to have a tricked out suspension to be able to carry so
much speed in the turns. And the rear of the Monty Python themed Vega
could have a huge rearward facing Trojan Rabbit mocking you from 6' above the
Vega's open rear hatch.
Saturday night is epic wrenching and beer. Since the car's are all crapboxes, many have serious problems during Saturday's 7-8hrs of racing. So Saturday night most of the teams are furiously trying to get them running again. Axles, hubs, suspension components, bushings, hoses, gaskets, alternators, clutches, differentials, all the way up to transmissions and whole engines are being replaced. Folks are running around everywhere borrowing parts and tools from each other, making suggestions, setting up flood lights, applying gasket sealent and duct tape, cutting this, welding that, and of course, drinking beer.
Penalties are handed out constantly. There's no escaping them
because other driver's will do something dumb and the next thing you know you're
being blacked flagged to come into the penalty box. There's always a
half dozen or so cars in the penalty box working through penalties. A
penalty could range from having to write something on the car 100X to having the
whole team marching around the 1/2 square mile paddock area singing. The
more absurd a penalty, the more the judges will like the idea. And if you
whine about your innocence the penalty will just get doubled.
The Race. Carolina Motorsports Park, Sep09.
Summer09 fellow SpecE30 racer Greg Moberg invited me to join his Lemons race team. Other drivers were Greg's father Eric Moberg, Kish Garantha an investment guy from NJ, Bob Shields-an SC based expert BMW mechanic and shop owner, and Bill Zawrotny an Atlanta attorney. Everyone had significant track experience.
From Greg Moberg's write up.
Saturday morning and the anticipation to go racing was building. The team
decided that I should start the race then picked numbers out of a hat for their
drivers position. It took about 10 minutes to get all 114 cars on to the 1
mile track and as we circled under yellow there was no open track anywhere.
Green drops and absolute chaos ensues. In some corners I'm ducking and covering
just to make a pass between 2 cars on the next straight. I was doing well and
keeping things clean when I came out of turn 14 and had an open front straight away.
Speeds were around 85 down this straight so as I close up on the braking zone
I'm thinking I can brake this car like my Spec E30 so I drive it really deep and
get hard on the binders. Well this sent all the weight forward and before I
could say F**K I'm sliding sideways down the straight. I corrected and now I'm
sliding right towards the steel Armco barrier so I go both feet in and manage to
come to a stop a few feet shy of hitting.
I drove another 20 min. until the next yellow when I was black flagged and team BF.c was given our first penalty. Scott takes over and is turning really fast laps when the USS Enterprise forces him off in turn 11. Scott is immediately black flagged and we get our second penalty.
The USS Enterprise Escape & Evade from Scott's perspective......
When I went 4 wheels off I'd finally gotten past the 6 ton, 50' long 1970 Ford LTD USS Enterprise. The thing was a menace in the turns but he was hard to get around because he had a lot of power. I finally got by him and was maybe 4 car lengths ahead when I went into turn 11. Since I was so far ahead I took the school line...the LTD was far enough back that he was outside of my worry zone.
As I'm headed for the apex and focused on the geometry of track-out I see out of my peripheral vision an 8' wide grill bearing down on me. The damn LTD is charging into the turn and can't possibly slow in time. I'm going to get tboned by a 6 ton monster and our bolt in cage isn't going to slow him down.
So I open up the radius of the turn a little in an attempt to give him more room. It's not enough. My brain is running the variables and I'm still going to end up dead. So I opened up the turn radius just as much as I could and still stay on the track.
Now understand that all of this all happened in about 1 sec.
I could see that he couldn't possibly slow in time. He'd totally overcooked the corner. It was looking to be 5000lbs of bad. And I was going to end up a hood ornament. So I headed for the dirt.
Then I got blacked flagged and had to go in.
Judge: "4 wheels off, eh? Can't you stay on the track"?
Ranger: (Respectfully) "Your honor, it was head for the dirt or die".
Judge: "Whatda mean?"
Ranger: (with a tone of calm earnestness) "That damn aircraft carrier almost tboned me in 11. I had no where to go"
Judge: "I know, it's never your fault. You should never have let yourself get in a position where he could do that".
Then the judge looks at me to see if I was going to keep arguing. I really wanted to say "Ya judge, I'll take care in the future to f******g not get 4 car lengths ahead of him." But instead I decided that it would be a lot smarter to just shut up and take my lumps.We got to write something like, "When I said I would not go 2 wheels off, I meant it. I went 4 wheels off." 100X on the car.
Back to Greg's story.
After this penalty Kish jumps in the car and manages to go about 40 mins without incident until he was forced to drive off track to avoid another driver. This brought on our third penalty. So Dad jumps in the car and is doing really well and picking up lots of spots while managing to keep things clean. when all of the sudden as he is braking for turn 11 the drivers rear wheel pops off and then passes him.
Scott note: I was mortified when we saw this occur because by installing rear brake pads a couple hours previously, I'd been the one that torqued the rear lug bolts on. If the lug bolts weren't tightened properly the wheel would come off. Which is bad. Now back to Greg's story.
Dad was hit square on that wheel about 4 corners previously and
it sheered the lug bolts. We get towed back to the paddock where we are able to
remove the remaining parts of the bolts, change rotors, slap on a new wheel and
we were back on track in about 20 min. Bob drove the next stint and was able to
be ridiculously fast while keeping it clean. Then Bill jumped in and was also
really fast and clean for his stint. So I jump back in do my best but at this
point we are fighting a pretty significant engine cutout problem that turned up during
Bill's stint. I
handed the car back over to Scott and he manages about a full stint before he
puts 2 wheels off and gets black flagged bringing on our 4th penalty. Kish jumps
in after that and does about 2 laps and gets the checkered for day one.
Kish started the race Sunday morning and was doing really well. About 40 min
into his session an Alpha turns down on him at an apex and hits us right in
front of the drivers side wheel. Kish is immediately back flagged bringing on
our 5th penalty. Dad then jumps in and manages his full stint without incident
on really slippery tires and hands the car off to Bob. About 30min into Bob's
stint he comes to a slow stop just before turn 14. After running a couple checks
we discovered the coil wire had come loose so we send Bob back out. He manages another 10 minutes before it happens
again. This time we make sure it is secure and send Bill out again. Bill manages
about 3 laps before an Acura decided to use Bill as his brakes and plows right into the
side of us. Bill is immediately black flagged bringing us our 6th penalty. Bill jumps back in after the penalty and finishes his stint
without incident and hands the car off to me. At this point our tires were pretty much gone so
pushing hard just resulted in sliding all over the place, not to
mention the engine cutout was back. I finished my stint without incident and
handed over to Scott. Scott was to take the car to the end and was doing a
really good job. A car caught fire with about 10 minutes left bringing out the
full course yellow. After many yellow laps Scott ran out of gas with about 4 or
5 laps to go. Our friends the Malt Liquor Tech team happened to be right behind
Scott. They managed to communicate via hand and arm signals and the Malt
Liquor Tech car pushed Scott around for more than half a lap and right into the pits.
With the clock ticking down the final minutes of the race, we pushed Scott to the paddock, put a gallon of gas in the car and
sent him back out. We re-entered with about 2 laps left and were able
to take checkered under our own power.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcfqH4W2DpY
More videos at ftp://FileSharing.BrasselerUSA.com Look in the videos folder. Download before playing.
We had several crew that came in from distant parts of the country, for no reason better then it simply sounded like fun. Unfortunately I was a little hard on them. The drivers had all worked and fueled race cars for a couple years now so we pretty much knew what to do, but this was all pretty new for the crew. I was kind of in "Ranger Gress, Major of Infantry" mode when it came to pit stops, so unsurprisingly, that drove everyone crazy. No one wants to volunteer to come help, drive half way across the nation and then be berated with "GODDAMNIT, DON'T JUST STAND THERE, MOVE MOVE MOVE!
Official write up at the Jalopnik web site, with lots of pictures.
More pictures. http://jalopnik.com/5360515/the-top-113-lemons-of-the-24-hours-of-lemons-south-fall-2009/gallery/
Saturday an early 60’s Volvo burned to the ground, but they had it racing again on Sunday. I saw several engines being replaced Saturday night, and folks replacing suspension bushings with tightly wound duct tape. The best wrenching story I heard was some guys with an old Saab '99 that lost a clutch. You can't get a clutch for a 30yr old Saab in rural SC on a Saturday night. So with welder, grinder and rivets, they fabricated a replacement clutch with sheetmetal and brake pads.
The only real problem with the whole Lemons weekend was that I didn't get
enough seat time. The team had 6 drivers. From my perspective that
was too many drivers and not enough me. Of course it's always about "me". I immediately resolved to fix this by looking for my own
Lemons car so I could form a 4 man team, the smallest allowed. Which brings me to…..
The Build. Darwin Wrenching's BimmerWorld World Challenge Circle Track BMW
325.
I chose a late ‘80’s BMW because it’s the only kind of car I know. The first pic is of it's previous incarnation, the
porta jon car. The other 3 driver's that I'd shanghaied into this and I,
bought the porta jon car for $500.
Because it was essentially race ready, we got it for a helova deal because not
only did it have a very nice cage, but it had a heck of a lot of maintenance
items replaced. It's drive-train and suspension were stock, mind you, but
a lot of the things that are utterly worn out in a high mileage car were
replaced and that significantly increased the odds of crossing the finishing
line without being pushed..
I took
this picture of the porta jon car when I was at the Sep09 Lemons race because it's
crapper theme
was so admirably awful. I had no idea that I would later
become it’s owner.
The first thing I did as (part) owner was start the group brainstorming on a
new theme. Something more admirably cool then admirably awful. That
brainstorming was not very successful.
The only thing that was already decided was that I'd paint it to look like a BimmerWorld World Challenge car because Greg Moberg and I thought that it would be amusing to have a relationship between his car and ours. With similar paint schemes the cars would sort of look like they were in the same team.
Beyond the paint scheme tho, we were flat on our ass for good theme ideas. The best idea I'd heard was to wrap the car in a belt of faux dynamite and do some kind of car bomber idea. Then we could dress as terrorists to complete the theme.
My favorite idea tho, perhaps only my favorite because it was "my" idea, was to see if I could do something interesting with the front end of a different car. The Lemons organizers are a little unfond of BMW's because they are a very common and successful entrant. They would prefer more oddball entrants. That bias against BMW's encouraged me to do something absurd to sort of disguise it's BMW-ness.
My favorite idea was to get the front end and rear and sheetmetal, grill and
lights from a BMW at a junkyard and then fasten them to the wrong sides of our
car. The idea would be to make the car look like it was going backwards.
But that sounded a little tricky. There is inevitably some contact in
Lemons races and I didn't want major pieces of poorly attached body work getting
ripped off of the car.
In thinking about various ways to bolt on body parts from another car, the most practical seemed to me to be some body parts from tube frame cars. They are big rubber and plastic things which fasten over big tube-frame custom chassis'. Cutting and fastening body parts from one of those ought to be easier then doing it with real body parts, or so my thinking went.
So I hit the website of the local dirt circle track and found someone in the classifieds that seem to be selling a lot of stuff. I called him up and asked him if he had some old beat up body parts I might to be able to get for not much. A couple days later I was the proud owner of a circle track front end body piece that the guy generously gave us for free.
Putting the circle track front bodywork on turned out to be a little trickier
then I thought. A circle track front end is about 2' too wide, slopes down very
aggressively and has monstrous fender bulges. But eventually it worked out and
the fender bulges can't help but bring a grin.
BimmerWorld is a race oriented BMW shop a couple states away that is heavily
involved in our little BMW racing community. Circle track racing is a type of
racing on a short circle track of about 1/3rd of a mile. I’ve only been to a
couple of them so I don’t know much about it. It’s like NASCAR for rednecks.
That was a joke on several different levels.
Circle track cars aren’t based on real cars any more then NASCAR cars. They are
all basically the same shape, which is big with long sloping noses. Also, like
NASCAR, they put headlight and grill decals on the front of the car to make them
resemble whatever car manufacture the driver is partial to.
One of the pics at right is one of the
BimmerWorld race cars that up until Dec09 competed in the
“World Challenge” series. This was televised on
SpeedTV. James Clay, owner of
Bimmerworld graciously gave us a SpeedTV windshield banner.
We, the 3 other drivers and I, struggled to come up with an imaginative and
amusing team name. In the face of general apathy I ended up making a command
decision and we are now “Darwin Wrenching”. Now I have to come up with an
amusing way to present the idea “for every evolutionary success, there are
millions of failures that you don’t see”, or something like that. Driving
on with that is somewhat inhibited by the fact that I'm tired of paying for
decals for the car. This idea also doesn't lend itself too well to
any kind of costume. How do you dress as an evolutionary failure......go
as "yourself"?
