While no one is really sure what the actual goal of a LeMons race is (Winning? Getting away from your family? Having the best theme? Index of Effluency? The People’s Curse?), I’m pretty sure it’s not winning. I mean, let’s say you get your crappy car around the track the most times — so what? There’s an old saying, “You know how to make a little money in racing? Start with a lot of money.” Case in point — if you somehow manage to win, you get handed $1,500 in nickels. Like serious — several hundred pounds of nickels. Even if you got your car for free (sure ya did), the cost of putting in a cage, tires, brakes, racing gear, travel, food, gas and entry fees are in the $5,000+ range. Spending $5,000 to get $1,500 is dumb. Teams that cheat (i.e. spend more than $500 on their cars) are even dumber. But dumb has never stopped anyone from doing anything. Stupid, neither. Case in point: last weekend’s race. In fact, the deceit got so out of control at Arse-Freeze-Apalooza that a new class of LeMons racer was born — the Mega Cheaters!
Now, if there’s one thing I know it’s cheatin’. Hell, my co-conspiriter — Judge Martin – wrote the book on cheatin’. At every race we find a dozen (or doubel that many) teams that can’t bare the thought of not running adjustable shocks. We ding ‘em ten, maybe twenty laps. Big deal, end of story. Something changed at this year’s Thunderhill. Maybe it’s because LeMons is getting more popular. Or maybe because Northern California has seen so many damn LeMons races. Or — maybe — teams are just assuming that we don’t really check. Regardless, there were multiple teams that ignored the rules and went for broke, spending much more than $500 on their car. Let’s meet ‘em.
-800 Laps
Lost Cause Racing
Whoever thought they could fool us using a FC RX-7 with the hood, snout and tush painted black is a crackhead. Er, I mean, is a member of the aptly named Lost Cause Racing team. Seriously, is there anyone breathing that thinks this particular car is worth less than $501? Mustang owners put your hands down. I was busy busting helping others, but negative 800 laps can only mean one thing — Jay Lamm himself dropped the hammer on Lost Cause’s dream of sleeping atop all those shiny nickels.
-1,200 Laps
The Dead Smurfs
These guys. Not that there was anyway they could have known 25 Hours of Thunderhill E2 class winner Evil John Pagel would be running tech, but come on boys — at least beat on the body with a hammer to make your lie look possible. Anyhow, John — who has personally prepped more than 30 Miatas for racing purposes — took three looks at the Dead Smurfs’s car and said, “It’s worth $5,000.” Of course, I had to hear their BS story for myself. Naturally, there was no paperwork. They claimed they got it for $500 because it was running funny. Then another guy said $450. They never explained how they got it running good. Then they spent another $500 on a turbocharger. And another $100 on an intercooler (at least) And they couldn’t answer my questions when I randomly pointed at bits of their engine and asked, “How much was that?” So, we figured 1,499 laps were in order. But then Jay reminded me that the Dead Smurf’s were going to let two of the Surrender Monkeys drive their car. As such, we lowered the total to minus 1,200 laps. The Smurf’s were good enough to tag it on their hood for all to see.
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Posted By: Jonny Lieberman | 30 Comments »
Tags: 2008 Arse-Freeze-Apalooza 24 Hours of LeMons Arse-Freeze-Apalooza Krider Racing LeMons Mega Cheaters Thunderhill Thunderhill LeMons
We had previously seen that nice clean piece of asphalt between the gas pumps and the garages and up the hill a bit and wondered what it’s purpose in racing was? We could see some wear and it appeared to be an autocross track of some sort, and we thought to explore it later with our car if we needed somewhere to test after fixes.
Then on Sunday we saw this camo bmw car drifting all over the place and thought it was an exibition or something?
I guess it was…
Hootervalve
Geez, with all that cheatin tech on that tank and they still couldn’t hold off the A1SharkPilot in a near stock 528e. Maybe spend the money on driving classes?
Hilarious. I was one of the shark 528e pilots and as a rookie car racer (but veteran downhill racer) I wasn’t the fastest on the hill. Indeed on various out laps I was easily slower than all but the ridiculously slow. And this guy never passed me. We had one excellent driver, and four also-rans with varying amounts of skill and experience. those tank guys must have been really lame.
I think we might be on the look-out for a 535i on the cheap tho. Somebody in our camp is uber-competitive (ok, more than one) and seems to want to win this thing for some lame-arse reason
Hmmm, why does it ask for a website if it doesn’t post it… people might like to see some pics of cars doing various things..
http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardhod/sets/72157611870199552/ use em, just credit me.
Thats so rad you brought up the 535i. The team is going to love it.I know they feel bad about what happened and the details of their side of the story will be sorted out with them and Jay. After all their pretty new at this and everybody does something stupid once in a while and most learn from their mistakes. For some reason I would like to see his car come back. Sans upgrades and r tires. It’s burning up the blogs all over the place and is now pretty famous. It’s such a fun car to watch especially out of turn one at Thunderhill. I hope they either come back reformed or the car gets pushed to another team. It’s kinda got that Junior Johnson aura going for it. Which to me makes things at Lemons a little more intriguing.
They should have offered to go to Walmart and buy the cheapest tires that would fit. Jay would probably have let them back out without a penalty beyond the downtime required to change them.
The Shark car needs to stop lying to themselves because I witnessed that car rail around you guys numerous times. Stick to DH bicycle riding.
HapSmo — Ooooh! Smack talkin’!
Love it — keep it up
The car is a 535i as it was in the last race (unchanged w/ no penalty laps) and it was listed as such on the lemons website. We were not hiding that fact. The trunk lid came off our first lemons 528e that was destroyed in the first race because the 535 lid was destroyed in the second race. The car cost $50 because it had 270,000 miles on it, it didn’t run and it was a lein sale. I have all the documentation but you “judges” wouldn’t even look at it. The money remaining allowed us to buy some used suspension shit and a new fuel pump from 002 salvage in Hayward. If you don’t believe me, call them. When we returned to tech after failing the first time, we had just performed a miracle in the one hour you gave us to relocate our roll bar. We passed tech and we were judged by Jay Lamm himself. He docked us 150 laps which effectively ended the race for us right there. 150 laps or 20,000 laps, it doesn’t matter, our race was over. We put the cheater tires on because our race was over anyway, who exactly are we cheating at that point. If we had known getting caught was going to end our race, we never would have run them. Lesson learned and I have already apologized to Jay. However, you were a complete a-hole to me during all my encounters with you. Its junkyard racing Jonny so maybe you should lighten up.
Here’s all I will say to you, Ed.
When you came through BS inspection the first time you told me it was a $200 car, not a $50 car.
Getting your story straight is pretty important…
Sure the #02 Tank BMW car lost sight of the Lemons race theme but how about the winning Metro with a CBR900 street bike engine? I’m the first to admit that was a cool car with a lot of clever engineering. Personally I hope the big three are reading this because they need this team to help them develop a fuel efficient car for the future. Maybe one of the judges have a unbiased explanation for their approval of the Metro CBR900?
Team SoCal Mr. Mazda
Epic event.
Been obsessing about this for a while and it was great in person.
I think Jay et. al. need to make the “spirit” of the event more clear to everyone.
I heard way too many people who were all worked up over BS black flags. This is like kids’ soccer. The point isn’t to ensure Total Dominance, it’s to have fun. The trophy from an endurance race with $500 cars is never going to get you laid.
Except it isn’t like kids soccer. There is real money on the line here (not like it pays for anything but your entry fee – but hey, it’s still $1500).
From what I heard, the Metro was passed because Jay had seen the car for sale for $1100 with the cage. If the cage was paid for separately, it would have been a $500 car.
My question on the cheater tires would be – Why have them at the event if you weren’t planning on running them anyway? Come on… You didn’t go out any buy them after going through BS – it’s not like your local Kmart is going to stock 60 treadwear rated tires.
And grinding the treadwear numbers was from ah, curb rash? Yeah sure, happens all the time….
“From what I heard, the Metro was passed because Jay had seen the car for sale for $1100 with the cage. If the cage was paid for separately, it would have been a $500 car.”
And yet…
4.1.1: Lame-Ass Rationalizations: … “it would have been worth $500 if it didn’t already have a cage” doesn’t count. Five hundred dollars means five hundred frickin’ dollars.
That case is *explicitly* prohibited in the rules, yet there’s a whole lot of it going on. A little clarity one way or the other would be good.
Personally, I’d like to see that phrase removed, since it doesn’t make a lot of sense if we want to see veteran cars.