-The 24 hours of LeMons rolls into the heart of America’s Rust Belt this weekend for “The Cure for Gingervitis” at Gingerman Raceway, located just across Lake Michigan from Chicago. Midwestern LeMons racers have come to expect a few things from Gingerman races in the five years since the series started going there, namely that the weather will at some point turn foul. With bad weather looming— albeit not snow for a change— for Saturday’s 9-1/2 hours of racing, racers shrugged at the possibility of today’s BS Inspections, choosing instead to relish the rare conditions at the track: sun, T-shirt weather, and a distinct lack of gale-force winds off the nearby lake. Let’s look at what rolled through the inspection shed at Gingerman today.
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-LeMons has long awaited its first General Motors “Dustbuster” van and Bad Decisions Racing has at long last brought the first GM U-Body. Bad Decisions have found themselves a Pontiac Trans Sport with GM’s 3.8-liter V6 and miles of cheap plastic body cladding.
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-Their bribes— part of a LeMons tradition— included a rare Europe-only U-Body diecast and an original Black & Decker Dustbuster in the box, each of which is worth literally tens of cents! Some unlucky team likely will be cleaning up oil-dry dust from their paddock space with the Dustbuster, should they fall afoul of the LeMons Supreme Court.
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-Period-correct is the name of the game for Bad Decisions Racing; their van carries a “first-generation GoPro.” They, of course, have a supply of VHS tapes on hand and will actually be filming onboard footage with the camcorder.
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-And what good are VHS tapes with no VCR? Well, they’ve brought that, too, along with the accommodations originally found in their Trans Sport and from a parts car and an old cathode-ray-tube TV.
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-LeMons has seen quite a few obscure Subarus, including an RX and a BRAT, but only this weekend will there be a Subaru XT. Anonymous have had their XT for about a year, but they only just got it running recently.
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-This is no normal XT, however; this is a top trim All-Wheel-Drive Turbo. Because the over/under of lap count is somewhere in the region of 30 before it sends its turbo impeller through several vital components, the XT will battle the Dustbuster van in Class C.
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-Anonymous’ features the sweet XT digital dashboard, but sadly, the team reported that it stopped working a few days before the race.
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-Team Priority Fail have been racing their VR6-powered Volkswagen Golf for a couple years in LeMons. With the VR6, the car has been reasonably quick if a bit unreliable. Clearly, the way to improve reliability is to transplant the whole VR6 drivetrain and subframe to the rear axle by building all kinds of sub-subframes and re-engineering the now-backwards reverse-gear lockout with a 3D-printed Rube Goldberg machine. The car was just finished a day ago and has turned a grand total of two laps around the paddock. What could possibly go wrong?
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-Speaking of engine swaps, Apocalyptic Racing dropped the 22R truck motor from their rear-drive 1978 Toyota Celica and have instead swapped in the 2.2-liter Ecotec four-cylinder from a Chevy Cavalier. It’s probably not faster yet, but the Ecotec is ripe for turbocharging eventually.
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-Mazda rotary engines tend not to remain intact in LeMons, mostly because a Lemons-priced 13B has already lived a hard life. The solution for this Red Bull RX-7 team is a 3.8-liter V6 and transmission from a Camaro.
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-The Dodge Stratus is a rare beast in LeMons; only one has ever raced and that was long ago. These Canadians ran that one Stratus and have now returned with the same decrepit car. They go by The Ancient and Mystic Society of the No Daniels, which is both a Simpsons reference and a statement on their feelings toward a former teammate.
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-Incredibly, the Stratus team got $200 from a now-mostly-abandoned Dodge Stratus enthusiast board when they first built the car in 2009. Where’s your obscure forum sponsorship, other LeMons racers?
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-The bright-purple Statically Indeterminate Chevy S-10 runs a Vortec V6, but the LeMons Supreme Court is working hard to convince them to replace that sometimes-reliable six-cylinder with a turbocharged Iron Duke running, oh, something like 20 pounds of boost.
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-Sometimes, when you think a Dodge Stratus enthusiast community has written the last page in the “Now You’ve Seen It Book,” you see someone in the LeMons paddock with a circa-1992 Oldsmobile Achieva windbreaker.
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-As ever, there were plenty of mildly disturbing costumes. The SHOgirls’ Ford Taurus SHO is one of those rare SHOs that might just win, but team members go out of their way to make BS Inspection as uncomfortable as possible for everyone around.
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-Chief Justice Steve McDaniel designed a hell of a bribe stencil this weekend, making a two-color stencil of the famous lighthouse in nearby South Haven. Here’s Judge Steve applying the stencil.
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-And here’s the finished product. Magnificence.
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-Meanwhile, the Product Design kicked off the weekend’s rod-tossing by aerating the block on their Saturn twin-cam engine during practice. As the LeMons Supreme Court headed out for the evening, the Saturnarians were busy swapping in a locally sourced replacement.
-Check back later for more rod-throwing, brake-toasting, and a titanic Class C brawl that may include a Dodge Mirada going toe-to-toe with a Subaru XT. That’s Real Racing™!
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