The 24 Hours of LeMons

The 24 Hours of LeMons (pronounced lemons) is a great event that’s all about maximizing racing fun for minimum expense. The basic premise is to find the cheapest clunker you can get your hands on and spend no more than $500 to purchase and upgrade it for racing. Then outifit it with a rollcage, five-point harness and any other safety equipment you choose and go racing for a dozen hours or more over a weekend. The purse for winning is $1,500 worth of nickels just to reinforce the fact that you shouldn’t take this event too seriously. We raced the LeMons South event at Carolina Motorsports Park in Kershaw, SC, and had the time of our lives.

Part One

Pinstriping: After finishing the build on our 1991 Honda Accord we called on pinstriper extraordinaire Tom E to give the car a little style. Our theme was a wanna-be NASCAR Cup team, which gave us a good excuse to plaster the logos of everyone who helped us out on the build. Tom also did the fantastic pinstriping on the hood freehand.

Part Two

The Race: The judges busted us for a Vtec engine complete with headers and cold-air intake, so we started 75 laps down and 90th out of 94 cars. But after two days and more than 550 miles of racing we wound up 41st. Not too bad considering we struggled with our Honda’s brakes all day on Saturday.

Part Three

The People’s Curse: One unique tradition of the 24 Hours of LeMons is after the first day of racing, all the participants are given the chance to vote on the the car that deserves to die. It can be because the car is a cheater or the drivers are particularly bad behind the wheel. It doesn’t matter; the winner–or loser depending on your point of view–gets treated like a wet bag of garbage in front of anybody who cares to watch. For our event the victim was team Superkak Racing, which somehow snuck a Mustang GT through judging. Hide your eyes if you’re squeemish.

Photos of all 94 Cars (courtesy Jalopnik)

The 24 Hours of LeMons website

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Just for Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

One Response to “The 24 Hours of LeMons”

The News | StreetMuscleAction.com Says:
July 27th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
[...] in the one-and-only 24 Hours of LeMons event last spring. If you haven’t, you can find them here. In addition to shooting the video for Street Muscle Action, I also covered the buildup of the [...]