Tag Archives: Sears Pointless

Automobiles

24 Hours of LeMons Sears Pointless: The Winners!

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By Murilee Martin

174 teams started the race on Saturday, and perhaps 90 were still running when the checkered flag waved on Sunday evening. The fourth annual Sears Pointless 24 Hours of LeMons proved to be the engine-killingest, metal-bendingest race we’ve seen in quite some time, which made victory all the sweeter for the teams that went home with trophies.

Overall, Class A Winner: If It’s Not Punk It’s Junk
These days, the mohawk-equipped ’92 BMW 525i of If It’s Not Punk It’s Junk and the Dos Equis-themed ’83 BMW 533i of Cerveza Racing are the cars to beat in West Coast LeMons racing. The Cerveza car was the race leader for most of the weekend, but the Punks grabbed the lead late on Sunday, built it up to two laps, and took the win. Zero black flags, zero mechanical ailments, and some very fast lap times were the keys to victory (again) for this team.

Class B Winner: The Flyin’ Hawaiians & 2 White Guys
The Flyin’ Hawaiians’ smog-carburetor-equipped Datsun 260Z had proven to be so unutterably terrible in previous races that the LeMons Supreme Court showed some mercy and classed the team in B this time. Next thing we knew, the team had managed to get their battered Datsun into 14th place overall, beating the nearest B competitor (an S10 pickup with 2,000 watts of audio amplifiers and a bed full of woofers) by 10 laps.

Class C Winner: Flaming A-Holes
Most V12 Jaguars (and V12 BMWs) get put in C Class by the LeMons Supreme Court (for obvious reasons), and this time an XJ12 managed to refrain from blowing head gaskets, spinning rod bearings, stretching head studs, or melting down its entire wiring harness for an entire race. The Flaming A-Holes held off a lot of tough Class C rivals all weekend, finishing in P29 and beating its closest rival (an ’84 Nissan Maxima) by four laps.

Most Heroic Fix Winner: Absolute Lemon Motorsports
The BMW E30 3-Series is the most common LeMons car, and that means that we’re very, very familiar with this car’s Achilles heel: a very fragile engine computer. The ECMs in E30s tend to become unhappy when subjected to the extreme conditions of endurance racing, and just about every E30 team keeps a spare ECM on hand. The veteran racers of Absolute Lemon Motorsports, however, cooked their car’s ECM early in the race, then fried their only replacement. Rather than try to chase down the elusive electrical-system gremlin that was killing their ECMs, they went …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Car & Driver

Automobiles

LeMons Sears Pointless Inspections: Bozo Texino, VR6-ized Vanagon, and a Hillman Imp

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By Murilee Martin

Here we are, back at legendary Sears Point aka Sonoma Raceway in Northern California, for the fourth annual Sears Pointless 24 Hours of LeMons. We’ve got something like 180 entries, and we spent a long, long day inspecting most of them for cheating (or lack thereof), safety equipment (or lack thereof), and general jaw-dropping amazingness. We got Bozo Texino. We got Hello Grumpy Kitty. We got everything here in the 24 Hours of LeMons!


If you’d like to see all the cars we saw today, make the jump over to the timelapse video we shot, which compresses eight hours into about five minutes. After that, admire the Westafari Volkswagen Vanagon, which features VR6 power, heavily modified suspension, and a spliff-esque smoke machine. Yes, build a Vanagon, get cut a certain amount of budget-interpretation slack; that’s what we call the Vanagon Loophole. The bad news is that every single VR6 that has ever competed in LeMons (perhaps four engines) has melted down within several hours of the green flag.


Eyesore Racing, masters of winning races and creating excellent costumes, is back with a Flinstones-themed Miata.


We’ve got a Popemobile with decaying zombie pope and gender-blendered nuns.


Remember the Stick Figure Racing MRolla, which featured the front half of a Corolla joined to the rear half of an MR2? Well, SFR is back, this time with a twin-engined Corolla FX16. Eight cylinders, 260 or so horses.


You’d think an all-wheel-drive FX16 would be a quick road-race, but our experience with the MRolla has convinced us that this car belongs with the slower cars in Class C.


Speaking of Class C, the LeMons Supreme Court believes that the BMW 850i, V12 and all, deserves to race in the most important LeMons class.


That means the former $100,000 Bavarian statusmobile will be competing toe-to-toe with the TransMission IMPossible Hillman Imp. We love British cars in LeMons, of course, and we’re overjoyed to have our second Rootes Group car.


Which one will finish more laps this weekend, the V12 German …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Car & Driver

Automobiles

Petty Cash: The Greatest Road-Racing Jeep Cherokee in LeMons History

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By Murilee Martin

We’ve discussed the AMC products that have raced in LeMons, but we haven’t discussed much about how Jeep—which was owned by AMC from 1970 through 1987—has performed in our race series. You’d think that the XJ Jeep Cherokee, with its solid front axle, high center of gravity, and 1964-era AMC pushrod six engine would be even slower than even the fattest of comfy luxury cars. In the case of Petty Cash Racing and their 1987 Cherokee, you’d be wrong—this Jeep is quick!


Team captain Matt Adair, a Seattle-based rock-crawling enthusiast, had to convince 24 Hours of LeMons Chief Perp Jay Lamm that he could build a RWD Cherokee that wouldn’t wind up on its roof the very first time it tried to turn at a race track. That task accomplished, the Cherokee showed up to the 2009 Arse Freeze-a-Palooza at Thunderhill Raceway in California. The team painted their car Petty Blue, but found that King Richard’s number 43 had already been taken by another team (43 and 69 are the car numbers most sought-after by LeMons racers) and had to go with number 430 for the Jeep.


The team’s drivers came from off-roading backgrounds and weren’t quite ready for the wild elevation changes and challenging turns at Thunderhill Raceway, but the truck handled and braked better than anyone expected, the 4.0 six suffered only a harmonic-balancer failure (a LeMons team that has only one major mechanical failure its first time out is doing very well), and finished a respectable 63rd out of 156 entries.


The team returned to California for the 2010 season and began to get noticed. First, a P45 (out of 147 entries) finish at the first-ever LeMons race at Sears Point, then a Class C win at the 2010 Arse Freeze at Buttonwillow.


Apparently emboldened by the success of Petty Cash, and surrounded by junkyards full of Jeep parts, Martooni Racing of Colorado decided they’d race a Cherokee as well. Sadly, they suffered apocalypse-grade mechanical problems and managed a mere 13 laps at the 2010 B.F.E. GP at High Plains Raceway in  their home state. Clearly, Petty Cash’s experience with thrashing rock-crawler Cherokees gave the team an edge.


The crucible of LeMons racing has done a good job of blasting holes in conventional wisdom surrounding allegedly bulletproof cars and engines, and it turns out that the AMC six isn’t quite as unkillable as self-proclaimed experts would have you believe. At the Sears Pointless 2011 race, the 4.0 a.k.a. 242-cubic-inch six in the Petty Cash Cherokee decided that it …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Car & Driver