Agya Club Indonesia
The quantity of race cars at the first-ever Salt Lake City 24 Hours of LeMons wasn鈥檛 so high, but the quality was just stratospheric. We knew we鈥檇 be in for a good race session on Saturday, and that鈥檚 precisely what we got. Here鈥檚 how things stood at the end of the first day of racing at the Return of the LeMonites 24 Hours of LeMons. Leading Class A and the entire field, we鈥檝e got the Volvo 740 Turbo of Team Too Stupid To Know Better. This team ran a Volvo 740-based birthday cake at Buttonwillow a couple of years back, but that car was destroyed in a wreck last year and this bone-stock red-and-white wagon is its replacement. The Volvo 240 has been quite successful in LeMons, but the 740 has shown a very consistent record of broken parts and DNFs in past races. Things might be different this weekend.
The Model T GT, winner of three previous LeMons races, sits a single lap behind the Volvo. The T GT gets surprisingly good fuel economy, with its two-barrel carburetor and hard tires, but it can鈥檛 match the stingy 2.3-liter Swede in that department. Dirty Duck Racing (creators of the judge-pleasing Impala Hell Project diorama a couple of years back), have been chasing a true Class B win with their Volkswagen GTI for many years now. They took home the Class B trophy from the one-day-novelty Sears Even More Pointless race last year, but they鈥檝e never pulled off a proper all-weekend-long class win. This weekend, they finished the first session with the class lead and a single-lap lead over the Model T GT鈥檚 Ford Pinto stablemate. Volkswagens like to fall apart in LeMons, but then so do Pintos. Sunday鈥檚 action should be a white-knuckler for these two teams. In Class C, the Village People Porsche 914 leapt out to an early lead and just kept building on it. By the close of the day鈥檚 racing, the air-cooled German owned a commanding 36-lap edge over its nearest pursuer.
We鈥檝e seen plenty of 914s in the series, and never before has one performed this well. 36 laps is pretty close to an hour-and-a-half at Class C speeds, which should be comfortable enough for the Village People, but a lot can happen in an endurance race. If the Village People鈥檚 Porsche reverts to type on Sunday, the Iron Duke-powered Pontiac Fiero of Team Salty Thunder will be ready to make its move. Class C always produces the most dramatic subplots in any LeMons race, and that brings us to a couple of heartbreak stories. The Maserati Biturbo campaigned by the Punk Pirates With OCD spent Friday night getting its engine fixed and turbos replaced, only to blow up its engine just two laps into the race. It should go without saying that Maserati engines aren鈥檛 easy to find on a Saturday in Utah. Still, at least the Punk Pirates managed to turn some laps; the 8-Bit Racing Subaru RX Turbo overheated and burned a couple of pistons about 50 yards into the race. Zero laps from one of our favorite cars.
Team Bangers N Mash started the day looking good in their Jensen-Healey, even contending for the Class C lead for a while鈥?but then disaster struck. A wayward connecting rod punched big holes through both sides of the engine block; note the 鈥渟ee-through鈥?feature visible in the photo above. This means the end of your race weekend in 999,999 cases out of 1,000,000, what with Lotus 907 engines being about as easy to find on short notice near Salt Lake City as an eight-headed platypus. However, the octocephalic monotreme in question waddled right into the Bangers N Mash pit a few hours later, with a local racer producing an intact, dust-covered Lotus 907 from his garage at the track. The swap should be finished in time for the green flag on Sunday. Plenty of teams suffered catastrophic mechanical failures, with several punctured engine blocks among the casualties. Here鈥檚 the engine of the Neon Pope Nissan; the connecting rod that did this also managed to break the starter motor nearly in half. The Flaming A-Holes Rover SD1 suffered the expected series of problems that you get with a first-time British LeMons car, ranging from fuel contamination to an electrical fire caused by Joe Lucas, Prince of Darkness. Still, the once-luxurious British Leyland machine finished the day with 130 total laps. The most shocking development of the day, however, was what happened with the Grumpy Cat Racing 1950 Dodge pickup. Once all the cars rolled into the paddock on Saturday night, the cooking began. The Dirt Poor-sche Racing team chipped in and hired Salt Lake City鈥檚 best taco-cart operator to prepare hundreds of his savory creations for throngs of hungry racers.