Beaten-up bodies, sketchy brakes and exploding fuel tanks – welcome to the 24 Hours of LeMons, where it’s not about winning or losing, but about just making the finish. Or even the start…
It’s hot as hell at 10am in rural South Carolina in May. The Four Porschemen of the Apocalypse have bullhorns and are driving around the paddock blaring on about the Second Coming that’s going to happen in eight hours’ time. Another racing team, the Tunachuckers, can’t even focus on the imminent end of the world because their 1975 Ford LTD Landau isn’t running right. Or at all. It is, in other words, a fairly typical start to a 24 Hours of LeMons race.
The event is a tongue-in-cheek homage to the 24 Hours of Le Mans, where teams of glamorous drivers – the movie about the race, Le Mans, starred Steve McQueen, nuff said – and big-ticket manufacturers such as Audi, Peugeot, Bentley, BMW and Porsche test their mettle over an enthralling day and night in France. By contrast, LeMons is a series that runs throughout the US and this particular event – the ’Shine Country Classic at the Carolina Motorsports Park in Kershaw, South Carolina, has the je nais se quoi that comes with being located 40km away from the nearest Wal-Mart.
Jay Lamm, the former editor of Sports Car International, founded LeMons in 2006 in Northern California as an upgrade to a one-off rally event
in San Francisco – the Double 500 – which put US$500 cars through a 500km race. The first official LeMons event was held at the Altamont Motorsports Park; commemorative posters of the race, featuring a drawing of an overturned AMC Gremlin and a driver frantically running away from the car (a two-door compact classic from the ’70s), are still sold as souvenirs. In 2008, it became a nationwide series, and the cult of LeMons was born.
A LeMons car must cost less than US$500 (around NZ$585) to acquire and kit out for racing. That doesn’t include the cost of mandatory safety equipment – including a roll cage, a fire extinguisher and fire-resistant clothing for all the drivers. You see, there is a very real risk that LeMons cars will, well, burst into flame.
Read the full story in October's issue of the Red Bulletin.
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