You’ll regain steering eventually

Hanging out with Distilled Racing at 24 Hours of Lemons “Days of Thunderhill”

Terrie Schweitzer
9 min readJul 14, 2024

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An animated clip of cars racing, featuring a 1941 Ford Coupe.
All images by the author.

Auto racing has a deserved reputation for being a hideously expensive endeavor. But what if you limited the amount of money you could spend on buying the car? Say, to something like…

…$500?

And what if you gathered the owners of these clunkers into one large parking lot with their tools, instructed them to deck themselves and their rides out in thematic costumes, and then told them to complete as many laps around the track as possible over a weekend?

You wouldn’t end up something like the French classic, 24 Hours of Lemans. Instead, you get 24 Hours of Lemons.

“Because racing isn’t just for rich idiots. It’s for all idiots.” (24 Hours of Lemons Slogan)

The premise is good, and the rules are even better. My favorite is rule 6.1:

6.1 It’s Always Your Fault: Lemons is an all-fault environment. You are 100% responsible for what happens while you’re at the wheel. Think you’re the hittee, not the hitter? We don’t care. Think you’ve been wrongly accused? See the part where it says “we don’t care.” Your job is to stay out of trouble. If trouble finds…

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Terrie Schweitzer

Director, Content Curation at Medium. Luckiest woman in the world.