You’ll regain steering eventually
Hanging out with Distilled Racing at 24 Hours of Lemons “Days of Thunderhill”
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 you, take responsibility like a grown-up and figure out how to avoid it the next time. This ain’t the damn SCCA.
A question one might ask is “how do you win 24 hours of Lemons”, and there is perhaps not a great answer for this. But the list of prizes reveals the flavor of the event:
1.5 Winners and Prizes: Classes are assigned (a.k.a., pulled from our butts) during tech inspection based on the judges’ best guesses; post-assignment whining gets you kicked into the next faster Class. Winners may be paid in nickels, dollars, rubles, or some other painfully inconvenient currency:
Class A (for cars with a prayer of winning) soaks up $400.
Class B (for cars with a prayer of finishing) walks off with $500
Class C (for cars with no prayer of finishing) drags away $600.
Index of Effluency (as determined by a super-secret equation including vehicle age, general hooptieness, reliability of country of origin, unlikelihood of success, and the Organizers’ whim) receives $601, plus a free entry in the team’s next race.
Halloween Meets Gasoline Prize: Best team theme / car theme / car build / costumes gets the Halloween Meets Gasoline trophy + $1000 (effective 1/1/22).
The first full-EV to win a 24 Hours of Lemons endurance race overall receives $50,000 in nickels
The idiots I got to hang with for this event were Distilled Racing, a crew racing a 1941 Ford with a gorgeous black and rust patina that sports bullet holes of unknown provenance.
The car made it through “tech”, the pre-race inspection, with Paul, the owner, proudly describing all of the modifications he made to the car that broke the cost rules by well over an order of magnitude, all to the accompaniment of intermittant banjo.
Those rules state that the car must “…be acquired and prepared for a maximum of $500 (exclusive of safety gear)”. The official word at the close of the event was something like, “But if you show up at Lemons in a car with bullet holes, you’re gonna race.”
The moonshine presented to the judges by Paul didn’t hurt, either, and was recorded as an official bribe.
Having successfully passed tech check on the vehicle, the moonshiners were ready to move ahead to other race prep.
Drivers go through safety inspections of their personal gear—race suits, helmets, gloves, socks, shoes.
Hanging out in the inspection area gave me an opportunity to develop other favorites to follow during the race. Hence, a listicle interlude:
My favorite 3 race teams at Days of Thunderhill
(Other than “them what brought you”.)
3. Los Huevos Rancheros
A 1962 Ford Ranchero. Because who doesn’t love an old Ranchero? It’s like they were made for something like this.
2. The Kim Jong Elantraon (team: Another Fine Mess )—
A 2005 Hyundai Elantra perfectly decorated with the exuberant execution of a third-grader.
(For more fun, see this team’s Instagram at @kimjongelantraon)
1. Team GDX Racing
I fell for this car and team as soon as their 1977 Buick Skylark pulled into tech.
You gotta love a car that requires precautions to avoid being gored in the eye as you exit and enter.
The Race
I should have a more exciting way to describe this race. After all, motorsports are defined by superlatives of thundering engines, death-defying feats of speed, and exhilarating competition.
Lemons, however, is defined by irreverent humor and shit going wrong.
It’s not exactly as fast as you might imagine an auto race, either, but it makes you smile.
It also makes one wonder what it must be like to be a driver. It seems seriously unpleasant…it’s hot (some racers have under-suits that circulate ice water from a cooler system next to them in the car). It’s got to be nerve-wracking to race a car (with the next reasonable stop being the demolition derby, if it’s lucky). The road track is more intricate than an oval, and there are over 100 cars sharing that road.
When I see the Distilled Racing Ford come off a curve into a straight-away, I get the impression the handling must be something like trying to drive a large pillowy sofa.
Cars start breaking down immediately and the pit area is full of cars being towed in, fire trucks going out, and teams doing everything from small tweaks to complete engine replacements. Announcements inform us that a race sponsor can bring parts in from surrounding towns. A local community college offers free welding assistance to any team who needs it.
Drivers who break a rule during the race are given a black flag and required to go back to the judges’ area, usually to endure some type of penalty. Distilled Racing’s second driver got the team’s first black flag of the day.
My personally favorite driver, however, became the stuff of Lemons legends by getting three black flags on one lap—his first lap around the track. As the driver moved the Ford into place for the penalty, I asked the owner of the car what happened—all I’d seen was a troubling cloud of dust. “He said he wanted to go fast,” he said, shrugging as he followed the car to do penance.
Lemons penalties are a matter of using up a race team’s track time—as an endurance race, the point is to complete as many laps as possible. For this penalty, keeping in spirit of the car itself, the judges ordered the team to perform a Bonny-and-Clyde-style shootout with water guns.
Our heroes were not immune to mechanical challenges, either. The ’41 Ford spent considerable time in the pit area as drivers returned and various issues were discussed, diagnosed, and fixed. Sorta.
I was mystified by the complexity of it all, but intrigued by the level of expertise and problem-solving. And sometimes amused by what I overheard—for example the driver-to-driver advice that closed with “You’ll regain steering eventually.”
I get the impression that it’s one thing to know what different parts of a car do, but it’s another thing to understand how all of those parts are working together as part of a system. Cars are defined by the body they carry—this is a 1941 Ford Coupe, but really that’s just the shell around all of the things that make this a car. And though “bone stock” cars are especially respected, many of the rides in Lemons have the body of one car, the engine of another, with various parts and fabrication in between.
Sometimes it all holds together. Sometimes it doesn’t. Toward the end of day two, I heard something and looked up to see a wheel making a giant bounce down the hill toward us—thankfully not quite high enough to clear the fence but instead slamming into the top of it.
In some respects, it’s a long couple of days. It is, after all, endurance racing. But there is always something interesting happening and I was never bored. And, you know, it’s just cool to hang out around people doing something in the physical world.
When the race did end, there were no real surprises in the “winners”— team “youmadbro? Racing” had been in the lead for the entire two days it seemed. But the awards ceremony was full of other appreciations. Among those, our heroes of Distilled Racing won the Judges Choice award.
Good and bad, there’s perhaps no one thing that exemplifies American culture better than cars. And the best of it, for me, might be best exemplified by 24 Hours of Lemons. It’s a chance to not take ourselves so seriously, but celebrate those who exercise some serious ingenuity and skill. The chance for an everyday person to drive a racecar. The chance to laugh over the things that break, fix them, and move forward.
You’ll find lots more to appreciate on the 24 Hours of Lemons website and YouTube channel. Here’s the official race summary from the Lemons folks:
