Home of the Toxic Asset Racing Program! Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale about the misfit adventures of a derelict Toyota MR2 and the mostly ill-informed attempts to un-derelict the car in almost certainly futile attempts to run it in endurance racing.
Yours truly was driving the TARP Clown Car for the start of the race on Day 1 of North Dallas Hooptie. When the race went green flag, we were on the back part of the course. Coming into Turn 11 — the last turn on the course, also a double-apex hairpin) I was gaining ground on the pack in front of me when a black car in front of me lunched its engine. Full boom! Bottom end exploded, huge holes in the block. I saw the accessory belt depart the car and an oil mist go up and immediately thought to myself, “self, this does not end well.” And it didn’t, as you can see from the video below. Keep an eye on the rear-view camera, that’s me spinning off into the infield Spy Hunter-style thanks to the oil slick laid down by the car that has the video:
Unfortunately, our onboard camera got knocked to full-zoom for my first run, so we don’t have video from our camera for this incident. After I discovered that error, our camera went great for the rest of the race. I need to compile a highlights video at some point…
Also, interesting to watch someone else driving a car similar in performance to ours (thankfully, though, we didn’t have any clutch slippage). Notable that they just plain stay out of trouble: pass when possible, but generally drive conservatively.
Thanks to uber-dedicated crew member Stevo, the first highlights videos of our first LeMons race are up and on YouTube. He broke it up into three parts; the first one is embedded below, but here are links to videos two and three. Enjoy!
The good people at TraqMate have agreed to let us borrow their complete TraqMate video and data acquisition system for the race. We’ll be able to record the entire thing via our ChaseCams. It should also make writing the story a lot easier. The stuff will arrive in about a week.
In today’s edition of the LeMons Video Documentary Series, we see the footage that the Group of Foolz put together starring their e30 at the Thunderhill race. As you can see, there is plenty of foolery for the entire family! That course does look like it would be fun to drive, what with the elevation changes and all. MSR Houston looks like it’s about as flat as a schoolgirl. Cue the video:
Team Formula BMW ran an e30 at Thunderhill last December. One of their team members, Rahul Nair, created an entertaining and instructive mini-documentary that’s well worth watching. It’s 25 minutes long, so wait until you have some time to take it all in (I watched it during lunch). It goes all the way from car prep (wouldn’t it be nice to have a full-service Lotus shop prepping our crapcan?) to transport, tech and judging, and then some of the race itself. I found the judging part to be most instructive, but you may have other favorite parts.
Here’s the link to his blog, which also has the video, but I’ll embed the video below for your convenience. Enjoy:
Here’s some interesting video from Arse-Freeze-A-Palooza, the LeMons race that ran the weekend after Christmas. Let’s just say “hilarity ensues.” Enjoy:
By the way, I ordered our race seat and harness today, as we’ll need those to get the roll cage in correctly. Pretty soon here we’ll have ourselves a race car…
Ok, so the video in the first post, maybe it’s not perfectly illustrative of the racing in LeMons anymore. They are now black-flagging folks who make contact with other folks, at least if they see it. All TARP drivers (a/k/a the true “toxic assets” of our race team) should watch this video; it’s the driver’s meeting from the Houston LeMons race in October 2008. Good stuff here, especially the part about not fighting over positions in an endurance race (9 minutes, 59 sec):
We’ve decided to make a go of it for the 24 Hours of Lemons race in Houston (a/k/a LeMons Gator-O-Rama) on Feb 28-March 1, 2009.
Whoa, there, you say! What in blazes is this LeMons thing, and are you crazy? If you know me, you know that your second question is superfluous. But the first one is a legit question. Although you could surf on over to the LeMons site that was so handily linked above, they say that a picture is worth a thousand words and that a YouTube video is worth even less. But I think this is descriptive, illustrative, and it gives me goose bumps every time I see it:
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