Lemons 2019

This thread is relevant to me.

We'll be there.  It'll be our second race, so it's still pretty much a blind-leading-the-blind scenario.  I was completely astonished when we passed tech last time.  Feel free to look for the Summer's Eve Team Deustch-Bags BMW and/or the Unknown Brewing canopy, but I'll try to come over and say "sup" as well.

As far as the cage, we bought a pre-bent kit for our chassis for about $400 IIRC and welded it in ourselves with no prior experience (I mostly watched and gave unhelpful criticism).   The results were... serviceable.  Again, they let us run so apparently it doesn't look like instant death. 

I was happy to see the Thunderbird, our first Lemons car, show up in the 10 year CMP Recap on the Lemons site. Naturally it was for a penalty. We played the Taiwanese National Anthem for two hours rather early in the race. Then got the privilege of writing "I will not let the Taiwanese National Anthem make me a bad driver," on the car 1000 times with a Sharpie. It's a good thing my daughter was going through a Sharpie obsession at the time and had a handful of them in her pack or we'd have spent hours in the pits finishing that one. Something was said about too much horsepower and not enough brake. It would hit 110 on the front straight but it had a hard time slowing down for turn one for some reason. It's a fun car when you stuff a 351 and a 3 speed under the hood. It got all explodey after the 6th trip past 300 degrees. I could not get the guys to stop spinning it 6K and it would throw the belt. 

This was a brilliant shot. 

https://24hoursoflemons.com/blog/10-years-lemons-carolina-motorsports-park/?fbclid=IwAR1H1EC_gRhrLzo5f2HPfyhiWXsJz3iue-IPBbt2EmkOzMu2asfCD93YkMw

In reply to Toyman01 :

Great article.  The memories come flooding back.  

What a freaking weekend. 10 Drivers, 2 Cars, lots of broken parts, welded together transmission shafts, parts chased down from 5 hours away, two cars across the finish line. I'm calling it a success. 

As a bonus, long sought after, now achieved.

I'll do a blow by blow in the next day or so, I'm beat. 

Congrats on the IOE!

Adam

IOE is the big prize! Way to go!

In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :

Agreed. We did some off the wall stuff to earn that one. 

We turned this, 

Into this,

At this point we had both cars down. The Civic had eaten the distributor, a long discontinued part. The Dirtson puked all the gear lube and had eaten the transmission. And it was only 10 hours into the 24 and we had been working on the cars for 5 of them. We were desperate to get something back on the track. Even if it was only for a hour or two. Turning a transmission into a shaft housing was the only option I could come up with. I'm still amazed it didn't snap those welds.  

Fun times. 

Wow, awesome win on the big prize!  Can't wait to read the full story.  

I was surprised how fast the Datsun was with only 1 gear.

volvoclearinghouse said:

You can buy a tubing bender that will make a "LeMons legal" cage for about $400.  Add in the cost of DOM tubing and you're in another 300-400 for tubing.  If you've never bent a tube or made a cage before....2,000 for a cage professionally installed starts sounding cheap.

Add to that the fact that the cage is a safety item and if you are not a skilled welder, you might as well make it out of PCV.  It will LOOK like a cage, but it may collapse like a house of cards.  

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...

Whoops, wrong story.

This weekend was the culmination of a lot of work and time on the part of an entire team.

10 team members, including my wife and two of my kids.

Plus an entire host of others that were willing to wrench, run parts, offer support, and just be generally awesome people. 

Two really questionable cars. A '86 Honda Civic Si that has already seen 8 Lemons races and is getting a little long in the tooth, and a '78 Datsun B210. 

Friday morning we met up to caravan out to the track. The problems started immediately in the form of a wreck that shut the road down. Driving 50' of RV and trailer, plus the rest of the crew towing cars and campers, there was no turning around so we were stuck. We finally creeped close enough to a left turn to hold traffic long enough to get the entire caravan onto an alternate route. 

That was unfortunately the interstate, which I was trying to avoid. I ran the Beast up to 65 and set the cruise control. It did fine for about 40 miles and violently blew a rear tire. It was surprisingly uneventful, and I got it off the road within 1000' of a rest area. We eased down the emergency lane and into the truck parking. Unfortunately I didn't bring a jack capable of lifting a 15k pound motorhome. I ran the hydraulic leveling system as high as it would go, and used an aluminum race jack to get the axle high enough to get the tires off. 

The spare was atrocious. I'm reasonably sure it had been under there since the RV was built. It was pre date code so I have no idea how old it was. The sidewalls were full of cracks and it only had 20 pounds of air in it. It's what I had so I put it on and ran the pressure up to 60 psi and got off the interstate. We made it to the track about noon, 4 hours to 130 miles. 

With 84 teams registered, the paddock was packed. There was a pretty big group of local autocrossers with cars and we all paddocked together. 

I was pretty unhappy that both cars failed tech. The Civic due to a loose battery hold down, and they didn't like how the fuel vent was run on the Dirtson. Both minor fixes, but still, I don't like to fail tech.

In BS judging we crushed it. The theme was Dirty Jim Racing and the Trailer Park Trash was there to win. The team captain was Tammy-Lynn the trailer park whore and she brought the entire Dirtsun family. From me, Uncle-Daddy, to Ricky the mullet wearing cousin to, even the murderer that escaped from prison for the weekend to race. The judges ate it up and we carried on with it the entire weekend. It was epic. Rule number one for Lemons is be memorable. Check that box, we killed it. Even made the Lemons FB page. 

With no Saturday night shenanigans allowed due to a hot track, Friday was the time to party. We may have done so. At least long enough to piss off the neighbors. They were apparently there to race. 

Saturday morning we tossed the radios in the cars, filled up the cans and got things ready to roll. The decision was made that my Wife and I would be first out. Her in the Honda and me in the Datsun. The Datsun was pretty horrible and by far the slowest car on track, even when it was running perfectly. My best lap, flogging it, was a 2:31 and that was the fastest lap the car made all weekend.

From there things started going down hill.

First up was the Honda. At about hour 3 it started misfiring. By hour 4 with would arbitrarily shut down and have to be towed in. By hour 5 it was off track for good. The problem was chased down to a failed distributor. The coil zapped me a couple of times in testing so I knew it was good, it just wasn't getting any kind of signal from the dizzy to fire. After spending several hours trying to track down parts, new or used, we determined that the distributor and all the associated parts are discontinued. Apparently Honda only used these on the Si cars for 2 years or so. They are made out of unobtanium. That put our "dependable" car out of the race for good. We put out a plea on Facebook and resigned ourselves to getting 10 drivers through one car for the rest of the event. 

More to come.

To add insult to injury, not long after the Honda puked, the Dirtsun came it with only 4th gear. The shifter wouldn't go into any other gear. We had had some shifter problem previously with the car when we rallycrossed it, so I pulled the shifter to see if that was it and then it wouldn't even go into 4th. That left us with zero cars. 

The decision was made to pull the Datsun transmission to see if I could get it in any gear to at least get it back on track. During the removal it was noticed that the plug in the bottom of the trans was gone and it was bone dry.  

The extent of the damage was pretty severe. The input shaft and counter gear were destroyed, The front bearing was blue and had a cracked cage, the shift rods and synchros wouldn't move, the entire thing was pretty much junk. But it was all we had so it had to work if we had any hope of going back on track. 

The decision was made to gut the box and weld the input and output shafts together and make it direct drive. 

More to come. 

We beat the gear box apart, cut the shift rods out with a grinder, stuck the input and output shafts back together and welded them up. There was no way to get them straight, so I just swagged it. The only welder close by was a Harbor Freight flux core machine. Apparently it will lay down a strong bead if you throw enough steel at the problem. 

After you throw away all the unnecessary parts, you are left with this. Just a straight shaft with a goober of metal in the middle.

The bearings I couldn't do anything about so I left them as is an stuck the shaft back in the case. It turned, but not exactly freely. It was close but things weren't quite straight. Nothing to do now but reinstall the box, fill it to the brim with oil to keep the bearing wet and send it. 

So that's what we did. 

At midnight we were back on track. Rather than sticking our best driver in the car, we stuck my daughter in it. It was her first time on track ever. So we sent her out in the dark with a broken car. And she crushed it as well. 

After 15 minutes or so she was turning lap times within 15 seconds of my fastest lap with a complete transmission. 

That bodged together junk managed to stay together for the rest of the race. The clutch took some major abuse but it kept making laps. 

We pushed the car back and forth to paddock trying to keep the clutch alive. 

More to come. 

Back to the Civic. 

Around 11 pm we got a Facebook message about a distributor. It was available if we wanted it, but it was 10 hours round trip away in North Carolina. Amazingly enough, the guy that had it was willing to make a 5 hour round trip drive to meet us half way. My wife and a former team member jumped in a car to go get it. 

While that was happening two of the team pulled the offending distributor and we kept the Dirtson on track making laps.

Another team was trying to complete a 24 hour race with only two drivers after two other members had to drop out. They graciously offered up some seat time so all of our team got to drive. It helped them out and let them rest. Still a pretty cool thing to do. Big thanks to the Chicken Neon. There are some good people that show up for a Lemons race. We weren't the only people cheering when the Dirtson went back on track with a welded transmission and finished the race. Good times, great people. 

I manned the radios until around 2 am and went to find some sleep. 

The Civic parts showed up around 6 am and the car was back on track by 6:45. It took some fiddling to get it running right but by 8 am it was turning laps in the 2 minute range and kept doing that until the last 15 minutes of the race when it fell off the pace. It managed to limp around and take the checkered flat. 

The Dirtson just kept going. Lap after lap. I still don't know how that shaft managed to stay together. I was going to be happy if it made a dozen laps. We did pull it off track when a short in a lighting circuit killed the LED lights. It was too dark to see and on of the team put it off in the carousel because he couldn't see. We also wanted to save some of the the car for the finish. It still turned laps for 6-7 hours with a welded up transmission. I was amazed. 

The crowning moment was winning the IOE award. You know when you win that, you worked for it. Not in your prep work, not in building the car, but at the track. A bad car won't win it. A blown engine won't win it either. You have to work for it and have fun while doing it. We did. I had more fun at the track this weekend with two horrible cars than I ever did placing high in the standing with a good B class car. 

Good times, great people kind of sums things up. It doesn't get much better than this. 

Even the second blowout on the RV while traveling home couldn't ruin the weekend. 

Have a photo dump.

The Dirtsun didn't make if off track under it's own power. It died in the line coming off track and never did refire. A helping hand pushed it through the crowd. 

This is how you know you are at a 24 hour race. 

I'll leave you with this. Family and friends are the glue that makes the world not fly apart at the hinges. With the right group of people around you, you have already won no matter what happens. I've been blessed with a pretty good group over the years and I am thankful for them.

volvoclearinghouse said:

You can buy a tubing bender that will make a "LeMons legal" cage for about $400.  Add in the cost of DOM tubing and you're in another 300-400 for tubing.  If you've never bent a tube or made a cage before....2,000 for a cage professionally installed starts sounding cheap.

To build a "500 dollar" car, our experiences are about $5,000.  Per race costs are about $1000 per driver, all in.  

Everyone thinks they're going to find a way to do it cheaper, but to date I doubt anyone has.  It's racing, after all.  Fastest way to make a little money in racing is to start with a lot of money.  

 

I did it.  Our lucky teamates cost was $400 for sonoma.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av3CjkQf_a8

Well done, all round.  Is there a chance that some other more-available distributor could be adapted to that shaft and mate it to the engine?  Apparently you're good at welding shafts together.  

In reply to volvoclearinghouse :

We did find a rebuild shop that will repair the old one for under $200. I'll probably have that done and throw it in the box for the next time. 

Epic effort and most outstanding post of the year.  Congrats, folks.

You guys were great this weekend.  Fantastic attitude, enthusiasm, and commitment to fun all around on your team.  Well done, and it was nice to meet you and your great family. 

Thanks for the kind words. I had an outstanding team to work with and a lot of outside help from other teams and friends as well. That camaraderie is one of the reasons I like Lemons. It's not all about being 1st. 

We are already making plans for the fall race. Might even bring a few spare parts this time.

Congrats on the IOE!!! I failed to find your paddock spot in all the craziness, but we were there.  I think we made it into one of your on-track pics above in fact.  I have a good video of Dirtie getting pushed off-track at the end of the race.  

Good times.

In reply to Matt B :

Sorry to have missed you. I was the noisy fat guy in the overalls and straw hat or a greasy t-shirt and suspenders. We spent most of the weekend running around like chickens with our heads cut off and didn't get much chance to shoot the breeze. 

In reply to Toyman01 :

And all of it over our 33rd anniversary weekend!! 

Cool picture from the Lemons Facebook page. The post in question.