"When we started our first race, we didn't even know if our car would go into third gear," remembers Coleman. With no license plate, no trailer and no truck, testing had consisted of one clandestine lap around the block at 25 mph. "We got lucky and only had to spend 3 hours in the pits changing our clutch during that race."
Too many teams to count have chunked something in the first half hour and spent the next day fruitlessly greasing themselves in a feeble attempt to fix what they should have broken months ago.
Lesson #8: Use a multi-race development strategy.
At most LeMons races, there is an option, at the end of the race, to walk away from your steaming pile and let the junkyard come pick it up. While there is a certain macabre glory in bitch-slapping your heap for 14 hours before leaving it in a ditch, think twice before you walk away. The car may have cost $500, but it's unlikely the cage was less than $1,000. If the car is a simple "rebuild" away from working again, keep it.
Show your car to LeMons czar Jay Lamm at the end of the race and tell him how ruined it is, and he'll assign an arbitrary, sub-$500 value to it. This generally gives you a few hundred clams to get ready for the next go-round.
You should also keep the multi-race plan in mind when you're $496 into your budget and you suddenly realize a $50 Saab Sonnet control arm will give your Fiero eight degrees of negative camber. Resist the temptation to go over budget and just save the Sonnet bits for the next race.
"Our car looked so trashed after the first race that Jay said it was only worth $100," said Coleman. "Funny thing was, it didn't look any worse than when we started..." With $400 to spend, the team replaced a ball joint, added an air filter, found a rusty header in the junkyard, and finally installed the anti-roll bars they had failed to notice their car was missing.
Lesson #9: Removing things is free.
What do fenders do for your racecar? What about the hood, trunk lid, rear doors, hatch, bumper covers? Answer: make it heavy and limit access to your broken engine. Take them off, sell them as scrap metal, and use your earnings to expand your $500 budget.
A week after our photo shoot, the Eyesore Racing CR-XXX started its fourth race in 89th place. Within an hour, first driver Sara Ehrlich had bullied her way to second place. Losing one position in the pits, Dan Ehrlich started third and worked his way far enough into first that Kyle Snyder and Sarah Fairfield were both able to start and finish their two and a half hour stints with car number 11 in the lead. For a long, long time, it seemed supernatural numerology might be the key to LeMons glory.
But things had not been going as smoothly as it seemed. Every driver had made at least one gay cowboy move, each of which rearranged the front structure of the car. Halfway through his stint, still in the lead, Jay Kavanagh came into the pits with a hot engine. As he stopped, a thin stream of superheated water pissed from the center of the radiator, darkening the pavement a few feet away.
The radiator was hanging by its hoses, all the mounts having long-since been bashed into scrap. This, it turns out, made swapping the radiator easier, as it fell out with the loosening of two hose clamps and the unplugging of the fan. A new radiator was zip-tied in, the cooling system filled, and Kavanagh went back out in fifth. There was no number five on the side of the car. Nobody knew what to do.
Damage, it turns out, had been done by the overheating. When Coleman went out as anchor, he immediately complained that a few dozen of the 77 horses seemed to have wandered off. Then the red flag flew. A Volvo had burst, briefly, into flames. Sitting still while the extinguisher powder was mopped up, the team was suddenly faced with a mechanical catch 22.
By John N. Frink
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