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May 3, 2009 12:00 PM
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The Goin' For Broken 24 Hours Of LeMons race just has too many Index Of Effluency contenders to have our usual guessing game, so we've come up with a modified version for the Reno event.
Anyone who has taken a look at the Goin' For Broken team list knows that the E30s will be out in force, with nine of them signed up for the race. The lure of the E30 is strong; you can have your pick of countless more-or-less-solid runners for under 500 bucks, they've got plenty of power and great brakes, and the junkyards are overflowing with parts. Perhaps inspired by the "Noch Einer Scheiß-E30" symbol we sprayed on it and all the other E30s at LeMons South Spring, an E30 team won the most recent 24 Hours Of LeMons event. Thing is, the LeMons E30 has two big strikes against it: First, E30s tend to develop maddening electrical problems and clog up the track with breakdowns. Second, there's something about an E30 that tends to turn a normally mild-mannered racer into- how shall I put this?- a raging, super-aggro jerkola on the track, a regular visitor to the penalty box (where we hear more aggrieved "it was the other guy's fault!" complaints from E30 pilots than from anyone else). We don't want the E30s (or the Miatas) to go away, but we do want new teams that are still in the "what the hell kind of car should we race?" phase to consider all the non-E30 options while car shopping. For example, let's say you're looking for a rear-wheel-drive European sports sedan with taut handling, all the power you'll need to crash repeatedly contend, and style galore. Before you become the 743rd LeMons team to show up with a 325e, why not follow the fine example set by the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys and buy yourself a Peugeot 505 Turbo?
The tale of the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys has had all the drama and heartbreak of an Emile Zola novel (and- we hope- the sexual perversion of a Georges Bataille's Story Of The Eye as well), what with the apocaplytpic black-ice wreck they suffered on the way to the Arse Freeze-A-Palooza race in December. You can read LeMons Supreme Court Justice Lieberman's interview of the team here, and then it'll be time to start calculating just how well you think their Peugeot is going to do at Reno-Fernley in three weeks.
The rules of this game are pretty easy: You guess the number of E30s (from 0 to 9) that you think will have lower lap totals than the Surrender Monkeys' Peugeot, and you put it in a comment on this post. So that we'll have a tiebreaker, you must also include guesses for the number of Miatas (from 0 to 3) that the Killer Bees Racing '77 MGB will beat and the number of MR2s (from 0 to 7) that the Unsafe At Any Speed Chevy Corvair will beat. Further tiebreakers will be solved via some unfair method we'll think of when the time comes. Got it? Three numbers, with the Peugeot-versus-E30 one being the most important. Prizes will be provided by the folks at LeMons World Headquarters in lovely Emeryville.
This seems like a good place for some polls, doesn't it?
Send an email to Murilee Martin, the author of this post, at murilee@jalopnik.com.
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