The LeMons Supreme Court always thinks of some location-specific penalties for each race, and South Carolina politicians Mark Sanford and Joe Wilson provided a rich vein of material for us.
We figure South Carolinians hadn't heard enough about Governor Mark Sanford's "Appalachian Trail Hike" disappearance to be with his Argentinean mistress, so we created the Cry For Me Argentina penalty with Gov. Sanford in mind. First, the team must mount a flagpole flying the flag of Argentina on the trunklid. Yes, the members of the Greyman Motor Club BMW 320i team are flying the flag upside down; we'll refer all outraged calls from the Argentinean Consulate right to them.
Then the miscreant driver had to write a long love letter to his Argentinean mistress on the car's roof. This dude seemed suspiciously skilled at writing letters to mistresses.
South Carolina was one of the states that more or less prohibited children from watching General Secretary Of The Communist Party Barack Obama's address to American schools, so we decided we'd do our duty as good gay-marriage-enforcing, tax-hiking, SUV-hating Californians by forcing miscreants to read Obama's speech. Because the secret socialist messages in the speech were hidden so effectively, LeMons Justice Lieberman mixed it up with lines from Trotsky, Lenin, Marx, and Stalin- you know, just in case folks didn't pick up on its call to revolutionary action. Judging by the "YOU LIE!" catcalls, we're pretty sure they got it.
So, the miscreant had to gather up all the children he or she could find; they'd serve as future guerilla fighters against the running-dog forces of counterrevolution. Here's a video of the Grayman Motor Club (which ran an E21 and and E30, both painted like Neapolitan ice cream bars and both frequent visitors to the Penalty Box) driver reading Great Helmsman Obama's call to arms:
While that was going on, we decorated the car in much the same manner as Obama plans to paint Air Force One. All hail Comrades Marx and Lenin! Oh, they hated this penalty in Kershaw!
New for LeMons South Fall was the Cone Of Shame penalty. The team currently running the highest black-flag count has to bolt the Black Cone Of Shame to the roof of their car. When another car surpasses their black flag total, we have the corner workers flag the car with the COS back in so they can hand it off to the new honoree.
The USS Enterprise Ford LTD looked especially good with the Cone Of Shame, which they so richly deserved after racking up seven black flags by Sunday afternoon. It brought back memories of the time the real USS Enterprise- which was ported in the Island That Time Forgot while I was growing up; its island was the tallest building in town- ran aground in San Francisco Bay. Badly done, guys!
Another new penalty was the West Virginia Homesteader. For this one, the miscreant's team must put the car up on four jack stands, then set up lawn furniture in front of the car and have high-calories snacks. This one inspired the telling a lot of good West Virginia jokes, most of which we can't repeat here.
The Fiat Of Tomorrow guys were very, very unhappy about getting the West Virginia Homesteader penalty; we wanted to find them a harmonica so they could play some mournful blues. Wouldn't you know, the Alfa Romeo Spider beat them by a half-lap!
We resurrected the Chronic Search, in which the miscreants have 30 seconds to hide their "dope stash" in the car and the judges have 30 seconds to find it, but we replaced the dime bag of oregano with a huge brick of lawn trimmings. These BMW pilots tried to hide the "reefer" in the glove box- clearly we're not dealing with guys who grew up driving Camaros and listening to Black Sabbath here- and ended up donning the orange vests and picking up trash.
Sometimes a team gets punished for something that doesn't even take place on the track! This gentleman had built himself a high-speed, kart-engined beer cooler and was roaring around the paddock at not-so-safe speeds. For that, we made him eat a can of pork brains, using king-sized chicharrones as a utensil, while the team's race car sat and waited. OK, here's a gallery for yez:
Advertisement
And here's another penalty video, courtesy of those Amazon-drivin' Tunachuckers: