I was pulling a couple of window cranks off this Spitfire, for installation on the 20R Sprite Hell Project), when these guys noticed my 24 Hours Of LeMons baseball cap. "We're thinking about entering the Buttonwillow Histrionics race, but we can't decide on a car," one told me. "Any advice?"

Naturally, my #1 choice for a first-time LeMons team would be a Triumph Stag. You can get this one for $450, and any team showing up with a Stag for their first-ever LeMons race would become instant Legends In Their Own Time. One lap around Buttonwillow in a Stag would be more glorious than 100 laps in a boring old 325i or Camaro, and talk about your Index Of Effluency slam-dunk! However, some teams have different priorities; some want to take the checkered flag, while others just want a car that can maximize seat time by running for a whole weekend.



Yeah, the LeMons newcomers often have this insane idea that it's possible for them to take the overall win (I know, I've been there), and that they'll be taking the big trophy and the 200 pounds of nickels at the awards ceremony. Well, that's just impossible, new guy; even a team stacked with experienced racers will still be looking at a pretty harsh learning curve the first time they get out there on a track full of rickety, parts-shedding junkheaps piloted by totally unpredictable hoons. We've read some great advice from previous winners (not to mention my personal cheating tips), and the Gator-O-Rama LeMons-winning Team Formula M For Mullet guys have shared their secrets as well (check in later for that). So if you're not willing to take on the Stag or, say, a Humber Sceptre, and you recognize that you can't win the thing on your first try, what car will maximize the amount of track time you'll get, while not being so slow as to make all the other racers hate your guts for being a big unflushable turd of a roadblock? First, let's talk about some seemingly good choices that aren't so good in reality:



LeMons Bad Car Choice #1: Any Honda or Acura. Honda makes some incredible 300,000-mile engines, and even a Civic HX will be pretty quick around a racetrack. The 2nd-gen Integra is probably the quickest legitimate $500 road-race car you can buy. However, Honda engines tend to puke at LeMons races; I've seen more blown head gaskets and thrown rods on Honda LeMons cars than on all other makes combined.


LeMons Bad Car Choice #2: Mazda Miata. Yeah, yeah, you and your buddies race Miatas all day long, and you totally know where to get one for, like, a hundred bucks. Thing is, we won't believe you during the BS Inspection, and half the other racers at the track will hate your guts because they know There Are No Cheap Miatas Out There.


LeMons Bad Car Choice #3: BMW E30. The E30 is one fast mo-fo, and that's no lie! You can get a pretty good runner for a few hundred bucks, too… you and half the other racers at any given 24 Hours Of LeMons race, that is. They break down on the track with depressing regularity (generally with fiendishly undiagnosable electrical ailments or fiendishly inaccessible mechanical failures), and there's something about an E30 that turns normally mild-mannered racers into regular Penalty Box visitors. We could go on and on (I might add the Mazda RX-7, Datsun/Nissan Z/ZX, 3rd-gen GM F-body, and a few others to the LeMons Beginners' Looks Good But Isn't Car Choice list) but it's time to get on with the good choices. To make this list, I consulted with the guy who knows more about good and bad LeMons machinery than any man alive: Nick Pon, LeMons Assistant Perpetrator and our own TheEastBayKid:


LeMons Good Car Choice #1: Toyota Corolla FX16. The big danger with a front-driver is that you'll fry the clutch and then get knocked out for five hours while you disassemble the suspension, pull the transmission, etc. However, it's worth taking that chance with an FX16, because it's impressively fast, handles predictably (very important if you don't want to talk to me and Justice Lieberman in the Penalty Box) and has proven to be a reliable LeMons machine. Plus, that engine sounds incredible; check out this video from the Schumacher Taxi Service FX16 at LeMons South '08:





LeMons Good Car Choice #2: BMW E28. We haven't seen huge numbers of E28s at LeMons races, but those that have entered have done quite well. In fact, Black Iron Racing's 535i won the LeMons SF '07 race. Is the E28 tough enough? Well, the Sharkmobile 528e has survived two races having the absolute dogshit beat out of it by its wild-eyed posse of black-flag-magnet drivers, and it's coming back for more!


LeMons Good Car Choice #3: Fox Body Mustang. The junkyards have ridiculous quantities of Fox parts (Fairmonts, Zephyrs, even the Lincoln Mark VII is based on the same chassis), the Fox handles and brakes pretty well, and it's easy to fix when something breaks. And you don't need the V8 to get around the track in a hurry; we've seen the Pinto-powered four-banger Mustangs rack up lap times indistinguishable from their 5.0-packin' brethren at race after race.


LeMons Good Car Choice #4: Mazda Protege. Mazdas tend to be pretty bulletproof at 24 Hours Of LeMons races, and Mazdas have won more LeMons events than any other marque. We don't recommend the RX-7 for LeMons n00bs (very quick, but fragile if you get hit), but how about the winner of the Arse Freeze-A-Palooza '07 race? You can get a Protege for next to nothing, the performance is pretty similar to that of a Civic (but without the tendency to blow head gaskets), and it's small enough to stay out of trouble.

Let the debates begin! If you want to see how this stuff works in reality, come to Kershaw, South Carolina, next weekend for the LeMons South Spring race. See you there!

Here is the letter written by the esteemed wordsmith Warren G. Taylor (Ok, his middle initial isn't G. but it should be.) that got us accepted into the race. yes, its both silly and true.

To whom it may concern,

I have been enlisted, through threats, bribes, blackmail, and the bartering, crossroads-like, of one slightly under-utilized and threadbare soul, to entreat you, through the use of eloquent and mellifluous prose, to allow the entrance of one Team Huey Newis and The Lose into the hallowed and oil-stained halls of the LeMons. This is a Sisyphean task that I take to with neither joy nor relish; but like the man who has sat down to consume a jar of mayonnaise at one sitting, I will dree this grim weird one spoonful at a time.

While I cannot truthfully profess to be an expert on many things, the entrance into a race I've never seen, by a group who, to my knowledge, have limited their racing to the variety that occurs between the car and the darkened rest-stop men's room when that urge that Dare Not Speak Its Name hits, is something I can clearly lie about, and with gusto. My understanding, without having consulted either the LeMons handbook or the actual entrants into the race, is that there are three very important standards that must be met for entrance into the Hallowed Race, and I posit that all are not merely met by this crew, but bested in a manner befitting the knights of old. That is to say, they literally got on horseback and, at full gallop, drove a lance through the heart of the LeMons rulebook.

They are not very bright, and this is but one example of that fact. But I digress. As follows, the standards they bear, and their unique methods for upholding same:

The Theme: This LeMons standard is, at least to the members of the team, something that they have not knowingly ascribed to. I say "knowingly" because, as you've no doubt gathered by the name of the team, they have inadvertently stumbled, like Peter Sellers from "Being There", onto genius. To put it simply, these are not men of their own era. They, like the eponymous song lyric from a later age, have simply been born too slow. While the rest of the world has soldiered on, through Clinton and Bush presidencies, the rise and fall and Phoenix-like rise again of Britney Spears, and not one but two Silicon Valley booms, these brave few have refused to buckle to the whims of passing days; they have been steadfast, resilient, and, indeed, mocked. While we live in an era of suddenly plummeting DJI's and the possible dissolution of a Major American Automaker, they have stayed in the comforting, womb-like era of suddenly plummeting DJI's and the possible dissolution of a Major American Automaker. Their ties? As thin as a rail of coke on a hooker's ass in the '85 Mets' locker room. Their suits? Clad with shoulder pads that not only protect, but surround and enfold, much like your mother's thighs. Their jeans? Jordache, stonewashed, and matching their jackets. These are not merely pleasant anachronisms, but severely deluded and, frankly, frightening men. They claim to be music aficionados, but when they give prospective girlfriends mix tapes, they just consist of two sides of a 90-minute Memorex with nothing but a repeating loop of "In the Air Tonight" and "Karma Chameleon". To put it succinctly, in their minds they are nihilistic loners who are flouting the spirit of the competition by wearing their street clothes. Their minds are wrong.

The Team: Think back to the 80's. What was a common theme in the shows that you loved? Was it the constant, uncomfortable references to how you should tell an adult if the creepy old guy next door tried to touch your personal stick shift? Was it the repeated instances of the heroes testing a bag of white powder by sticking their finger in and tasting it, oblivious to the possibility that, at best, they were putting enough pure, uncut cocaine on their gums to light up downtown Miami, and at worst they had just eaten a tablespoon of finely powdered soap? Was it the profusion of nihilistic outcasts with, to say the least, odd living arrangements? Magnum in the guest house, Crockett living hobo-like on a marina with a pet alligator, Hannibal et al living like a pack of well-armed transients. Yes, these were all themes. But the force that drove these themes, that was the touchstone in a time of uncertainty, was The Team. Michael and KITT. Joe Penny and the guy with the mustache. The A-Team. The goddamn A-Team. Sweet Jesus, the word "team" is right there in the name. The Team was everything; if the team stuck together you were guaranteed success. Without the team? Failure. The Team was not built of characters, it was constructed of archetypes, individuals that were each born to a task that they were invariably called upon to do. And do it they did, with aplomb, with vigor, with style. Never were they expected to vary from the path that fate had sent them down. Was Face ever to pilot the get-away copter? Of course not. And neither was Hannibal called upon to woo the comely lass, or Murdoch to perform incredible feats of strength right before being poisoned by his closest friends, failing once again to resist the temptation of the sweet, sweet elixir that was a cold glass of milk. Were any of that to occur, it would lead to the unknown; and that way, as we all know, lies madness.

Perhaps the place where The Team becomes most evident, where the archetypes are stripped of unnecessary encumbrances like "character development" and "acting", is in the realm of the cartoon. And among the cartoons, Voltron stood tall, for he was the mighty Defender of The Universe. That's right, sonny boy, The Universe. Not "The Kitchen" or "The Block Between 4th and 5th Streets" or even "Miami". The motherfucking Universe. How, you ask, could one group defend an territory that encompasses all known space? The answer is simple. The Team. They depended on The Team, for it was the life's blood of their mission statement. And, as with all good teams, the archetypes were clear. The Leader. The Byronic Cool Guy. The Ox-Like Man-Child. The Short Guy. The Chick The Loses Her Bikini Top With A Frequency That Seems Inappropriate For A Show Aimed At Pre-Teens. With a team thus assembled, there was no threat, no matter how great, no matter how terrifying, that they could not be beaten up by for 3 minutes while defending themselves with new, interesting, and completely useless weapons, until finally getting bored and cutting said threat in half with The Blazing Sword.
Team Huey Newis and The Lose is not a team thus constructed. There is no leader. There is no cool guy. Sadly, there's not a single one of them that would look good in a bikini.

It's five Pidges and a Hunk.

But they're here. And they're...well, they're here. My understanding is that that's all that's really required of them.

The Car: The 80's were a time of great turmoil. Saturday morning cartoons were telling us horror stories of families separated by the Berlin Wall, Robert Ludlum was assuring us that Mutually Assured Destruction was only moments away if Jason Bourne didn't get off his amnesiac ass and do something about it, and Bono still hadn't brokered a peace in Belfast. Cocaine use was rampant, Star Wars had only recently primed your childhood for being raped, and children were learning, through the combined propaganda of Ralph Macchio and Duke, that not only was "Knowing Half the Battle," but "Kicking Your Enemies in The Teeth" was the other half. Forged in this fiery foundry of fear was the car that was the car, as the man says, for its place and time. The 1985 Mustang GT 5.0. But not any Mustang 5.0—this is the last of the carburetor 5.0's, with all of 210HP and 270LB/FT of God's Own Torque, puking enough unburned hydrocarbon out its tailpipe so that if you were to order the convertible model, it would create a portable hole in the ozone layer above your car that would double your tan efficiency as you drove. When new, this was a car that burned rubber, loosened morals, and lubricated lasses.

The Lose's car is, sadly, no longer that car. The only thing it burns is oil, and the only thing it will loosen is the valve gear, most likely at an inopportune time. Unfortunately for that very valve gear, the only thing that will be well lubricated is whatever parking spot the car currently sits in. It is old. It is tired. And it is time for this old mare to be put out to pasture. But before that time, before the crushing teeth of an automotive purgatory await, this old girl has a final mission to accomplish. And who are we to deny the dying their final wish?

FIN
And so. Three standards, all well met. The only thing standing between this ragtag bunch of misfits and the glory of victory is the acceptance of this entry form, and the possibility that their car won't start. The second part is almost a given. Don't be like Sarah Jessica Parker's father in Girls Just Want To Have Fun. Don't be like Dean Rooney. Don't be like Principal Vernon. Don't be like...well, there's a lot of them. Don't be that guy. Pharaoh, let my people race.

Thanks once again to that Porcubimmer-drivin' LTDScott for another great tip![Showdown Muscle Cars].