When we saw that Team Union Jack Racing would be bringing a 2005 Mini Cooper to the Yeehaw It's Texas 24 Hours Of LeMons, we figured we'd be seeing a Corolla-based "Mini." Nope!
Not only was it a Mini Cooper, it turned out to be a supercharged Mini Cooper S! The team members run a car salvage company and had all sorts of paperwork "proving" that their total outlay was under 500 bucks, but... no. Sure, they claimed to have started with a totaled rollover victim and sold off a lot of interior parts, but seeing this Englishman driving a German Mini instead of, say, a Triumph GT6 made us less than happy. Initially, we figured we'd give them 80,000 BS penalty laps, if only to protect them from the People's Curse, but then we hit upon the sacred-to-England value of 1,066 laps. Hey, they still get to race! They had a good sense of humor about the whole thing, and the drama of the inspection was quite entertaining to the Penalty Box hangers-on, so it was a win for all.