The LeMons Supreme Court, in its ongoing attempt to keep the gears of justice oiled with the blood of racing miscreants, created some brutally effective new penalties for the Buttonwillow race last weekend.
We didn't have the services of LeMons Supreme Court Justice Damon Lavrinc this time around (he was off ogling Ferraris in Pebble Beach or some such nonsense), but our latest member of the Court turned out to have a mean streak that made even super-sadistic Damon seem like Mr. Rogers; in other words, exactly what we needed! Meet LeMons veteran, Reliant Scimitar driver, and author Jason Torchinsky, flanked here by LeMons Chief Justices Martin and Lieberman.
Judge Torchinsky so admired the stencil we use on BMW E30s that he made one just for Miatas! We figure Miata drivers need encouragement to switch over to a real sports car, as in the kind made in Abingdon-on-Thames.
While he was at it, Judge Torchinsky made a Saturn stencil, just to spray on random cars and increase confusion.
Perhaps the most evil of the Judge Torchinsky penalties (he created so many of them that we won't even be covering half of them here) was the Luxury Upgrade. What do LX versions of cars have in great quantities? Right, cupholders! So, he went and bought some Pep Boys plastic cupholders and a few bottles of Orange Fanta. You can see where this is going, right?
The miscreant gets cup holders on both doors, plus one on the dash, and each one is topped off with a fluid chosen for both stickiness and vivid not-found-in-nature color.
Then the miscreant gets back on the track and continues racing. Careful now, it would really suck to spill a couple gallons of Fanta in your race car on a 100° day!
Speaking of spilled liquid in race cars, we've continued to administer the much-dreaded Gangsta Funeral Penalty, in which we "pour one out for the dead homies"… into the race car. However, we've found that Clamato Bud Light tallboys work even better than 40-dogs of Olde English 800.
We try to stay topical with our penalties; hence the Cash For Clunkers punishment. The miscreant, since there's no doubt that he or she is driving a real clunker, must give us some cash. But not just any cash- we need to get one each penny, nickel, dime, and quarter… with the same date as the clunker's model year. Naturally, this involved a lot of hitting up strangers for change. Amazingly, every team that got this penalty was able to find the coins fairly quickly, even the team with the '79 280ZX.
Since this is California, we needed a penalty that paid homage to the large number of red-eyed hopheads staggering around in search of Screaming Yellow Zonkers, and thus was born the Chronic Search penalty. With the Chronic Search, the miscreants are issued a fat bag of "weed" (actually oregano with a Dr. Dre label, because we're way too cheap to buy the real stuff for this), and they have 30 seconds to hide it somewhere in the race car. If the judges can't find it in 30 seconds, they're free to go. If we do find it, the miscreant's entire team must don orange vests and go pick up trash for 30 minutes.
Judge Lieberman's SO, Amy, works as a sideshow performer, snapping mousetraps on her tongue, hammering nails up her nose, that sort of thing, so we had her assist in scaring the living crap out of miscreants. First we had her put on a fire suit, so she'd look like a busted racer, then we'd line up a couple miscreants behind her, giving the impression that everyone was going to have to, say, jump up and down on broken glass in bare feet. Amy put on a convincing act, and the expressions of horror on the faces of the on-deck miscreants were good for many laughs during the weekend.
Here's the power drill up the nose. OK, next! To their credit, not a single racer chickened out when their turn came up; we had to intervene several times in order to prevent gung-ho guys from shredding their feet on the glass.