We got a really great judicial bribe at last weekend's Sears Pointless 24 Hours of LeMons race: a beat-to-hell, unregisterable, not-legal-for-public-streets Ford Tempo. After honoring Ford_Tempo_Fanatic with a Tempo DOTS recently, we found ourselves in something of a dilemma.
First order of business: designate this fine machine as the Sears Pointless Official Judgemobile! That means the Ghost Ride The Whip Box gets strapped to the roof with a big ol' ratcheting tie-down. Whoops, bent the sheet metal!
The Project Car Hell Tipster T-shirt stencils were knocking around in my Crown Vic's trunk, so a quick application to the doors and the Judgemobile looks quite official. We drove quite a few laps around the Infineon paddock as we subjected miscreants to the Macho Man and other mend-your-ways tools of the LeMons Correctional System.
Then the LeMons Supreme Court started getting totally swamped with bad drivers in the Penalty Box, so we decided to put some of them to work on the Tempo. The weather was so nice that we wanted an open-air car. Off with the passenger's door, bad drivers!
Our friend Dominik, aka "The Crazy German Dude," and his team removed the driver's door. This took them quite a while, mostly because they seem to prefer channel-lock pliers to sockets and wrenches.
This is fun! These dudes managed to get their door off quite quickly, thanks to the miracle of early-20th-century hand-tool technology.
Aaaah, much nicer now.
It's just amazing how pleasant driving a doorless car can be on a nice California afternoon, especially after you slice off those irritating automatic shoulder belts with a big ol' huntin' knife.
We told the Death Cab V8olvo team to get us the hood, and they did so in about 17 seconds. They'd have been faster if we'd allowed them to chain the hood to a light pole and floor it in reverse, but we gave that plan the big "Nyet."
The removed components made for good Penalty Box decor.
My nieces and nephew showed up to watch the race, so we decided to teach them about the good ol' days of driving, when kids not only lacked child seats but even doors! Here we see them going for a spin while some mustachioed miscreants dance to "YMCA" behind the car.
My sisters weren't sufficiently horrified by that, so we decided to teach the kids about the really good ol' days of driving, when children rode in the trunk with the lid removed! We gave 'em a bullhorn and let them dictate the chants of miscreants marching behind the car. Yes, every 8-year-old's dream; favorite chants included "I smell like rotting vegetables!" and "We're all big poopy-heads!"
What fun! Sadly, the electrical system crapped out when I drove it a couple miles uphill to get some photos in Turn 4, and we had to push it back to the Penalty Box. We put some penalized teams to work on it, but nobody could fix the problem. Uh-oh!
Then the People's Curse winner- the Maxima that made a lot of enemies on Saturday, for reasons I'll put out for debate in a later post- couldn't be crushed for a bunch of legal reasons that give me a headache trying to understand right now. The crowd wanted blood! BLOOD! Naturally, the now-dead Judgemobile seemed like a logical substitute.
And so that was the end of our free Ford Tempo. Sorry, Ford_Tempo_Fanatic! If you'd come to the race, we'd have let you drive tow it home for your collection!