24 Hours of LeMons, part II: the car.
Behold a most glorious sight! The world’s first bearded race car. Well, at least it’s kind of a race car. At least it has the safety equipment. Still being installed, but it will have the safety equipment. Supposedly, it smells a bit, has a crappy slushbox of an automatic transmission and didn’t do so great on the leakdown compression test (read: down on power). But hell if it doesn’t got some mad bearditude. And hell if it ain’t going to spend the weekend going around and around at Altamont Motorsports Park as fast as six of us sunstroked pseudo Steve McQueens can make it go.
Now, before the bearded spectacle begins in earnest, a few props. WORKS, a Mitsubishi tuning house with shops in San Rafael and at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, has graciously offered FTB a chance to become part of the glorious lineage of the gentleman race driver. Impossibly, this is a lineage shared by the car’s previous owner, but more on that later. This is an event that puts real racing within the reach of those of us with mortal salaries and full-time lives. With the primary stipulation for competing being the simple rule that the cost of the car cannot exceed $500, this is my chance to live the dream. Behold, the democratization of motorsport and the rebirth of the gentleman racer.
Okay, maybe I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself here. And my excitement is certainly tempered a bit by the attendant danger of driving geriatric hoopties at high speed for long periods of time. The attached video shows one lap of last-year’s event from the winning Road & Track entry. Multiply that by oh, thousands, and you get the idea.
But, Road & Track, Car and Driver, Sport Compact Car, et. al.: we have a fully operational, full-body beard. You do not.
Turman
PS. Memo to self: pick up spray-on flame retardant on way to racetrack. Make the jump for the video to see what the hell I’ve gotten myself into.