The 24-Hours of Lemons, The “Total” Experience

Last year was too easy. We showed up with a slow car wearing “snow tires” and basically just tried to stay out of everybody’s way. I described it as showing up for a gunfight armed with a pocketknife. We only lost about an hour of track time with driver changes and an overheat problem with minutes to go so we had lots of slow laps and track time.  We had three drivers return from last year, Mark Aeppli, Norman Jones, and Bill Hamilton.  Dave Dannunzio was our new driver and Jim Morrall was our crewchief who kept us on track and focused.

This year we sharpened the pocketknife, same car with the 88-hp 2.3 liter in a 1988 Ford Mustang. This year we took off the stock airbox/silencer and added an open air cone filter in a poor man’s CAI version. We also replaced the giant stock muffler with a piece of flex muffler pipe and used the small catalytic converter as the muffler plus added a header type exhaust off a 1996 Ford Ranger. I’ll bet we had at least 10 to 15 more horsepower this year. We picked up about 5 mph down the front straight-away over last year. We also went with 17” Cobra R rims and better tires with a 200 rating. A set of V-8 springs stiffened the car up and really helped handling.

This year’s goal was to raise awareness for women’s breast cancer. We went to Wal-Mart and bought 14 cans of cheap flat black paint at 96 cents a can.  $13.01 and 30 minutes later we had the car painted flat black.  We added twin LeMons type stripes and on the hood we had a large pink ribbon painted with names of both survivors and victims of breast cancer.  

Whereas last year we breezed through the pre-race inspection and were put in class-B, this year we had to make several changes and were bumped up to Class-A. Guess we looked completive to the judges. We needed an extra exhaust hanger and a much better battery tie down holder. It took a while but we finally got everything tighten down and passed the final tech inspection.

Our new rims and tires were a tremendous improvement over last years. We could actually pass cars on the outside of the turns as we didn’t have to brake as early and could carry more speed into and out of the twisties. We could actually hang with and even pass some of the cars that were much faster in the past. We were having fun. This year we had a race car. Things were going well until about four hours into the race on Saturday. Then it just quit and I coasted it off the track and waited for a tow back to the pits. We didn’t know what the problem was but with a new battery could only figure it was the alternator. A mid-race trip to the nearest NAPA store cost us about two hours of track time. After swapping in the new one I headed back out on track but kept a watchful eye on the amp gauge. We had depleted the battery pretty good and had to jump it off after the alternator change. I got in about 5 laps and watched in horror as the amp gauge started out showing about 11 amps and slowly dropped down to 8 before quitting again. This time when the tow truck showed the driver said, “Don’t worry, I know where you live”.  It was the same one who had towed me earlier off the track.

As we had replaced the battery and then the alternator earlier, we were now lost as to what our electrical problem could be. We sought out help from a couple of our friends on Team Police Brutality. Jeff Bloch and Tom Jackson answered the call. I can’t say enough good things about their help as they had us back on the track in about 45 minutes after finding a wiring problem.

The little Mustang ran like a champion … and then the rains came. It was a very hard rain but we kept running at a slightly slower pace. With no wipers it was a real challenge but we were making up time as the faster cars were slowing down and fishtailing. At one point I got tapped in a turn, plowed into another car, and sent us both off track. That resulted in our second black flag of the day as we had gotten one earlier for merging too aggressively. Our penalty for that one was writing on the car one-hundred times, “I will merge to traffic”.  I had flashbacks to being in the fourth grade again as we wrote out our penalty with a black marker pen time after time on the hood.  After another driver change we were back on track until the curse of the wet track got us again with another off track excursion. This was our final black flag of the day as their rule was three strikes (black flags) and you were through for the day.

We packed up and headed home in the rain. We finished 64 out of 104 cars entered.  We spent 12 hours and 13 minutes on the track and did 332 laps.  The winning team had 14 hours and 53 minutes of track time. We lost nearly 5 hours of track time due to electrical problems and the penalty at the end.  It was a good run and plenty of fun but probably our last Team Infidel excursion of this type. However it looks like our little racecar will live on to race another day with a new fire truck red paint job as the car for “The Thin Red-Line Race Team”.  Stay tuned as the little Mustang that could, will continue to do in new colors.