New Hampshire LeMons Day 1 Over: Civic Leads, Chevette Shockingly Reliable
Today was a long, grueling day of racing at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, with the occasional break for lightning storms and cleanup of oil from multiple catastrophic engine nukings.
Speaking of nuking, the leader at the end of Saturday’s race session ended up being the Goin’ Nuclear Civic, which now sits atop an intimidating 9-lap lead. Given the fissile nature of Civic head gaskets and the likelihood of xenon poisoning of Civic connecting rods, however, the Honda isn’t quite a safe bet to take the checkered flag tomorrow afternoon. The Goin’ Nuclear drivers have a lot of talent on their side (fast laps, zero black flags), but Civics tend to be all-or-nothing LeMons cars.
If the Goin’ Nuclear car suffers a meltdown, the Keystone Kops Volvo 240, which has suffered approximately zero mechanical problems in at least a half-dozen LeMons races, is poised to grab the lead. The Kops’ brick is pretty quick, but they’ll need some help from that fragile Honda engine to make their move.
The Index of Effluency battle appears to be an all-GM affair at the moment, which— given The General’s historical IOE dominance— comes as no big surprise. At the moment, the top IOE contenders look like the Chevette Where The Sun Don’t Shine, the Gutlass Cutlass, and the Brooklyn Bomb Squad Geo Storm. That could all change tomorrow; the Farfrumwinnin VW Fox would need to claw its way pretty deep into the top 10 to beat the trio of GM misery chariots to snatch the IOE, but it’s looking pretty strong as this point. Meanwhile, the Banana Hammock BMW L7 seems poised to make a move into the top third of the standings, at which point it would enter the IOE conversation. There’s just no telling what might happen tomorrow!
When the green flag waved Saturday morning, the heavy IOE favorite was definitely the Team Whaaambulance Dodge Daytona Shelby Z. At the end of the session, however, the Shelby Z had managed a total of five laps, due to massive oil leaking and burning (including an Exxon Valdez-grade track-oiling episode that ended the day’s race session 20 minutes early). Team Whaaaambulance isn’t giving up, however; as I write this, they’re spinning every wrench they can find in a valiant attempt to get their high-performance Shelby-approved machine back into quasi-raceworthy shape.
Thanks to our Atlanta-based LeMons Assistant Perp Kim, we’ve got a new penalty available to the LeMons Supreme Court Correctional System: the Royal Wedding Penalty. The drivers of two miscreant teams must don their wedding garb and ride in the Royal Golf Cart while “Rule Britannia” plays and commoners wave British flags. It was all so very festive.
We don’t know what New England weather will give us tomorrow, but we do know the battles for overall win and Index of Effluency will be interesting. Check in Sunday night for the latest Loudon Annoying 24 Hours of LeMons news.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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When watching the Nascar races at Loudon on tv in years past I have wondered who'd been using the road course just before....
Cripes, Murilee, would you please let me know the next time there's a LeMons within one state of Massaschusetts? Or is there some website where I can keep track of where they are going to be? I would have come up for this.