'Shine Country Classic Day One Over, Mazda MX-3 Leads
It was a hot, muggy, rod-throwin’ day here at Carolina Motorsports Park in Kershaw, South Carolina; when the checkered flag waved to end the session, only 36 of 68 starters were still moving under their own power.
Still, somebody has to be leading, even with a near-majority of entrants sitting in pools of oil and broken engine parts. As of now, the race leader is the Hong Norrth Mazda MX-3, which took the overall win at the Southern Discomfort race a few months back. Zero black flags, zero breakdowns.
The Index of Effluency battle could still go any of several directions tomorrow. The Nissan Stanza wagon of Team Sputnik leads Class C by a good 20 laps, the NSF Racing Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 remains in the game in spite of breakdowns every quarter-hour, and the Greene County Moving Company S10, complete with couch and handtruck in the back, is making a strong IOE bid.
Meanwhile, the Tunachuckers’ 1975 Ford LTD Landau remains in the IOE conversation, but just barely, after managing just 43 laps today. The culprit was their varnish-and-rust-filled factory fuel tank. The solution: a fuel cell purchased from a nearby dirt-track roundy-round racer, with the LeMons-rulebook-mandated bulkhead separating the fuel cell from the driver manufactured using a piece of sheet metal cut out of the car’s roof. Now that’s ingenuity!
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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I think Yosemite Sam tried doing that "standing on the surface I'm sawing a chunk out of" in a cartoon once.
I'm sorry; how does one procure a 450SEL 6.9 for $500? What did I miss here??