Twin-Engined MR2olla Makes Debut, White Trash Barbie Goes CHP: BS Inspections of the Goin' For Broken 24 Hours of LeMons

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

Many of you said a twin-engined Toyota race car would never work, but the Doublesuck MR2/Corolla combo (automatic transmission in the back, manual in the front) went out onto the Reno-Fernley Raceway track for some practice laps today and did just fine!

West Coast teams tend to come up with the best (or, in this case, most disturbing) themes for their race cars.

Since this is Nevada, many of the teams decided they’d pack heat to the race. Sorry, guys, no shooting each other in the paddock!

White Trash Barbie And Ken brought their matching pink P71 Crown Vics, which picked up some BS laps due to their 3:90 gears and 5-speed transmissions. They’d have done worse, had their CHP costumes not been so great.

Matt Farah was there with Adam Carolla and an unnamed NBA player, shooting some sort of TV thing for Speed. Yes, a 7-foot-tall guy can fit in a caged 300ZX. More info on the show when I learn more.

The Dust-n-Debris Dodge Shadow got destroyed when it bashed the wall at Infineon a couple months back, so the team swapped the running gear over to a 90s Plymouth Duster. This will be a true 24-hour race: green flag at 10:30 AM Saturday, checkered flag at 10:30 AM Sunday. How many of the 80 entrants will be running by Sunday morning? Who can say?


To get an idea of what find racin’ machines passed through the hands of the LeMons Supreme Court today, here’s a video showing seven hours of inspections in a couple of minutes.


Music: Bennie Krueger, “Don’t Bring Lulu”, 1925






















Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

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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  • Pk386 Pk386 on May 14, 2011

    I want to see more of the MR2olla!

  • GiddyHitch GiddyHitch on May 15, 2011

    Adam Carolla's show on Speed is called the Car Show and it will be great to see him back on TV after NBC botched American Top Gear. Get it on, got to get it on, ain't got no choice but to get it on!

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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