A New Adventure For An Old Soldier
Somebody took me up on my offer. My old Performance Touring “E” Neon is off to another home, where, it is fervently to hope, it will become a first-rate LeMons racer.
I don’t want the history of this car to disappear. No, it’s not a Parnelli Jones Mustang or Sunoco Camaro, but it was a factory(ish) race car for much of its life and it deserves to be remembered. So, if you have some time, and you want to read about a car which spent sixteen years in rough-and-tumble competition, read on…
The full story can be found at neons.org. I’ll just excerpt a few of the photos from that story, in rough chronological order:
That’s our little Neon, from start to finish. It made podiums in three different classes across three different sanctioning bodies. It ran up over 13,000 racing miles. And it’s not done yet.
I’d like to say that I was sad to see the little Neon disappear on the road towards $500 crap-car racing, but if a car has a soul — and I want to believe that this one does — than it has a racing soul. Racing is life. The rest is just waiting. For our Neon, the waiting will soon be over once more.
More by Jack Baruth
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That looks like Nitro Yellow Green Pearlcoat, one of the greatest factory colours ever invented, especially shocking that it came from a domestic mfr. of that era. When Neons first emerged I had hoped for a whole lineup of wonderful crazy "neon" colours to go with the name but Dodge mgmt must have chickened out and went back to Basic Bland. The other Neon colours such as "aqua" and "magenta" paled by comparison so to speak. For a while Ford Ecorts had a couple of wild hues, metallic purple and metallic pink. Now on modern roads we're surrounded by a thousand shades of metallic grey i.e. silver. I still find it hard to believe but I have to resign myself to the fact that unusual factory paint colours must in fact be really that much harder to sell to your average citizen who wants to blend in??
Is it #187 as in "187 to the dome?"