And the Real Winner Is…
GM cars start any 24 Hours of LeMons race with a big Index of Effluency advantage, and when you throw a big couch and handtruck in the bed of your Chevy S10 and spend the weekend hurling the thing around a twisty road course full of much faster vehicles… well, for the Greene County Moving Company, the end result was LeMons racing’s top trophy.
The couch-laden truck’s quickest lap time of 1:15 wasn’t so quick (in fact, it was the slowest thing on the track), but the Greene County Movers picked up exactly zero black flags and suffered only brief mechanical ailments, which gave them an impressive 28th place out of 68 entrants. This is the second S10 to win the IOE this year, after the Pickup Trash S10’s win in Michigan last month. Congratulations, Greene County Movers!
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 just noticed it's a long bed, the "dual taillights" confused me for a minute. Looks like it has a rotted out rocker panel and cab corner. I second pk386, what's the motor/trans, 2.5 2.8 or 4.3 and stick or 700R4?
Hey everyone! We only had 3 1/2 weeks to get this truck ready for the race. Our previous pick, an 87 Isuzu P'up (another gem), went south at the 4 week countdown mark (cracked head). With such little time, we didn't have too many options. Having already ordered a pickup roll cage, and purchased 14" tires, we needed something that would fit the bill. Hence we landed the S-10 you see above. It's a 1986 model with a 2.8L V-6 and 4-speed manual transmission. The truck had 205,000 miles on it (original motor and transmission). We bought it knowingly with oil pressure issues (hey, we were desperate). The first day we ran 10W-40, which is what the previous owner ran in it. However by the time we reached the end of day 1, the oil pressure was only around 10 psi at idle. So after a quick run to Walmart Saturday night, we threw some 20W-50 in her and she made it through day two. In fact, when we lost the wheel on the back stretch and had to be flatbedded in, I thought for sure we had lost the motor. I was happy to make it through the first two hours on day 1. This was our first debut at a LeMons event, and I wanted every driver to have a chance in the driver's seat. Making it through day 1 and day 2 were just bonuses. Everything on the truck was stock (no time), and the only other issue we had was overheating. When we shut the truck down (say fueling), the water would boil out. We would then have to drive a lap, and go behind the wall to add more water while the truck was running. @mechimike, I loved the Ford LTD. There's just something about the big land boats.