And the Winner Is…
The temperature soared well into the 90s today, causing fearful mechanical carnage among the cars that had survived the first session of the 2011 ‘Shine Country Classic in South Carolina. Through all the busted engine blocks and vaporized head gaskets, one Screamin’ Chicken-bedecked Mazda just kept blasting out fast lap after fast lap, padding its lead and avoiding even a hint of a black flag. In the end, the Hong Norrth 1994 Mazda MX-3 took the checkered flag with a dominating 12-lap cushion separating it from the second-place car (the Team SOB VW Golf, a perennial South Region contender that’s way overdue for a LeMons win on laps).
Just goes to show: ditch your head-gasket-frying CRX (as Hong Norrth did this year) and get a Mazda, start winning LeMons races. Two wins so far this season, which gives the team the early lead in the national LeMons points competition. Congratulations, Hong Norrth!
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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Congratulations to Hong Norrth. One question: which engine did they run? The four-banger or the six? Or did they drop a 13B rotary in for laughs?
Also, I think that the profile of the car is greatly improved without the glass bubble hatch. This is one case where Mazda should have done a coupe with a trunk as an option to the cockroachy looking hatch.