After four years, the 24 Hours of LeMons—endurance racing for $500 cars—has become one of the most competitive forms of motorsport on the planet. Most of the time, a team gunning for the bragging rights that come with a LeMons win will follow a standard formula: put a bunch of top drivers in a 20-year-old German or Japanese sports car. Not so with the Beverly Hellbillies; they’ve got the top drivers, all right, but their car is a 1927 Model T Ford pickup built by a crew of old-time hot rodders.
And it finished an incredible 9th out of 173 entries in a recent race.
Inside the cockpit. Shot by Dean Thomas
It’s difficult to describe the punishment this form of racing inflicts on vehicles; after a full weekend of full-throttle thrashing on a twisty road course, perhaps a third of the cars will be completely kaput (nuked engines, busted suspensions, and cooked brakes are the most common culprits) and another third will have spent all but a few hours with their crews crawling over them in a repair frenzy. Most wannabe-contender teams tend to choose from one of a handful of vehicles as the starting point for their LeMons race cars—the BMW E30, the fourth- and fifth-generation Honda Civic, Mazda RX-7, Mazda Miata, and Chrysler Neon are very popular—and rely on the engineering brains of the automobile manufacturers to keep their steeds going around the track.
The 24 Hours of LeMons also boasts plenty of cars that never, ever belonged on a race track in the first place. Minivans, stretch limousines, hearses, Grandpa’s old Eldorado, 50-year-old antiques, rolling sculptures, ill-advised engine swaps, you name it—all are encouraged to get out on the track with the “serious” racers in their BMW 325s. Some slide-rule-and-pocket-protector-enabled teams pack tens of thousands (or, in the case of the amazing Angry Hamster motorcycle-engined Honda Z600, hundreds of thousands) of dollars in engineering expertise into their $500 cars, and the employees of quite a few well-known race shops—Pratt & Miller and Hennessey come to mind—have entered cars packed with their hard-earned racing voodoo. How about a LeMons car that’s decades older than the crowd, fits right in with LeMons’ absurdist ethos, and goes toe-to-toe with the quickest machinery on the race track? For that, you need to talk to some wild-eyed American rodders.
Launch the gallery below for a closer look at how the Model T GT came together:
Click to launch the photo gallery
