What do you make when life gives you LeMons?

Now that this thing has sold...

What do you make when life gives you LeMons?

by Casey Brown

For every generation of racers, there is one with stunningly bad karma. For whatever reason, the racing gods torment this poor soul, making his racing life a living hell. Some say that the unlucky chap has it coming, that he deserves this ire of fate for reasons unknown. Still others blame his bad luck on chaos theory and random fortune, certain that the streak of bad luck will eventually end as it mathematically should be inclined to do. Our hero is one such man.

As many top-level drivers have, our protagonist cut his teeth racing with an autocross club. Unlike most, however, he was a member of the legendary Texas A&M Sports Car Club. Founded in 1968, TAMSCC may just be the nation’s oldest college-based automotive racing club. Home to SCCA Solo 2 national champions Casey “SoupDaddy” Weiss and Chris “Assman” Ramey, TAMSCC has produced some of the finest autocrossers and automotive engineers in the country. Indeed, quite a few club members regularly trophy at SCCA’s Solo 2 National Championships each year or go on to work for one of the Big 3. However, our hero is not one of these exalted elite.

The Brown Hornet, as he was dubbed by a fellow TAMSCC racer (despite not being African-American) due to his (dubious) resemblance to the superhero featured in the Fat Albert cartoon series, instead has a true talent for bad luck. You see, wherever the Brown Hornet goes, disaster follows, especially when it comes to cars, women, and more importantly for our purposes, LeMons. Since late 2009, the Brown Hornet has attempted to drive in five LeMons races. During four of the five races, he completed a combined total of five, yes “5”, laps. This is the story of the Brown Hornet’s first LeMons failure.

The Death of a Unicorn
It began with a dream in the spring of 2009: turn a friend’s piece of crap Mustang II, which had been sitting without a drivetrain for nearly as long as the Brown Hornet had been alive, into a LeMons race car.

The goal was to enter the car in the “Yee-Haw It’s LeMons Texas” race being held in late October of that year in Houston. After some discussion, the Brown Hornet and his fellow dreamers decided that the car’s theme would be a unicorn, for seeing a Mustang II running was as likely to happen as seeing one of the mythological creatures.

When a naturally aspirated 2.3L engine was soon procured via a trade involving a $7 Freebirds burrito ([url]www.freebirds.com[/url]) and installed into the car, the team felt that they were making swift progress. However, they had underestimated just how much work it would take to turn the derelict chassis into a running, LeMons-prepped race car. Worse, they had overestimated how much time they would have to get the car built. With other obligations getting in the way, such as attending autocrosses (the car’s owner is a perennial Solo 2 nationals trophy-winner), having jobs, and a wedding to plan/attend (the car’s owner was due to be married a few weeks before the race) and eating into their build time, the project languished.

With a mere two weeks to go before the race, the car had yet to be fully assembled. Due to LeMons’ popularity and the team's desire to procure a spot in the race, they had paid their non-refundable entry fees months in advance, long before they even had a running race car. Desperate now, they were determined to get the car finished and so threw themselves back into the build with renewed verve and gusto.

After a hectic week of all-nighters spent putting the car together, it still needed a cage. While one of their teammates was a good fabricator, he lacked the tools needed to make a cage. After explaining their plight to a buddy of theirs who is a master fabricator with years of cage building experience (he races in a late-model series in Texas and autocrosses in C-Prepared; thus, he is always having to fix his smashed up/blown up cars), the car was trailered to their friend’s shop 90 miles away for an all-night caging session.

Despite the car’s efforts to free itself from the trailer on Houston’s Beltway 8 at 55 mph, it arrived back in its home the next day with a shiny new cage installed.

With a week to go before the race and with a car with an untested engine (it had not yet been started), the team faced another crisis as their drivetrain expert, the car’s owner, became seriously ill. Bed-ridden, he was unable to work on the motor. Being a child of the modern import era, the Brown Hornet didn’t know which end of a carburetor was which and so the motor sat untouched as the team worked to finish the rest of the car. Much of the work was completed in car wash stalls late at night (well lit, lots of space, easy access to soap and degreaser).

By the time the race weekend rolled around, the car had not even been successfully started. That did not deter the team in the least as they trailered it to the track, confident (somewhat) that they could get the car running and teched in time for the race.

However, there was still one other issue to resolve: wheel fitment. For reasons that are still confusing to the author, the team needed a set of wheel adapters for their wheels. Thus, it was left to the Brown Hornet to order wheel adapters from an online vendor. Unfortunately, due to the rush, the team failed to realize that they had ordered the wrong adapters until two days before the race. Having had no time to rectify the situation on Thursday before they headed to the track Friday morning, the Brown Hornet had to locate a machine shop in the Houston area on Friday to get new adapters made. Fortunately, he was in luck as he found a shop willing to stop everything else they were doing just to fab up some adapters.

While the Brown Hornet was off dealing with the wheel spacer issue, the rest of the team was thrashing on the motor. Just 30 minutes before the start of the race, the car fired up for the first time with a sputtering, disdainful series of gasoline fueled burps. Once the motor was warmed up, which was itself a difficult feat to achieve as the carb kept flooding which caused the engine to stall, they checked the oil. To their horror, they discovered that the dipstick was bone dry despite the fact that they had already put oil in the motor. Worried that they were somehow burning off the oil, the team kept adding oil to the motor until the dipstick finally indicated a tolerable level of oil in the block. With the engine finally running and the wheel adapters on, the car was driven/pushed around the paddock with the hopes that the sputtering and flooding would resolve themselves.

 After the short test drive, which was the first time the car had moved under its own power since being parked in a field somewhere near a religious cult's compound in Waco, and the arrival of the new wheel adapters, the Brown Hornet and his teammates thought that they had at last solved all of their problems and that the car was ready to be raced.

Unfortunately, a final inspection prior to gridding revealed that the car’s wheel studs protruded PAST the new adapters! As a result, the wheels were prevented from sitting flush, an unsafe situation on the new adapters. In the machine shop’s rush, the adapters had been made 0.25” inch too short, a fact that the Brown Hornet hadn’t noticed when mounting the wheels to the adapters due to the frantic rush to get the car to grid. Luckily, they were able to procure some wheel spacers and yet another crisis, one that could have caused a wheel to come off at speed, was averted.

As the field of cars left grid and drove down pit lane, the unicorn-themed Mustang II was a sight to behold as it sputtered along…especially after it began dumping water all over the place. It was almost as if the car itself did not want to make it out onto the track, so fiercely was it protesting. The team watched dejectedly as the car puked its lifeblood out at the end of the hot pits in one last ditch effort to avoid the track.

It was while swapping the radiator hose that the car’s owner discovered why the car sputtered and burped when running: they had connected the fuel lines to the carburetor backwards. Yes, it was as the car was broken down in the pit lane from the coolant leak that they finally saw that they had hooked up the carburetor backwards.

With the hose fixed and radiator topped off, and the fuel lines replumbed to their correct locations, the car gloriously traveled down pit road and out onto the track and completed its first lap in anger.

 And what a race it was for them, if by race I mean, “Their car was pond-water slow and was a rolling roadblock to everyone else on the track.” Despite the fuel lines being fixed, the sad old four-banger that they had traded a burrito for had no power. The car couldn’t even accelerate out of 3rd gear, so bad was the lack of power. Various team members took turns making a few pitifully slow laps to see if they could figure out what was wrong, but to no avail. As the race neared its conclusion, The Brown Hornet completed two laps before the team called it quits and retired in exhausted and humiliated shame. Their car, the fabled Mustang II, had completed a grand total of 15 agonizingly slow laps.

So what was wrong with the motor? Remember all the oil they had put into it? Well, none of it had burned off. Instead, they had been fooled into thinking that the motor was low on oil because somehow they had used the wrong dipstick, one too short for the traded-for-a-burrito motor. As a result, they had put seventeen, yes “17”, quarts of oil into the motor. When they pulled the valve cover, the cam was lobe-deep in the stuff.

Despite figuring out that they had overfilled the motor with oil, when they drained the excess and started the car back up, it still lacked power. With all hope of making any meaningful laps lost, they admitted defeat and trailered the car, determined to solve the mystery later. When they finally did their autopsy, they realized that they had failed to run a compression check in the previous months and discovered that one of the four cylinders made nearly zero compression due to missing rings. The motor they had traded for a burrito turned out to be no bueno.

Despite the epic failure, the team (mostly) remained close friends and vowed to fix the car and enter it in future LeMons events. However, and probably for the best, that day never arrived and eventually the car was sold to new owners. Mayhaps they would free it from the karmic taint that the Brown Hornet had imbued it with. Only time will tell.

Why Texas A&M should SECede

With one compound sentence, Brent Zwerneman, Aggie beat writer for several different Texas newspapers, may have prodded the Aggies into SECeding. According to Brent’s unnamed A&M source, Big 12-2 commissioner Dan Beebe recently told A&M officials that “Texas holds the key to the long-term future of the Big 12 and that the Big 12 would survive without the Aggies.” If this is true, then Beebe just tried to use the worst negotiating tactic ever to keep A&M in the Big 12-2. By reinforcing Aggie opinion that Beebe and the Big 12-2 are UT’s puppets, he may have finally given the Aggies the impetus they need to break away.

So why are Aggies so anti-UT and the Big 12-2 these days (aside from the normal reason that UT as an institution is elitist and arrogant and thinks the world, i.e. Texas, revolves around them)? It is my belief that the events of last summer, when UT attempted to leave the Big 12 for the Pac-10, and promised to bring a handful of other Big 12 schools with them (one of which was A&M), put a sour taste in the Aggies’ mouths. Sure, the Pac-10 kind of made sense for the hippy-dippy crowd at UT (after all, Austin’s unofficial motto is “Keep Austin Weird”) but the Pac-10 would have been a TERRIBLE fit culturally for A&M. Think of Austin as an extension of the Left Coast whereas College Station has more in common with the rural south and you’ll understand why A&M would never join the Pac-10.

When the Aggies revolted against UT’s master plan and began exploring their options in the SEC, for which A&M is a cultural fit, UT was shocked that the Aggies weren’t blindly going along with their brilliant plan and threatened A&M with cancellation of the annual Thanksgiving game. Hold a sword over someone’s head and see how they like it; that’s about how well that threat went over in Aggieland and it only served to reinforce the image of UT as a bully and spoiled child to the Aggies.

As it turned out last year, UT abandoned their Pac-10 aspirations after realizing that the Pac-10 would never have let them have their coveted ESPN Longhorn Network (the Ocho?). UT then worked with Beebe to throw more financial scraps to the Big 12’s poor kids’ table to mollify the other nine members (by now it was known that Nebraska and Colorado had had enough of UT’s dominance and would be leaving for the expanding Big 10 and Pac-10 respectively). With a promise of increased revenue due to new television contracts and fairer distribution of league income, the Big 12-2 survived as a 10 team league without a conference championship.

In the end, UT got something that it had long whined about: the removal of the conference championship game (to be fair, OU had also whined that playing in the conference game had sometimes derailed their national championship contention hopes, to which the rest of the nation told both schools to, “Man up and play the damn game, Nancy”. The fact that the Big 10 and Pac-10 both expanded so that they could have such a game, and the revenue previous Big 12 championship games had generated, should have told Beebe, OU, and UT something). With the smaller, weaker conference saved, all was quiet on the Southwestern Front for almost a year.

The quiet was shattered when ESPN and UT announced during the summer of 2011 the creation of the LHN, a 20 year, $300 million venture which would add UT programming to ESPN’s family of networks. The Aggies, while maybe jealous of such a deal, could deal with such a channel existing. After all, that’s just free market capitalism at work: if ESPN wanted to pay that kind of money to partner with UT then good luck to both parties. HOWEVER, Aggies, and others around the nation, soon became incensed when UT and ESPN officials both made it clear that one of the primary goals of the LHN would be to broadcast high school football games in which athletes being recruited by UT were playing. Such maneuvering was CLEARLY intended as a recruiting advantage for UT and, as such, was deemed neither fair nor honorable by Aggies. As a result, A&M officials quickly sought rulings from both the Big 12 and the NCAA on the matter.

Another issue, that of UT using the network to broadcast UT conference games, was seen as mostly secondary (after all, if the rights to those games were not already spoken for by the conference’s existing television rights, then what harm did it due to allow the LHN to broadcast such unmarketable games?) until it became clear that UT officials were exerting pressure on other conference members to pre-schedule such games. Reportedly, Texas Tech officials responded to such pressure by telling UT to go take a hike. This is the first time Tech and A&M have been allies in anything since 1999 (the year Tech students tore down their own goalposts and shoved them into the visiting fans’ section after defeating #5 ranked Texas A&M).

During these tumultuous events, UT officials and fans have offered several arguments as to why A&M should not leave the Big 12-2:

1) The traditional A&M vs. UT game would no longer be viable if the two teams were in different conferences.

This is flatly ridiculous. A number of in-state college football rivalries exist, quite strongly in fact, despite the fact that the teams play in different conferences. Below is a list of the most prominent such examples:

• Idaho/Boise St. (have played every year for 40 years, streak ends this year)
• Nevada/UNLV (Battle for Nevada)
• Utah/BYU (Holy War, they are working to keep the tradition going and will play for sure in 2011 and 2012)
• Colorado/Colorado St. (Rocky Mountain Showdown)
• New Mexico/New Mexico St. (Rio Grande Rivalry, includes a bonfire by UNM before they play NMSU!)
• Iowa St./Iowa (Cy-Hawk Trophy)
• Kentucky/Louisville (Governor’s Cup)
• Georgia/Georgia Tech (Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate)
• Florida/Florida St. (Sunshine Showdown)
• Clemson/S. Carolina (Battle of the Palmetto State)
• Pitt/Penn St. (Pitt – Penn State Rivalry)

And to those who argue that the game will mean less if the two teams are in different conferences I say that it will mean MORE. Not only will the game continue to be for bragging rights in the state of Texas, but it could also have national title implications for two conferences IF both teams arrive for it undefeated. In the current situation, if both teams arrive undefeated, the game only matters to one conference. Even if both teams aren't undefeated but if they are both ranked, the game becomes a much more interesting spectacle to the rest of the nation, almost like an early bowl game. As such, it should command huge ratings, especially if it is still played on Thanksgiving Day.

2) The Aggies will get killed in the SEC.

While competition in most major sports will likely be stiffer in the SEC than in the Big 12-2, the myth that an 8-4 SEC team can beat the champion of any other conference is just that, a myth. Yes, A&M has lost quite a few games to SEC teams in recent years. Quite frankly, A&M hasn’t been a good team for quite some time. Arkansas State, anyone? As a result, games were lost. HOWEVER, A&M now appears to be righting the ship (especially if you drink the maroon Kool-Aid, which I have been accused of doing from time to time). In my opinion, in 2010, the Aggies should have finished 11-2 instead of 9-4. I say this because it now seems clear that Jerrod Johnson, the Aggie starter at the beginning of the year, was feeling the effects of his off-season shoulder surgery far more than either he or the A&M staff had realized or let on. Quite frankly, he should have been benched after the third game of the season, a narrow win of lowly Florida International. Had that happened, Tannehill likely leads the Aggies to a win over Oklahoma State (a game which was lost because JJ threw five picks, the last of which set up Oklahoma State’s go-ahead score) and Arkansas (A&M only lost by a touchdown despite JJ’s injured arm). That A&M is ranked in the Top Ten heading into the 2011 season should, hopefully, tell us something about the future of Aggie football. What is known is that A&M is returning more starters and more letterman than any other previous season. With experience and depth come championships. Which is a better time to move to a tougher conference: when the Aggies are down or when the Aggies are rising?

3) If A&M joins the SEC, SEC teams will have a sudden flood of recruits from the state of Texas.

Say what? Put the crack pipe down. First of all, some SEC teams are already recruiting Texas players as evidenced by their 2011 rosters (provided by ESPN.com):

• Alabama, 4
• Arkansas, 20
• Auburn, 2
• Florida, 1
• Georgia, 1
• Kentucky, 1
• LSU, 13
• Mississippi State, 4
• Ole Miss, 9
• South Carolina, 0
• Tennessee, 0
• Vanderbilt, 7

Secondly, Texas players have been getting poached by OU for decades!

• OU, 59

If A&M joins the SEC, it seems logical that A&M’s recruiting will improve compared to OU’s and UT’s. After all, in which conference would a top recruit rather play: the one that is dying or the one that has won five out of the last six national championships? With the ability to offer Texas recruits something neither UT nor OU can, the ability to play in the SEC, I believe that A&M’s recruiting would soon surpass that of those two schools. In addition, A&M’s ability to recruit in Louisiana would dramatically improve. How many kids in Louisiana would rather play in the SEC than in the Big 12-2? I would have to guess that the answer is “the vast majority” due to LSU’s influence and presence.

4) If A&M leaves the Big 12-2, it will have to pay millions of dollars in exit fees.

What if the conference no longer exists? With A&M leaving, I believe that the entire conference landscape will begin to change. The Big 10+2 could easily invite Iowa State and Missouri to join them. The Mountain West probably takes Texas Tech and UTEP. Kansas, Kansas St., OU, Oklahoma St., Baylor and UT join Tulsa, SMU, Houston, and Rice in a revised Big 12-2. With this new iteration of the Big 12-2 only having six of the original 12 members, A&M makes a case that the Big 12 is dead and therefore refuses to agree to the exit fee. When the new Big 12-2 conference withholds A&M’s 2011 season TV revenue, A&M takes the conference to court and the matter is soon resolved out of court in A&M’s favor.

5) It’s harder to win a conference championship or national championship in the SEC.

This may be so but, shit, A&M couldn’t do it in the Big 12 because a) A&M’s coaching and recruiting were terrible under Fran, b) A&M’s recruiting still lags behind OU and UT despite beating UT in recent years. Fran’s now long gone and I believe, as stated above, that a move to the SEC gives A&M a huge recruiting advantage over UT, OU, and, quite frankly, over other SEC schools as A&M will have first choice of top Texas talent (would you rather play for TCU in the Big East, UT in the Big 12-2, or A&M in the SEC?).

Frankly, A&M doesn’t need to win a division or conference or national championship every year to be successful in the SEC. Does Florida win their division and conference every year? Auburn? Alabama? LSU? No, but it seems clear that the constant high-level of competition better prepares them for the years when they can string together undefeated or one-loss seasons. Let’s not get too greedy here: for the vast majority of schools in the country, a 9-3 regular season, which I feel should be A&M’s goal every year, is not a good year, it’s a GREAT year. I feel that this is a viable goal for A&M in the SEC as early as next year (granted, I’ll feel a lot better about that if we beat Arkansas and win our bowl game this year).

Also, the fact that five of the last six national champions have come from the SEC, and some of those had one loss (and one even had two losses!) going into the national championship game, should tell us that teams in the SEC are in fact more likely to win national championships than those that are not.

6) A&M’s TV revenue will take a hit.

If A&M joins the SEC, it will allow the SEC to renegotiate their contract rights. Currently, the SEC has one top 10 TV market (Atlanta). A&M will bring two more top 10 markets with it (Houston and Dallas). Based on the increase the Pac-12 saw during its recent renegotiations, the SEC, the nation’s top conference for football, will surely be able to secure a comparable increase. Such an increase will likely take the ~$18 million each SEC team currently receives over the ~$20 million A&M is expected to receive in the Big 12-2.

7) A&M would lose important conference rivalry games.

Really? With who? I’ve already postulated that the annual A&M vs. UT Thanksgiving Day game would continue to be played. While it might be nice to think A&M has a rivalry with OU, it’s a fact that one doesn’t exist (OU dominates that series and is more focused on UT anyhow. Plus, honestly, that Boomer Sooner song that the OU band plays and the fans sing after every first down, field goal, touchdown, tackle, penalty, and food order is really annoying. Aggies won’t miss that at all). Kansas or Kansas State? Yawn. Baylor? Pah-lease. Baylor gets into one bowl game in a bazillion years and suddenly thinks they aren’t Baylor any more. The Baylor rivalry made sense when A&M was an all-male school and needed an excuse to go to Waco to poach girls (who couldn’t dance) but that need is long gone. Texas Tech? All their fans do is throw rocks and batteries at people and cars when they visit College Station (maybe Aggies should throw condoms back at them to help combat their excessively high STD rates). And who wants to go to Lubbock? Ugh, no thanks, the Aggies will happily leave Tech behind.

In the SEC, A&M would immediately have new, more exciting rivalries. A&M is already playing old-SWC foe Arkansas every year in Jerry World. A&M vs. LSU is as good as any rivalry in the SEC, especially when those games are played on campus with the attendant pre-game tailgating. A&M vs. Alabama every year would be amazing. When those teams visit Kyle Field, image the national media attention the Aggies would get when 89,000+ fill the stands. Imagine ESPN’s College GameDay circling the dates when SEC teams come to Kyle Field.

8) A&M won’t be on TV as much.

In the Big 12-2, there are five scrub teams that don’t make for compelling matchups (Iowa State, Kansas State, Kansas, Baylor, and arguably Texas Tech [because networks keep avoiding this game for some reason]). In the SEC, there would only be four non-compelling matchups (Kentucky, Vanderbilt, Ole Miss, and Mississippi State). Despite the lack of national attention a Kentucky vs. A&M game would command, as a new team in the conference, especially one ranked in the top 25, such games would likely be on TV for at least for the first two years A&M is in the conference.

Finally, let’s look at the SEC on TV in another way. Below are two breakdowns of the 2010 ESPN College GameDay schedule.

• ESPN College GameDays with at least one conference team in the game:
• SEC, 4
• Big 10, 4
• Pac 10, 4
• Big 12, 2
• Mountain West, 2
• ACC, 2
• WAC, 1
• ESPN College GameDays by conference host team:
• SEC, 3
• Big 10, 3 (one of which was played at a neutral site)
• Pac 10, 3
• Big 12, 2
• ACC, 1 (played at neutral site)
• WAC, 1
• Mountain West, 1

Clearly, the Big 12, even when Colorado and Nebraska were still in the league, didn’t command as much national attention last year as the other major conferences. Is this likely to improve now that Nebraska has gone to the Big 10+2? No way.

Finally, a move to the SEC will likely mean that Brent Musburger never again has to visit College Station. That’s got to be worth something.

SECede!!!