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.