[8695Beaters]

That's right Lemons not LeMans. If you have ever tried to go racing today, you will have noticed a number of things. One, racing is really expensive. Two, because of rules, there is almost no innovation in the cars. Anything new is usually uninspiring (so what if Ferrari came out with another new wing for their F1 cars).

Take the 24 Hours of LeMans. To go to one race, you have to begin over a year before the race. You must hire dozens of people to build the car and manage the team. You have to do lots of practice and work nonstop for months before arriving at the track. The 24 Hours of Lemons has almost nothing in common except for the name and the time length.

The first (and only) race in 2006 was held at Altamont Raceway in California (the same place where the Hells Angels killed a kid at a Rolling Stones concert in the 1960s). Since then Sprot Compact Car, Car & Driver, Road & Track, and HOTROD have all raced cars at the 24 Hours Of Lemons. This year there are 6 races.

This sounded like just way too much fun. Beer, barbecue, and beaters. And since I'm in college, it sounded like a great way to go racing for cheap. The only major rule for the race is that your car has to be worth less than $500 (excluding safety gear such as roll cages, seats, harmesses, tires, and brakes). So I put together a team for this year. We are all college kids from Delaware. Collectively we are known as Ragged Budget Racing. We have decided to race at Stafford Speedway in Stafford, CT from August 23-24. we will be towing our car from Delaware to Connecticut.

In January we formed and found our car. We bought a 1989 Hodna CRX DX. There is a profile of it in my garage. The hoops we had to jump through to buy it were intense. Check out the bottom of this post to see what we went through. For a race like this, we could have bought a huge American sedan and pushed everything out of the way. Except that every car that has done welll has been a Japanese compact. So that's what we bought. Our car has coilovers and a strong motor, so we feel we have a contender on our hands. With almost no weight, it will be quick enough and since it handles well, we can avoid trouble insted of causing it.

Right now the car is sitting in the back of a garage while we wait for acceptance to the race. Since a lot of people apply for the race, the organizers have to choose who races. We sent in our application two weeks ago but won't find out if we race until June. So now we play the waiting game.

If we are accepted, we will finish stripping the interior, weld in a roll cage, and put in a racing seat, harness, and at least one fire extinguisher. We will also find some new wheels so we can mount some decent tires, and fluff up the brakes while we are at it (new pads and maybe lines). The car also needs new CV joints, and the car has a leak in the trunk (but who cars about the leak? It's a race car).

If this all falls through and we don't race, I may just turn our Lemon into a rally beater. The parts are mostly the same and if I total it, who cares? The car is a really bad street car, but a really good Lemon. And thanks to Hondaclub for supporting my crazy ideas. I will be updating here as more info comes up.

Here is why Ragged Budget Racing should be at the 24 Hours of Lemons:

Ragged Budget Racing should race the 24 Hours Of Lemons because we have been screwed throughout the entire process of building the team. We began in January 2008 and searched far and wide for our car. We found a couple of old Hondas that worked well, but when we found a 1989 Honda CRX, we knew we had found out Lemon. It is Krylon flat black, the interior is in pieces, and it smells like the inside of my shoes. So after meeting the seller and driving the car, we met as a team and decided to buy it. With cash in hand, 2 hours before we were to meet and buy, the seller called one of the team members to say he had just sold the car. We had already made a deal and all we needed to do was to pay. The seller said he had sold to a member of our team driving a blue Mini. One of our team members does in fact drive a blue Mini. After lots of frantic phone calls, we met with the new owner and tried to buy his new purchase from him. He hadn’t even signed the **** title. We met with him in the middle of a dark parking lot in the middle of the night. It looked like a gang meeting. We haggled and dealed, and ended up paying $50 more for the car than we wanted. Which was still $50 less than the new owner said he paid for it (and still under the Lemon’s limit). So the moral of the story is that in trying to buy our Lemon, we almost got boned by a greedy con man with no license. This should have been a sign of things to come.

As if that wasn’t enough, the car had no tags. It had an expired license plate, but that was it. And being the lazy and cheap bastards we are, we didn’t want to get new tags. But the Lemon’s new home was 20 miles away from where we bought it. So, on a Sunday afternoon, we drove down a major Interstate with an unregistered, uninsured beater. A loud beater too. So as we are putzing down the highway in our new crap can, we drive right by a patrol car. As we pass he pulls out onto the road behind us. We are screwed. I have a friend following me to keep people from seeing our expired tags, but it’s only one car. After pulling off some minor evasive action to prevent said occifer from viewing our plate, we exit the Interstate and make a mad dash to the car’s new home. The car now smells of fresh urine and sweat.

Ragged Budget Racing had only been together for about three weeks when we did all of this. We are all college students who have a death wish (if we didn’t would we be doing this?). We are all racing fans, but have no money. And we are driving from freaking Delaware. We all live in Delaware. How many teams come from Delaware? We want to prove what a bunch of engineers-in-training can do with a clapped together beater and too much time on our hands. Come on, give us a reason not to study.