Well, my entry for the 24 Hours of LeMons was accepted. The car is a '79 Chrysler Newport with a 318. We will be participating in the May 10th-11th event at Altamont Motorsports Park near Tracy, California.

I would have rather had an A-body, but everything around here was too expensive so we race the boat.

Shameless plug alert... Sponsorship is available. If you would like to donate tires in 235/60R15, a cop car wheel, some time or, cash, we would love to hear from you.

Wish us luck!

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Joshua

Good Luck! Gonna get lots of stuff welded to your car?

I'll dig around and see if I still have some tires. You can grab them on your way through (if I can find them.) I had two. I'll check tomorrow night.

Soon enough? You can use my "Tire Machine."



CJ

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Part of Tyrde-Browne Racing

Good Luck Josh
Maybe you can race a slant next time
Frank

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Scrapple: Because a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
73 Duster - Race Car
66 Dart Wagon - DD
178" FED
82 D150
All Slant powered

I LOVE the LeMons race concept!
First race I ever saw was a demo derby (45 years ago), and I've loved racing ever since. Now I enjoy the high tech endurance races.
LeMons seems like a perfect grassroots blend of the two; a fantastic idea!
Looks like the Mopar to have in the series is a Neon..
they seem to do quite well.

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1975 Duster 225, same thing in a van.
Also a bunch of Neons.

My team collapsed and was resurrected. As a result we did not race the '79 Newport, but an '84 Ford Ranger. This lead to changing the team name to No-Power Rangers.

Below is the post race write-up I posted to the Mopar Road Race and Auto Cross mailing list to which I belong. If you search You Tube for Lemons Altamont 2008 there is one video clip showing the pickup going by in the first few frames. We finished 40th of 88. Would have been better, but we lost many laps due to seized brake calipers and a lack of power.

LeMons Racing Altamont '08; The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Our rookie owner/driver drew the longest straw and started the race.
After about 45 minutes he came in complaining of a lack of power. After
fiddling with the truck for a few minutes I got in and discovered no
brake pedal. I was able to pump up the brakes so I took the truck out
and almost completed a full lap before returning to the pits. I could
tell the brakes were dragging badly. We got the front up on stands and
found the rotors impossible to turn by hand. The only solution was to
replace the calipers.

Mad props to Tim's friend Alex and our own Keith Johnson (aka Dr
Rustbucket) who saved the day! Without them bringing brake calipers to
replace the seized ones the truck would have spent less than an hour on
track Saturday and our 40th place finish would have been impossible. Big
kudos and much love to Keith and Alex! Without you guys it's likely I
would have had only a few minutes of wheel time that day. That's the
good part of this little sub-story.

The bad side is that the truck spent lots of time in the pits with
smoking hot seized up front brakes while the competition put us 87 laps
down. OK, cutting the LR tire on debris didn't help our position either,
but far more laps were lost to the bad brakes than anything else. The LF
caliper was the worst. When I cracked the bleeder screw to see if there
was pressure being retained in the hydraulic system I got vapor!

The ugly part is this could have all been avoided if the rookie truck
owner had done more prep work as Tim had asked. I won't list all the
things on the truck that were not addressed by said rookie driver/owner,
but I was quite unhappy with the lack of prep. Tim ended up spending
many hours reworking problem areas and addressing others that had been
completely neglected before the truck left LA, but more needed to be
done. We were very lucky the brakes were the only serious mechanical issue.

Overall the truck handled very well for a Twin-I-Beam pick 'em up truck.
Between cut down V6 Ranger coil springs, F250 Monroe Gas Magnum front
shocks and a beefy sway bar the front was well planted and used the
275/40R17 Pirelli tires quite well. The back was lowered 4" to match the
front by simply moving the spring mounts higher on the frame and
substituting shorter Ford Aerostar shocks for the now-too-long Ranger
spec shocks. Once the truck picked up some speed on the oval I was able
to drive inside many other cars and hold them off going into the
chicane. You just don't get a lot of thrust from a 2.3L engine at 2000
RPM so plenty of cars went around as the truck struggled off the
corners. If the truck could have come off the slow corners better many
more cars would have had to stare at our tail gate. Steeper rear gears
would have helped a lot.

Early on in my drive I kept my nose clean and hit the brakes often to
avoid car-to-truck contact. I gave room when cars were along side and
allowed faster cars to go by. Not once did I intentionally block or hit
another car. I did rear end the '73 Fury as I explained in my previous
e-mail, but that's the danger of running so many cars with so many
rookie drivers on such a short track at racing speeds. Sunday's drive
was a bit different for me. I was tired of making way for slower cars
that refused to allow space for two vehicles to race side by side. I
took a tougher attitude and gave up ground less often. This led to the
spun out a gold Benz when the put his tail into my nose not once, but
twice! Not once did I earn a black flag. In speaking with a driver from
Team Size Matters Chrysler I learned that he too spun that Benz in
strikingly similar circumstances. The lesson here is watch your mirrors
and don't cut off faster traffic.

Even with squabbles in our pits during mechanical problems and an
argument about tires it was quite the weekend. I am looking forward to
my next LeMons race. I felt good about my wheel time except for
occasionally over driving the truck and hitting a Ford Escort that I was
unable to avoid. Immediately after I hit the Escort the race was red
flagged and much oil dry went down right where I slid into the Escort
rather than making my turn. I feel that if the truck had been better
prepped and tested before it hit the track we would have had a more
relaxed time in the pits, spent more time on track and finished better.

Joshua Skinner
No-Power Rangers

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Joshua

I found a picture of me driving out of the esses onto the banking.

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Joshua

This racing series is just shy of awesome! I have been watching this series since 1984, except it was called "Aloha Friday on the H-1 Freeway Toward Waikiki". Bunch of rust buckets bashing the crap outta each other. Yep, LeMons and Honolulu have a lot of similarities.

Mad props to ya. I'd love to do something like that some day if the races ever come closer to home.