What does it take to win the 24 Hours of Lemons?

they just completely bite it and you know people are sprawled out everywhere [Applause] [Music] so another automotive dream of mine was to become a racecar driver because I'm not sponsored by Pepsi Cola I decided to get into lemons racing because that's actually affordable and it's along the lines of the ridiculous types of things that I like to do some friends of mine had a team and they asked me to come along as the driver so I of course said absolutely I've been waiting for you to ask so we embarked on this journey with a 1997 Volkswagen GTI and like most people getting into lemons we were pretty much complete amateurs we had no idea that you had to bribe the judges so we showed up and even though we had a solid Class B car they wanted to put us in Class A and of course waiting for us to bribe them so instead we took Class B with a whole ton of penalty laps so our first race we had absolutely no chance it was a good learning experience we probably had six black flags over the course of the weekend I mean just absolutely amateur hour when we learned that we needed to bring spare parts because stuff breaks we learned that we needed to drive cleanly so part of the whole lemons stick is that your car has to be under $500 purchase price you have an unlimited safety budget but you can't go above the total investment of $500 for your car so you can't do cheating motors and to ensure fairness they have what they call the BS inspection which I think stands for barbra streisand but I'm not sure they go through your car there's a couple of gearheads that are incredibly sarcastic and they you know ask you questions like are you running the factory coolant in this car which is of course a trick question because you have to run water they look at your car and assign you penalty laps based on a combination of whether or not they think your car will catch on fire blow up whether or not they think you'll be fast how good your team is in general so the second time around we brought good bribes and we got Class B with zero penalty laps which is right where we wanted to be we would go on the forums and figure out what they wanted so we brought one guy a carburetor for his Chrysler motor on this hot rod he was building we brought a race seat for another guy I brought a Porsche whaletail for the guys that they could weld onto somebody's car for a penalty so they'd started to like our team because we brought them really interesting bribes and we didn't win our second race either we had mechanical issues you know and probably more black flags and things like that and we started to Institute team penalties so that if somebody spun or somebody got a black flag we assessed them a hundred dollar fine because we quickly learned that even though we might gain two seconds left by driving the wheels off the car if something broke or if we got a black flag we lost eight laps and that went out the window so if you get too many black flags they dream up all these crazy penalties where they either make you Park for a while but usually it's something more interesting like they made one team take the door off their car and take it into a local bar and they had to get a picture in full race garb with the door and the bartender and then come back so you really didn't want to get more than three black flags in the day and we ended up rebranding our car and our team one of my favorite videos is the car bros story of a teenagers first Ferrari epic video very hilarious this is our team theme which almost nobody got so it was even funnier I wore this to the Amelia Island Concours apparently I don't need anybody to respect me ever so I wear things like this to a big conquer event but I get on the shuttle to the konk or with the president of the the mid-atlantic region Ferrari Club and he sees my shirt and goes oh what kind of Ferrari do you have and goes on and on and this and that we're talking about Ferraris for 15 minutes we get off the bus and his wife looks my shirt with a scowl goes you know it's spelled wrong and sometimes the off-track shenanigans are just as fun as the on-track ones pretty much every time we go to Walmart it's an adventure and what has now become a tradition is one of the teammates Frank got the handicapped thing of a jigger and starts going at a mile and a half an hour through Walmart and you he's laughing uncontrollably but he has to keep a straight face so his shoulders just shaking and we're all dying filming him but of course once he commits to it he's committed so we made him do that the whole time and then we of course have our pit bikes and one of them we've nicknamed the Widowmaker because it is a torque monster we had the mistake of having two people on it one person facing backwards and I'm on the other bike behind them and all of a sudden out of nowhere they just completely bite it and you know people are sprawled out everywhere and this and that so they have a very strict pit speed and it's ten miles an hour for the for the race cars and I was up on the hill spotting and running the radio the chicken was ready for lunch so I of course had to get back to the pits in a hurry so I'm flying through the pits full bore on this thing which is probably 20 miles an hour and one of the officials just yells me market right now and so he yells at me and so I like clamp the brakes and of course like slide to his stop and fall off the bike as much as I'm a lawbreaker I hate having anyone annoyed at me so I had brought my laser gun with me for the weekend because I thought man this will be fun why not so as a peace offering I went up to where his pits were located because he was also racing with the team and I brought him the laser gun and I said hey you want to use this to enforce speed and the pits and I showed him how to use it and all that and so he goes how about you do that for an hour and I'll let you have your pit bike back you know it is the slowest speed trap ever but I got it all excited about it I'd have him come over and yell at them it was great because they're all my competitors so I'm like Park them Park them so there's all sorts of fun things like that that have nothing to do with racing but make lemons weekend a lot more fun but a lot of people are there to win and build some really GT cars and ours was completely completely by the book completely we were racing in at Autobahn Country Club and ended the first day in first place by like 5 laps and we were really surprised because there are some very fast cars in our class so the guys radioed hey chase down this car there and first so I chased him down I gained a couple laps on him and they said okay just back off so we're joking around on the radio you know singing songs to each other this and that and with 45 minutes left in the race we were up by 5 or 7 laps I come into a corner and I brake for the corner it was like I hit a slick of oil just total wasup control I had no idea what's going on the car went sideways you know I put the clutch in and came to a stop on track but there's also all these noises happening so I'm like okay didn't hit oil but I don't I don't know what happened as i radioed to the guys I'm like we're done what are you talking about I'm like I don't know we're done a weld had snapped on the control arm which is a kind of freak happening came back to the next race and just kind of everything went wrong that wasn't our time to win so that was pretty frustrating so then I think this was our sixth attempt at this we were doing really really well and I'm in the car again and go to break into a corner and it was like the same thing happened just all of a sudden lost and control all these noises this and that I kept it on track again but came to a stop apparently there's a bolt and transmission that likes to work itself loose it's a common problem in these VW's and it had made its way through the transmission and out the case you know that time we were ten laps ahead we knew we had it in us to win so our seventh attempt you know we started out and things really weren't going well one of my co drivers got a black flag for just over driving the car the Achilles heel of our team has been the radio's sometimes it's the mic sometimes it's receiving I mean it's just like we can never get them working properly and I had no idea where we were at so I was pushing it as hard as possible I knew I had made up some time because I knew I had passed some of our competitors and I had seen a couple of them go in and it was this long sweeper so I kind of set up for the slingshot to pass him coming out and there is a corner station way over here that was tough to see and as I'm coming out of the corner committed to the pass I see them pull out a yellow flag not trusting the other car to not just hit their brakes when they saw the yellow flag I panicked and stabbed my brakes an amateur mistake usually I'm smoother than that but because there was still some load on the car when I hit the brakes it instantly spun the car and I kept it on track when you spin both feet in I kept it going but it was an on track spin and so I knew I was going to get a black flag so I went into penalty he asked what happened and I busted out into a Britney Spears rendition of oops I spun it again you know cuz you can get the judges on your side that helps but I appealed to the fact that we had made multiple donations to the lemons of love charity and asked him to look at the rows of basically get out of jail free stickers across our windshield and so they said okay your generosity has saved you but I found out after this that I had got us in the first place and had a lead margin of multiple laps but that black flag put us back in the second place we had gotten our radios working properly and we come around and I heard the race control call out that they were going to drop the green so I down shifted I got right outside of him and just waited and as soon as they called out green flag on the radio I just punched it I passed him before we even got to the start/finish line so I got back first before you know basically as soon as the race started and you know made up a couple laps on him teammate Frank took over and cruise to victory but it was nerve because what had happened to us twice before so we're counting the laps just going please don't break please don't break coaching him through when he finally came in they threw the checkered flag we knew we had won our class it was an epic feeling it was so good after all the trials and failures before that so it's a really good feeling and we immediately put up our car for sale because it now had race provenance [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 392,565

Rating: 4.9026871 out of 5

Keywords: 24 hours of lemons, lemons racing, chump car racing, chump car, $500, cheap car, crapcan racing, autobahn country club, ferrari, car bros, ferari, volkswagen, endurance racing, snap on, mustache, stig, gingerman raceway, track day, doug tabbutt, switchcars, VINwiki, Car Stories

Id: OP9cz2CbrTo

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 13 2018