Dying cars' day in the sun

LeMons race heaps love on heaps of junk. Winning is beside the point

DURHAM -- An automotive gangrene called the 24 Hours of LeMons has spread to the East Coast, bringing with it one of the shoddiest excuses ever concocted for hanging with the boys every weekend to hoist wrenches and frosty beverages.

It's an excuse that four Triangle teams have eagerly seized over the past few months as they resurrected decaying junkers for the event, which starts today in Kershaw, S.C., about 70 miles south of Charlotte.

"Uh, we're building a race car, honey. Home by midnight."

Riiiiight. And you do that by fashioning a front bumper into a giant bone? Clenched in huge dog's teeth? Or by bolting on horns that bleat a flatulent rendition of "La Cucaracha"?

LeMons -- which has inflamed car lovers' baser instincts since its inaugural run in California two years ago -- isn't just a race. No one, even the organizers, is quite sure what it is.

There is racing, but not 24 hours of it like the hallowed endurance race in Le Mans, France. There's more like 14 and a half hours in sessions today and Sunday. And that's just the beginning of the false advertising. This thing owes as much to TV game shows, Roman gladiator fights and the Burning Man Festival than to auto racing.

"I call it a novelty race," said Tom Freeman, whose team, the DoriftoDogs, prepared a BMW 325E in Angier. "There's a show-and-tell aspect to it, because everybody gets to be creative and make an airplane or whatever out of their car. It's this chaos and madness that comes out of the minds of all these frustrated car geeks."

Like Doriftodogs' canine BMW.

The "LeMons" part, at least, is accurate: The cars must cost less than $500 to buy and prepare. And while cheating is almost mandatory, most entries still would be more at home in a salvage yard or a weed-filled backyard than on a race track.

One of the Darwinian aspects of the LeMons is the packed track -- nearly 100 cars are entered in "LeMons South," and 23 are from North Carolina.

The journey, not the destination

As they frantically finished preparing this week, members of three Triangle teams said the goals were to finish and give everyone a proper stint at the wheel. None admitted to hopes of winning the $1,500 prize for most laps completed.

In a quiet Durham neighborhood, Taylor Brockman, Travis Tea and Greg Prospero, all clad in grease-smeared T-shirts, gathered around Team Quattro Libre's Audi 4000S in Brockman's garage.

The team had painted it the red, white and green of the Mexican flag. The color scheme and the cheesy mustaches they're growing are a tribute to "Nacho Libre," the Jack Black comedy movie about Mexican pro wrestling.

It's the car with the fancy horn system. It also had a leaking exhaust manifold that made irregular popping noises and a dodgy ignition, which made it hard to start. The team hoped to fix the ignition before the race.

Tea bragged that he had already destroyed two Audis on the road.

"This could be the third," he said.

"OK, you'll be the last driver, then," Prospero, the team captain, replied, then started fiddling with a driver cooling system fashioned from a boat bilge pump, an Igloo cooler and clear tubes that snake around inside a T-shirt.

He had plenty of time to gin up strange contraptions, because Quattro Libre has a secret advantage: unemployment. Prospero and Brockman scored nearly unlimited time to work on the car after both were laid off June 30 -- Prospero from Bank of America and Brockman from Motricity.

"We need another sponsor," Prospero said. "Maybe the Employment Security Commission."

Locals have been scrutinizing YouTube videos of LeMons, trying to get a feel for what to expect.