These Are the Motorsports You Wish More People Knew About
Gotta give a callout to the 24 hours of lemons, (or Luckydog, which is a similar series)…
it’s a series where regular idiots like you or I can get out on a track and race. you dont need an SCCA license or anything like that… you also dont need a $100k race car, rather the opposite end of the spectrum at $500… though realistically it costs somewhere around $5000 to build up a lemons race car once you account for all the safety gear and everything. we built our race car for about $3000 TOTAL because we did the roll cage ourselves. that’s about as cheap as a race car gets…. though i should add, there are some serious crapcan race cars out there, that are wayyyy over budget…. but those get put in to class A (cheaty race cars), there’s also class B (kinda sorta play by the $500 rule, not as cheaty as A)… and class C (those who took the $500 rule farrrr too seriously, and showed up with a car that has no chance of ever winning anything, let alone finishing)
furthermore, once you have the race car built, you can race for as little as about $3200 (1 entry for 4x drivers, gas, food, tires, 1x track day, 2x days of racing) give or take for the entire weekend. so roughly $800/person for a weekend of BBQ, racing, paddock shenanigans, hanging out, and just good ol fun…
plus… how often do you get to come flying around a corner, just to mash that throttle to the floor, and hit the end of the straightaway at 110mph? at home not so much, but on the track, just about every single damn lap.
ALSO. the race directors are actually really cool about making exceptions for people who are subject to shitty circumstances….
so quick story, one of our teammates uncle has a stage 4 cancer that came back (recently. my story is little outa chronological order). he’s always been a gearhead. loved cars. loved working on cars. loved going fast (within reason) but life/this/that, he never got around to the opportunity of driving a car WOT the way you get to on a track. when he heard that we built a car for lemons he was a tiny bit jealous, he came out to a couple of our races to watch… at the time we had no idea what he was going thru, but when we heard what was going on, we knew that we had to see about getting him some time in the seat…. he was OVER THE MOON when we got him a spot in the driver’s seat at sonoma at the end of 2021, for him it was the experience of a lifetime….
fast forward to this May. shit progressed, and he wasnt feeling well. so we reached out to the Lemons staff explaining our situation, basically 3 healthy drivers, and 1 driver who may not be able to do more than about 20~30 min behind the wheel safely (racing is very tiring, he could probably go for an hour, but wed rather play it safe, both for our driver and others, so the plan was to limit him to a 20 min stint… enough to get the adrenaline pumping and feel the racing but not too far to where he’s not in control.)…
we contacted the Lemons’ staff, explaining our situation, that we wanted to add a 5th driver, because our current 5th may not be able to do much driving at all, usually that’s $250 or so. they waived the fee, and said along the lines of “look, in situations like that where we have the opportunity to provide someone with the experience of a lifetime, please dont hesitate to reach out.”
I have always wanted to run the 24 Hours of LeMons, and a couple of years I’ve come close to putting a team together and making it happen. Someday, I’ll find myself behind the wheel of one of those beautiful shitboxes.
