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What Does A Race Belvedere Need Most? Bowling Ball-Actuated Active Aerodynamics! [24 Hours Of Lemons]

The Faster Farms Chickens' 1966-7 Plymouth Belvedere looked pretty good as an exact replica of the Foster Imposters' car… but something was still lacking.



Since there's a trophy for Most Dangerous Banned F1 Technology, the Chickens decided they'd take a shot at it. While their first choice was a Chapparal-style Sucker Fan, budgetary constraints nixed that option pretty fast. Instead, they opted for the Hillbilly Wing, an ironing board that flips up to provide crucial downforce under acceleration, deceleration, turns, bumps, or steep grades. The video above tells the whole story.



They've also added some nice audio features. Yes, that's the Super Chicken "Charge" call!

Just to make things more interesting, the folks at Foster Farms Chicken got wind of the Faster Farms crew and contacted them. Rather than get all corporate and crush them for copyright infringement, etc., Foster Farms took the high road and issued an official press release:

CALLING ALL RACE FANS: ‘FASTER IMPOSTERS’ TO RACE AT THUNDERHILL IN WILLOWS IN 24 HOURS OF LeMONS
WILLOWS, Calif. –
The “Faster Imposters” – a take off on Foster Farms’ popular advertising characters – are gearing up for the race of their lives midnight to midnight December 27 - 28 at the Thunderhill Raceway Park, in Willows, Calif. It’s 24 Hours of LeMons, an all night race of 100 broken down, beat up cars just trying to cross the finish line.
Faster Imposter Race Captain Adrian Smith and his teammate are such fans of Foster Farms’ Foster Imposter television commercials that they’ve put together nearly an exact replica of the 1960s Plymouth Belvedere featured in the ads and plan to race dressed in Imposter knockoff chicken costumes. Of course, they’ll bring the stuffed Foster Imposters along for moral support. The Foster Imposters are the junk food eating chickens that can never quite make the grade to be fresh, natural Foster Farms chickens. The Faster Imposters are also trying make the grade.
“It's very important that the car lasts long enough for all of us to have a chance to drive some of the roughly 15 hours,” said Smith. “Getting this wonderful beat-up old Belvedere up to snuff has been a challenge. Just finishing would be honorable in an old 60's Plymouth,” comments Smith, who has a soft spot for the old Belvedere cars and has collected and rebuilt several.
Given that, their race strategy is:

- Save the car, don't drive it beyond its means
- Pit safely and effectively
- Have as much fun as humanly possible!



Be sure to check in this weekend for 24 Hours Of LeMons Arse Freeze-A-Palooza coverage; I'll be pretty busy with judging and racing, but I'm sure I'll manage to sneak in some live updates here and there. I got to lovely Willows last night and found Belvedere Adrian at his teammate Al's shop (that's Al as in Al's Rapid Transit, a name that should be familiar to West Coast Mopar guys), conveniently located just a couple miles from the track. He was busy gluing stale pizza and donuts to the race car's dashboard, in order to replicate the Foster Imposters' ride as accurately as possible:




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First-Ever LeMons Junkyard Scavenger Hunt Won By Huey Newis And The Lose! [Junkyard Find]

What could be more fun than spending a Sunday afternoon digging through the contents of junked cars in a search for heavy metal cassettes, silverware, Magnetti Marelli electric motors, V12 intake manifolds, or pornography? Searching for those things (and even more harebrained items) in order to win a Gerald R. Ford Memorial Pardon Certificate for your 24 Hours Of LeMons team, of course! That's what happened at a certain East Bay self-service wrecking yard yesterday…



After a great deal of beer and fried food swillage brainstorming, the Chief Perp produced a list of items and associated point values. Naturally, we left a lot of wiggle room for hair-splitting junkyard lawyers who wanted to debate the finer points of prescription meds and cloisonne-versus-paint. I really wanted the BMW 750iL's intake manifold to hang on my living room wall, so we gave such manifolds a 100-point value in the hope that some team would do all the work of pulling one for me.


First, we figured we'd establish an "office" in the junkyard; here's the Chief Perp and Judge Loverman removing the doors of an Econoline for enhanced ergonomics. Welcome to LeMons Scavenger Hunt Headquarters!


Whoops! Looks like another junkyard patron left a surprise inside! We abandoned the Econoline, moved a couple rows over and picked out a nice clean Aerostar instead.


Much-beloved ex-Jalop Mike Bumbeck heard about the fun and, being a serious junkyard aficionado himself, decided to drop by. Hey, there's a Plymouth Sapporo in the yard!


A dozen or so teams showed up and the lists were distributed. Teams had one hour to gather as many items as they could, then meet up at the headquarters Aerostar.


The participants fanned out and began rummaging through gloveboxes for insurance cards, tearing up the pair of Italian cars (a Fiat 131 wagon and an Alfa Spider) for Marelli motors, unscrewing hoseclamps, and so on.


Though we didn't have such things on our list, this 1957 birth certificate from an Air Force base in Alaska was one of the coolest items found.


Time's up! Everyone gathered around for the accounting, and those junkyard lawyers started making their cases. We'd brought a 12-volt battery pack to test the analog clocks, at which point the participants learned that a functioning junkyard analog clock is a rare find indeed.


Hoseclamps and silverware were very common finds (2 and 10 points apiece, respectively), with some teams approaching the 150-clamp mark.


Several teams vied for the 100-point "Best '24 Hours Of LeMons' Written In Emblem Letters" award.


As far as items to be installed on a team's race car went, this "Orgasm Donor" license plate frame inspired a great deal of envy. What a find!


The overall winners? Thanks to their realization that Oldsmobiles were bristling with cloisonne badges (40 points for each cloisonne badge from a manufacturer no longer sold anywhere), Team Huey Newis And The Lose came out on top with 375 points… and then they were awarded a 5,000-point bonus for finding a Mendocino County court docket chronicling the most awesome Christmas Eve DUI bust ever; Judge Loverman tells the whole story over at Autofiends. The NorCal contingent of Team Porcubimmer came in second, and Team Cant Am (back in action with a new Volvo 242T and looking for a trophy in honor of fallen comrade Court Summerfield) took third place. All three teams got the aforementioned Gerald R. Ford Memorial Pardons (present one to the LeMons Supreme Court when you get black-flagged and avoid horrible punishment), and Team HLATN gets an extra-special prize: pole position at the Arse Freeze-A-Palooza, also know as the I Love Pole Award. Sure, pole position is completely meaningless in a 24-hour (actually more like 18-hour, thanks to Communistic noise regulations) endurance race, but it's a badge of honor!




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PCH, Totally Affordable Racing Madness: Austin Healey Sprite or Lancia Scorpion? [Project Car Hell]

Welcome to Project Car Hell, where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! Yesterday, the Ferrari 328GTS vanquished the Japanese upstart NSX in a PCH Superpower Smackdown, which should make fellow PCH Superpowers Britain and France- unsettled since a Glas beat a Lotus day before yesterday- breathe a sigh of relief. Today we're going to let a couple of Superpowers have at it, in a Sub-$500 Race Car Challenge: Britain versus Italy!


With UDMan's '63 Corvair raising the Index Of Effluency stakes for next year's New England 24 Hours Of LeMons, anyone who shows up with the same ol' snoozeworthy RX-7 or Camaro will be the object of well-deserved ridicule by his or her peers. You need to limp roar onto the track in a car manufactured by one of the Big Three PCH Superpowers, and we've managed to find one that already has a roll cage! In fact, this '68 Austin Healey Sprite is a proven racing champion, having taken the SCCA Grand National Solo II Class DP trophy in 1978! Since that time, well, there's been near-total a certain amount of deterioration, but who the heck cares about non-structural rust damage in a race car? Of course, there is certainly might be some structural damage as well, but you'll get to fixing that… right after you figure out how to get a new engine installed with the $1 in budget flexibility you'll have after spending $499 on this car. There must be something you can sell off this hulk racer; if nothing else, you can sell off the transmission and use the $75 to buy a basket-case donor car with some sort of functioning engine/trans combo. Thanks to Evil Genius for the tip!

Since the rollcage doesn't count against the $500 LeMons price ceiling, why pay for a car that already has one? Instead, go for a mid-engined Italian machine, and we don't mean some cheapo Fiat X1/9 here. You can kick it up a notch and send your opponents staggering back with a mixture of pity fear and confusion dread when you drag drive this 1976 Lancia Scorpion off the trailer before the race. It's got some accident damage, but so what? You're not racing to look pretty, you're racing to spend an entire weekend turning wrenches and cursing in Italian win! Does it run? Is the Pope Italian? Hey, that Fiat Twin Cam engine is just months minutes away from firing up, you'll see!

Which cheapo race car will get you feeling Effluent?
( surveys)



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