The 24 Hours of LeMons celebrates the 10th anniversary of its first race this weekend at Gingerman Raceway and while I’ll be there wearing the robes of the LeMons Supreme Court. While the endurance racing series for $500 cars maintains its original intention of fun before seriousness, LeMons has changed a great deal in the intervening decade. The early races were held where racing was cheap, which was almost all short ovals with “road courses” marked using tires in them.
The very first race and four of the first 10 or so were at Altamont Motorsports Park in California, but the series also ventured to Flat Rock Speedway in 2007. While contact was forbidden in those early races, the close confines meant an inevitable amount of fender rubbing. Today, the racing takes place almost exclusively on purpose-built road courses and is much cleaner, but one of the takeaways from the video below is how far onboard-camera technology—and indeed almost all racing technology—has advanced in 10 years. For a few hundred bucks now, you can run live remote telemetry coupled with live HD video trackside, even on a LeMons car.
That was a thought that almost certainly never crossed anybody’s minds at Altamont or Flat Rock in 2007, which are shown in this video from Anton Lovett’s ONSET Chevy Cavalier wagon. That wagon was eventually totaled in a rollover at Sears Point in 2010, but Lovett has run something like 80 LeMons races since. Amazingly, some of the cars in this video do actually still exist and still race periodically in LeMons. The Mercedes 190 at Altamont, for example, has continued racing despite taking enough knocks at Altamont that its right-side wheelbase is two inches shorter than the left.
