By Kevin Redden

This is the second installment of our saga to get a CHEAP Milano ready for the 24 Hours or LeMons race at Thompson Speedway in August. As a reminder, here is the description from the LeMons web site:

The 24 Hours of LeMons is a weekend-long race for cars purchased, fixed up, and track-prepped for total of $500 or less. Generally, track racing consists of two endurance sessions, one on Saturday and one on Sunday, with a late-night intermission for sleeping, eating, and Band-Aid application in between. Count on plenty of noise, prizes, water fights, and questionably civilized fun before, during, and after the track sessions. Finally, assuming you’re still standing, there’s the gala awards ceremony which presents trophies, plaques, and winner’s purses paid out in nickels.

When we last left our heroes (er, idiots?), they had stripped the interior of the $500 Milano Verde down to the bare essentials, hoping to get it back together enough to give it a test run at the AONE Autocross on May 31st . Since then, we’ve made great progress…

Last time, we made some patch pieces for the rust holes in the floor pans out of some old Alfetta door skins. I finally got those banged into shape and welded on, so now we don’t need to worry about our feet hitting the pavement! Brian painted them, so now it looks almost stock (yeah, right!).

Kevin welding in the floor patch

Tom used some heavy-duty screen to fabricate a new grill to keep the flying bits from other cars out of our radiator—looks mean! Lon worked at getting the seats back in and some new brake lights installed using a cheap trailer light kit from Harbor Freight. Brian and Greg spent some time trying to get a nice side-exit exhaust setup on, but this was foiled by the lack of front jack points (the board underneath that we were using to put the front part of the car on the lift was in the way) so they put the stock exhaust back on. Brian spent a little time on a new paint scheme for the car. Once that was done, the car was ready for the autocross!

The finished floor patches – not concours correct but they’ll do!

On that morning, I met Brian at Nashoba early so we could get things set up before folks starting arriving. Brian backed the LeMons Verde out of his trailer and we used it to carry the piles of cones around the course—so far, so good! After we got the layout set up, I decided to take it for a more spirited run around the course to try it out. The first thing I noticed was that the steering wheel cover made the wheel way too fat, so that was going to have to go. Next, as I pushed things a bit, the engine would stumble and hesitate in the middle of the RPM band, but it was fine and sounded great at the high end. I went to take the first sharp turn and car didn’t want to! The tires were complete junk—no grip at all! Luckily, Brian had decided to bring along a set of his 15" wheels with race tires on them, so, while we continued to set up the rest of the autocross stuff, Tom swapped wheels on the Verde.

The first official autocross run – new Italian paint scheme and race tires!

Tom and Brian were going to run the autocross in the LeMons Verde, while I would run it in mine and then try the LeMons car again when we got to the fun runs at the end. We were running two groups in the event and we decided that the first group would get two runs each. Then we’d switch groups, they’d get their two, then back to the first for their final three runs, etc. Tom was in the first group, so he took the LeMons Verde out for his two runs. After the runs, he said that the brakes were really dragging a lot but that the tires felt pretty good. He and Brian decided to try to bleed some pressure out of the master cylinder to see if that would help the brakes, so they shut the car down. Once that was accomplished (it didn’t fix the problem; turned out that our pedal installation wasn’t quite perfect and the brake pedal couldn’t disengage all the way), Brian went to start the car again but it wouldn’t light. After some dinking around, we determined that the fuel pump had decided at that moment to pack it in and we didn’t have any spares with us (I wouldn’t let them take the one off my Verde!). So, after a measly two runs, the LeMons Verde was down for the count, although it was far better to have it happen here than in the race!

We took a couple of weeks off after that and just recently started making progress again. Brian and Tom swapped the bad fuel pump for a spare and that fixed things, so now they are working on plumbing in a second pump in parallel to give us a better chance at avoiding this issue again. While they were working on that, I was working on a patch panel to cover up the gaping hole in the driver’s side rocker panel. I got as much welded in as I could, but we’ll need to take the front of the car off the lift arms to allow me to finish it.

On June 16th, we FINALLY got notified that our entry for the race was officially accepted! Woo-hoo! Now we have to get cracking and get our roll cage ordered, as well as the harnesses and all the other stuff we didn’t want to spend money on until we were sure we were officially in.

You can follow our progress in the blog I’m keeping, and you can visit the LeMons website for more info. And we’ll continue to keep you posted in future issues of Velocissima!

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