Great news! After a long weekend of grueling wheel-to-wheel endurance racing, the three Alfa Romeo Milanos finished 2nd, 3rd, and 4th at the 24 Hours of LeMons at Stafford Speedway in Stafford Springs, CT! Here’s how it ended:

For the most part, the Milanos circulated completely without drama, eating up the laps. Good pit strategy, zero mechanical issues, and minimal time penalties (i.e. good self-restraint) put all of the Milanos high up in the standings very early on. This year, 83 teams were entered and about 59 made it to the track. There were so many cars on the track that, at the start, there was about 100 yards between the front row and the last row! This made for some interesting racing in the beginning, and also thinned the herd pretty quickly! All of the Milanos received various severe shots to the rear by out-of-control cars and drivers who had overstepped the laws of physics. Fortunately, no Milanos sustained any real damage or, more importantly, received any penalties for "rubbage". In fact, this year, Milano time penalties were all but absent — a decided advantage in successful endurance racing. (Well, okay — Kevin Oliver’s car did actually get two penalties, in one of which they made the driver eat baby food!)

The most exciting hit was one the Testa di Spillo car received in the chicane "S" turn. Chard Beef (a GM V8 product from hell — you really have to see this one to believe it) hit them hard enough in the rear bumper to lift the Milano clean off the ground. Fortunately, everyone was pointed in a straight line at the time and no one spun out and off.

In a little early drama, the Pro-Crass-Duh-Nation car came in early with some sort of misfiring issue. Kevin Redden helped Greg diagnose the problem and figured that the air flow meter might be the culprit, so he quickly pulled a spare from his stash, hooked it up on Greg’s Milano, and out he went.

As the race got closer to the end, it was pretty clear that the Kielbasa Kids’ Honda Civic was going to be untouchable unless Lady Luck decided to give them her disfavor. The car was running like a clock and, since he had run flawlessly and damned near won it all last year, it was not looking good for Scuderia Limoni. Then, with less than an hour to go, last year’s winning Miata (the car they had failed to run down in the waning minutes of that race) seemed to get under the Kielbasa Kids’ skin. All of a sudden, they were racing — hard. Yowsa — just what we needed! The Miata drivers were completely out of the race but were being total jerks on the track (they were flying and everyone else be damned) and the Honda was taking the bait! It became clear that a substantial time penalty or maybe even a race-ending crash or mechanical collapse was a real possibility! We had a (long) shot at first place overall — woo-hoo! Unfortunately for us, the Honda driver got hold of himself, wiped away the red mist, and slowed down. You could almost see him take a deep breath and regain control of his emotions. Dammit! Now, all we had to hope for was mechanical failure. While Civics have their problems, based on last year’s results, that didn’t seem likely. Oh, well.

There was a little late drama for the Scuderia Limoni entry. With about 40 minutes to go in the race, with Brian at the controls, the car decided to dump the heater core onto his feet (something to look into this winter). With his feet burning up and the cockpit filled with smoke, Brian thought the car was on fire! He brought it into

the pits, where we discovered that the car had overheated because the fan had stopped running. With help from Greg’s crew, we got the fan jury-rigged, filled up the coolant, and sent him back out to finish. The stop seemed interminable, but in reality it only consumed about 15 minutes total. At that time, we had about a 40-lap lead over the Testa di Spillo car. We thought/hoped that we had made it back out in time, but couldn’t be sure how much damage had been done until the final results were posted. Scuderia Limoni had managed to hold onto 2nd place by 10 laps.

This year, the "organizers" had changed the track configuration to something that worked better for the Milanos — they removed the chicane at the exit of the oval and let the cars run out of the oval and right down the main straight. This solved the gear ratio incompatibilities that the Milanos had last year. While none of the team’s fastest lap times matched the winning Civic’s best, we were all within 1-2 seconds a lap (best to best) — a much closer margin this year.

A "highlight" of the weekend is the People’s Curse award, in which all of the teams vote for the most cursed car on the track, which is then summarily destroyed. This year, a pimpmobile Impala (green with a big gold grill and trim) was the "winner". All of the teams were allowed to have their best mechanics come forward with their tools of choice and remove as many parts as they could in 5 minutes. I would say that about 75% of the "mechanics" chose sledge hammers, second most popular were axes, and third were big friggin’ pry bars, followed by an assortment of bolt cutters, etc. Can’t recall seeing anyone with anything like a wrench or screwdriver. What was amazing was that none of the "mechanics" got their skulls crushed or otherwise lost body parts — it was mayhem, with people standing shoulder-to-shoulder swinging sledges and axes.

All in all, the 24 Hours of LeMons was a ton of fun! By the way, last year, Kevin Oliver sent a "press release" to Alfa Romeo headquarters to notify them that some of their heritage (20+ year old crapcans) had done so well in a race of crapcans. He hasn’t heard back yet. Perhaps they’ll be really impressed this year!

(Click on the thumbnails below for a larger view,
and then use the arrow buttons to navigate)