What I Learned at 24 Hours of LeMons
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Better to be squishy and reliable than fast By RYAN LEIGHTON It was early autumn when I thought it would be a bright idea to try my luck at auto racing. I had never stepped foot on a race track before. But I was convinced to get behind the wheel of a late 1990s crapbox to endure what became 14 hours of high octane terror on the New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
Joined by the likes of four other dubbers and one veteran racer, we called ourselves the Headgasketless Horsemen. We donned our racing gear, and went to battle with hundreds of other rusted out crapboxes, better known by the term “lemons”. This was 24 hours of LeMons. As for the car, saying it handled well wouldn’t be correct.
hat’s not to say it handled poorly, either – because even that denotes that it handled at all. No – the car just kind of squished around corners. Try as though we might to wring any sort of aggression out of it, we were still racing a white marshmallow around the course. Yet still we soldiered on for 337 laps. The five cars behind us – a Mazda Miata, BMW 325i,
Audi A6, Datsun 280Z and BMW325 were all unquestionably faster but we were better. Whereas those teams drove their cars too hard and wound up in the garage or in trouble, our squishy little sedan just kept puttering around the course. By the end of our endeavor we might have taken away one lesson. If life give you lemons, squeeze the life out of them, because
it’s better to be squishy and reliable than fast.