Anyway, I raced in the 24 Hours of LeMons the weekend after Christmas 2008. I meant to blog about it here, but I dropped the ball (see first paragraph regarding blogging resolution).
I raced with team Lower Gear! in a 1988 BMW 325e. Our theme was a spoof on the television show Top Gear (due to time constraints, we didn't get to follow through with all of the ideas we had planned):
Chan Nghiem (team captain), Ron Harness, Joe Sesto, Stuart Jivapongse, Kevin Chang, and Jerry Esteban
Here's a close up of me getting ready to
Also, Ngan came along as part of our pit crew (although she spent an awful lot of time eating and sleeping):
This was the first LeMons race for everybody on the team, so we didn't have high expections (not to be confused with the desire to win). The car held up extremely well (thanks Chan and Kevin!), so fortunately we didn't have as many mechanical issues to deal with as some other teams. However, we had a few minor issues that helped set us back a bit, including dealing with a seemingly defective transponder (turned out that our team was being listed as Delinquest Racing, and the transponder was working just fine), and a few spins/contacts that resulted in penalties (e.g., Sporting diapers, 30-minutes in the penalty box, etc.):
Oh yeah, there was also an incident where Chan's keys got locked inside of his car (not sure how that happened...Kevin! ;) that interuppted our rotation slightly (not really, but I wanted to add some drama):
Long story short, we finished 76th place out of ~100 (check out the top 100). Not too bad, considering the fact that we left early the second day (we knew we weren't going to win, so we decided to do one rotation and call it a day to beat the traffic).
At any rate, I had a great time racing and hanging out with the team.
You can check out the rest of our photos here (I really need a longer lens).
Go team Lower Gear!
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