You know you look at terrible seventies Carney like that would never run right
my grandmother had one and it broke down all the time and here I am racing it.
A lot of other gear heads will see a Ferrari ensuite somewhere and be like
all over it. And I'll look at the broken ass Corolla that's on the street, and I'm like, 'I'd race that'.
The thing that seperates lemons from anything else that you're out there in a
machine that you designed and made all of your own.
It's like Halloween meets gasoline. It's like burning man for car geeks.
If the thing runs, and it's unlikely to kill bystanders then bring it out.
Everybody they always ask how fast are you going, and I don't know.
The car doesn't have a speedometer. Dunno, don't care!
Kind of the point of lemons is that everything is breaking all this insanity around it.
A lot of the cars do fail, but that's part of the process right?
Taking something that shouldn't really
work that shouldn't even be on a racetrack that shouldn't even be in the
same zip code as a racetrack, and making it not just drivable but actually racing it for 14 to
24 hours without stopping.
These cars shouldn't exist but they do, and they do really well.
To just see like, somebody put two engines in a car -- wow! I wonder what terrible things I could think of.
That's part of what makes lemons, lemons. It's part of your expression.
For me it's more like an outlet of creativity.
Putting things together that shouldn't exist and kind of making a code.
They don't look pretty, but they work.
People try all sorts of wacky design ideas that you normally wouldn't see it
at any other type of racing event.
Look what we could make with these limited, cheap, easily available junkyard parts.
A lot of the fun is making these frankenstein machines.
It's very much improvised.
We looked at the 911 shell that we had sitting at the shop it was rolled.
There was no other place it could go other than a junkyard
And then the next inevitable question was, what the absolute antithesis of a Porsche engine?
What's the most offensive thing we can do? Well that's a turbo diesel.
We have a tractor engine in our Porsche. Why not have a tractor theme?
As your doing it, your like 'ok, this needs a wire to this, how on Earth are these connected? '
And you kind of build it all as you go.
If you're that kind of MacGyvery person
you will appreciate a lot of the skill sets required on lemons.
I don't think you can take most super cars out there and run them for eight hours a day.
You can arrive and drive with a Ferrari, but your heart and soul isn't
in the thing that you're driving. You didn't design this thing, you didn't
fabricate it. You didn't stay up until two in the morning was scrambling to get
this engine to turn over.
So when you get there and you're in this thing that
represents your creative side, represents your ability to make things; it's just an incredible experience.
There is real racing going on. It's a real competition, but at the end of the day the top prize is for the
people who fulfill that car culture thing the most with bringing the most
terrible thing and doing the best. I think that's kind of genius.
If you're still going around the track at the end of the race that's a huge accomplishment in it's own right.
I could do the racing part sometimes. I feel like the creativity part to me is almost way more important.
The 24 Hours of lemons is a race that anybody can go to, you can spectate, you can drive.
You can enter your own car.
You can enter the car that you've always wanted as a teenager, or as a kid that is now affordable.
And you can turn it into a race car, and go racing in your dream car.