Texas Gator-O-Rama Results! 6th of 96
The team from left to right: Ken, Matt, Brian, Price, Dan, Drew. Oh yeah, and Fred hanging onto the car.
The Cleaver Motorsports family set out to Motorsport Ranch Houston early Friday morning (2/27/09) to begin shaking down the revitalized BMW 325E LeMons car. From the very beginning things were looking great. The junkyard candidate of a bimmer actually moved around the track at a solid pace. As a true testament to German engineering, we began to turn some very pleasing lap times despite the questionable engineering that brought the #17 BMW back to life.
Our driver lineup consisted of Price (Dad), Drew, Dan, and Ken. Dan is a life-long racer, proud owner of a SCCA Solo II National Championship (back in the ’80s if I recall), and Ken is a well-rounded Time Trial racer and driving instructor for NASA and other various organizations. Ken brought some valuable knowledge from the Spec E30 world and helped us in making the most of our junker. Throughout the practice day, we began to encounter some occasional stuttering in left-hand turns. Regardless, practice went on and we tried to fix it by the end of Friday before racing began the following morning.
Needless to say, all of our assumptions were wrong. Drew started the race and immediately encountered the same problems, but much more severely and was forced to pit at the very beginning of the race. Luckily, our ace mechanic Brian was able to crew for us over the weekend. Within just a few minutes, Brian found that the main electrical relay was less than ideally snug, and so we resorted to zip ties and electrical tape. Drew went back out on track 9 laps down, and the car ran flawlessly for the rest of the weekend.
After the first hour we were charted at 67th position. Throughout Saturday we all stayed out of the penalty box and moved all the way up to 12th position by the end of the first day of racing. Everyone drove really solid laptimes and most importantly stayed out of trouble.
Sunday the pace picked up dramatically. The crappiest of the crappy had self-destructed by this time and the pits were about as busy as the track. Also, people that had no clue what they were doing on Saturday were a little more competent by Sunday. Price began on Sunday and did a fabulous job. Ken soon followed. We encountered our first minor penalty on Sunday when Ken barely clipped a cone that was out of place. Since we were good all day Saturday, the judges cut him slack for such a minor offense and we were on our way, but it cost us about 3 more laps. Ken ran a great stint and then we pitted to put Drew in the car.
Drew came out of the pits with an axe to grind since we still had a lot of work to climb into the top 10. Drew was flying through traffic and making excellent time, paying attention to corner workers, avoiding accidents, and all the proper stuff to avoid penalties. There were many full-course yellow laps in Drew’s stint and when the track finally went green again, Drew had a clear path ahead to make up some serious time. Drew was busy ripping around the racetrack and was setting the fastest laptimes that we saw all weekend. Unfortunately, after another full-course yellow, Drew once again had a clear track ahead when we went back to green flag racing. Drew was driving faster than ever. So much so that it was too fast for the track conditions. Drew went 2-wheels off just after exiting the post-launch esses. That caused our 2nd black flag of the day. Relatively speaking, we were still nuns compared to the morons that ended up in the penalty box 8+times, so the judges let us go with a driver change. This downtime put us another 9 laps down, but we managed to stay in the 8th position. Drew admitted that the off-track excursion was of no fault other than his own, but warned Dan-the-closer that the track was getting warm and greasy, especially on the backside.
Dan set off to another great blistering pace and was working through traffic, all the way up until the final two corners of the race, attempting to pass people running at the back of the pack. Dan’s aggression was rewarding and amazingly stayed penalty-free all weekend. His performance put on a good show, earning us laps and raising the hair on the back of our necks as we spotted the course for him.
Overall, we managed to squeeze out a 6th place finish out of 96 cars that entered the race. Of some 450+ drivers, one of Drew’s pre-offroading laptimes scored our team the “Fastest German Car Award” by turning a laptime of 1:16.8, the sixth fastest lap of the race. Although we were “sixth” fastest, we like to think that at least a couple cars that turned in faster times were cheater cars that were rightfully penalized. That said, the other 5 cars that turned faster laps than us finished no better than 34th position. This race isn’t at all a testament of speed. We just got lucky. Our speed made up for a few minor mistakes and gave us something fun to fight for all weekend.
The 24-hours-of-lemons is a fantastic motorsports expo. It deserves television coverage with so much excitement going on over the course of two days of racing crapcan clunkers. I highly encourage anyone thinking about entering to get a solid team together and build a car. You will learn an infinite amount about racing while going through this process. You learn more in an hour of going wheel-wheel every single lap than you would in a lifetime at Driver’s Education events.
Stay tuned for future updates about our motorsports endeavors! Up next is refreshing the bimmer for the LAISSEZ LES CRAPHEAPS ROULEZ NEW ORLEANS in June. Along with that, Dad’s Panoz needs some attention so we can get back on the track in a real compilation of race-engineered machinery.
Feel free to contact us for any info about the race!
