When you compete in a typical 24 Hours of Lemons racing event, you don’t actually race the entire time. It’s usually about eight hours on Saturday and another eight or so hours on Sunday. The track goes cold at night, beers are popped, grills are fired up, and you either enjoy chatting about your shitty race cars with the teams around you or you’re frantically wrenching so that your shitty race car is ready to actually race. But this past Lemons event at Thunderhill was different. Somehow, the Lemons team convinced Thunderhill to hold a 25-hour and 1-minute race… and it was pretty wild.
Our race car is a 1962 Ford Ranchero. It has lights, and it’s actually street legal. The only thing we needed to add to prepare for the race was lighted numbers. This is so the corner workers know who to call in for black flags when the sun goes down.
Thunderhill is a fun track. In both the full five-mile setup and the shorter courses. Thankfully, to help manage our mental loads, the layout for this race was just the 3-mile east loop, which includes the hill that Tavarish used to launch his McLaren a few years back. It’s an entertaining bit of tarmac located in a very hot part of California. I say hot because the temperature would play a serious factor all weekend. Daytime temps ranged from the 80s first thing in the morning up to as high as about 110 degrees. And our team doesn’t run cool suits. We’ve been rethinking that after this most recent race.
Regardless, our more pressing issue, which was discovered during practice on Friday, is that our fuel stumbling issues for the car remain. In fact, they’ve only gotten worse. We believe the fuel is essentially boiling via the return line because it’s running past very hot bits of the car on an excessively hot day. To try and rectify this for the race start, car owner Tim Odell devised a way to attempt to cool the fuel on its return journey to the tank.
We used an oil cooler and extra fuel line to make a longer pathway through cooler air. This mostly worked great on Saturday. We could all pull off nearly one hour to one hour 20-minute stints. At that point, you’re pushing your body and brain too hard anyway due to the temperatures on track. When I got out of the car after my first stint Saturday, it felt like my brain was boiling.
Thankfully, we had some refuge from the heat for this race. Tim borrowed a proper racing trailer, which kept our tools inside and also had an AC unit mounted on top. If we hadn’t had this for the weekend, we would’ve been in pretty bad shape. The trailer was a game-changer for the weekend, for sure.
Another great tool we had for the race? A Sprinter van setup for camping, which we borrowed from SantaCruz Campers. This afforded us two proper spots for sleeping, a fridge, and a place to step out of the heat. I asked my friend Zack Klapman (of The Smoking Tire) to race with us, and he mentioned that his friend owns a camper van company. He put in the ask to see what might be available, and we ended up with excellent mobile track-side accommodations.
Back to the racing: The day was going well. Everyone was pulling solid stints, but we were certainly anxiously excited for the approach of nightfall, primarily for the cooler air it brings. As the track went dark, the cars lit up, and the whole place took on this ethereal vibe. It was awesome to see Lemons racing in the dark.
It was also more difficult for me to push the car hard. I struggled to find my braking points and I actually performed better when I was moving with traffic. This is because the extra lighting helped light up more of the circuit for me. Some cars had more aggressive lighting strategies in that they added lightbars and other extra bits of illumination. We just had the old 7″ LED headlights to guide the way.
For the rest of our team, however, they adapted to the nighttime perfectly. All of their nighttime lap times were besting their daytime numbers. The car was enjoying the cool air. And those of us not racing or up next were trying to enjoy the nighttime coolness by taking naps or showers.
I hopped back in the car to take laps as the sun came up. It was beautiful and I was excited to try and go faster again, as I’d set our previous fastest laps during the day on Saturday. But Sunday brought worse fueling issues. The car struggled far more, even with our previously working fix. We debugged. Attempted other fixes. But the car would handle a few laps before it would stutter and stumble under any sort of load.
I believe in trying to get more fuel flowing, but we may have actually made the whole problem worse. Our car is powered by a 331 V8, fed via a Holley Sniper. To improve fuel flow, Tim added more fuel pumps to the gas tank to maximize what we’re getting out of it. In the past, the car would behave as if it were empty once the tank got halfway down.
But by increasing the flow of fuel, we may be sending too much back down the return line. This just gets hot, boils, or cavitates, and you wind up making it all worse again. Our plan for the future? Dump the Sniper and go back to a traditional carburetor. This ditches the return line, as well. If we simplify and still have problems, we can further debug from there. But at least we can remove certain worsening variables from the equation.
Overall, the weekend was great. When the car runs, it runs like a monster. It’s fast, super controllable, and truly fun to drive. I believe it could win Class C if we could keep it out there for a full race. But that’s obviously a tall order, especially when a full race is just over 25 hours.
Thankfully, our next race will be back to the standard Lemons setup we’ve come to know. Still, if Lemons does another nighttime event on the West Coast, we’re definitely heading back again. This last one was awesome.