Our excursion to Barber Motorsports Park this weekend was both fun and exhausting. We arrived to a chilly but warming Birmingham, Alabama not long after the area had seen low temperatures in the teens and large (for the south) amounts of snow. There was still some snow on roadsides and ice on the road entering the facility.
The mood in the paddock, though, was the usual revelry and good spirits (of both kinds) that you’d expect in the 24 Hours of LeMons. This was the series’ first event at Barber Motorsports Park, and everyone marveled at the manicured and well appointed facility as much as they did the detailed theme work on their competitors’ cars—in particular that of the fabulous Knoxvegas Lowballers. They brought their SVT Contour-powered, mid-engined Geo Metro with an impeccable Smokey and the Bandit theme. They added smokestacks, a huge grille and a trailer-like box to it, making the car an homage to the movie. Their teammates even donned costumes, one wearing a wedding dress, another sporting a mustache worthy of Burt Reynolds.
Once the race began, we were out to impressive results: 8th place! Tragedy struck early in a poorly executed pit stop, dropping us into the 20s, and it was downhill from there. Stepping on our own hootuses earned us more slow pit stops and several black flags throughout the weekend. One of these was with the OK Speed team, run by TTAC’s Christian “Mental” Ward—with whom we had an imaginary auto journalist mini-competition. One of OK Speed’s drivers spun, and Johnny, our driver from OG Racing, ended up scraping doors with their Miata. We finished the race in 38th overall, a mere four spots from the top half of the standings. OK Speed ended up with cooling system problems that nuked the cylinder head, and their sufficiently shadetree repair earned them a Heroic Fix trophy.
We have a list of tweaks, upgrades and repairs to conduct on the Miata—but the main fault, dear Brutus, is not in our car, but in ourselves. We’re hoping for cleaner driving next race.
For a full race recap, check in with The Rusty Hub or Murilee Martin.
Hearty thanks go to our car’s sponsors: BFGoodrich, Flyin’ Miata, Treasure Coast Miata, Sbox Engineering, The FIRM, AutoSport Labs.
Big thanks also to The 24 Hours of LeMons, OG Racing and EFS Combust.
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