OFF THE RECORD

Racing a LeMon
Houston attorney Matt White continues his quest for a win in the 24 Hours of LeMons

By Keri D. Brown

"Nasty. Brutish. Not Short Enough. The crowd. The spectacle. The pall of blue smoke and roasted clutch discs. In all motorsport, no event captures the universal human need to whale on old crapcans and hoover down greasy barbecue like the 24 Hours of LeMons.”

So reads the introduction on the 24 Hours of LeMons website. (The name is a play on the “24 Hours of Le Mans,” the world’s oldest sports car endurance race.) Bracewell & Giuliani counsel Matt White is a tax and estate planner by day and a racer of beat-up cars by night. Matt caught the 24 Hours of LeMons bug after deciding that tracking a rather reliable Lotus Exige on the weekends did not compare to the simultaneous satisfaction and frustration of purchasing and modifying a cheap, or rather, very cheap car to race in LeMons.

The rules for the ten or so 24 Hours of LeMons held around the country each year are simple: a team of four to six racers purchases and preps a car for no more than $500 (safety equipment required for racing is also installed, but not included in the $500 cap). During the two-day race, the team that completes the most laps wins $1,500 in nickels. If the judges rule that any car cost more than $500, the team is docked one lap for every $10 over budget. Also, the competitors vote for the team they think cheated the most, resulting in the award of the “People’s Curse,” and the midrace crushing of that car.

Matt first raced in the 24 Hours of LeMons in 2007. He and his team hauled a 1986 Honda CR-X from Texas to Altamont, California, to race at an arena that bore a passing resemblance to something out of MAD MAX 2: THE ROAD WARRIOR.1 The CR-X finished in an improbable 8th place in a field of approximately 85 cars. Improbable because the car’s bumper was ripped off on the first lap and the car ran the rest of the race with an exposed radiator. “It was a miracle we lasted another 10 laps, let alone the entire weekend, given the amount of contact between cars in that race,” Matt says. The organizers have since cleaned up the racing, imposing severe penalties for any car on car contact.

The LeMons organizers give out a variety of awards, some good, some bad, and Matt’s team has won their share of the dubious ones. The team won the “You Got Screwed” award for the race in which their car’s engine blew up on the first lap. At another race, his team won the “Most Heroic Fix” award after the car died during the pre-race technical inspection. Matt’s team tore the whole car apart trying to diagnose the problem. Eventually, they determined it was a faulty engine control unit. The team called various junkyards, found a new one and installed it just after the race began. Then, during the race, the clutch failed. After another round of searching, the team located and installed a clutch overnight and finished the race the next day. “I think the judges felt sorry for us,” Matt says. “It was about 40°F and the wind was blowing at gale force. When we finally finished remounting the transmission around midnight, we were all on the verge of frostbite.”

After flirting with initial success, Matt’s team is now actively trying to win a race. The CR-X has a replacement motor and a fuel cell so the car can run longer between pit stops. But Matt is not counting his nickels quite yet. “The car finds new ways to break in each race,” says Matt. “I consider it a success if we finish with the car and each of the drivers in one piece.”

And in the end, that may be a worthy goal. As the organizers say when asked about safety: “Car racing just isn’t a brilliant thing to be doing. Get used to it.”

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