Racing LeMons: The People's Curse

2.4: Whiner Eligibility. Whiners are not eligible to compete. If you believe that you might be a whiner, please check with a domestic partner, guardian, or health-care professional before getting the rest of your team kicked the hell out of the race.
-24 Hours of LeMons Rules

Last week, I attended my first 24 Hours of LeMons race out at Infineon. In my last blog entry about LeMons racing, I talked about how I’m pretty much hooked on the concept, and have been doing more research/reading about the sport before making a full-on plunge into driving for one of the teams.

In reading the rules, a few things come through very clearly: LeMons is about having fun first, and foremost, and if you take the competitive aspect of this too seriously, or you cheat, it will likely not go well for you, your team, or, in the case of the People’s Curse, your car.

As stated, quite succinctly, in the official rules of 24 Hours of LeMons:

1.6: Your Car May Be Destroyed at Any Time: In addition to accidents and other unfortunate boo-boos, one car may be selected by blind ballot of all teams for immediate removal and total destruction. It could be your car. It probably WILL BE your car. You’ll have 30 minutes to yank out any safety items you want to rescue, and then it’s toast. Them’s the breaks. Don’t bring it if you ain’t OK with losing it.
1.8 The People’s Curse: Each team gets one People’s Curse ballot
after finishing tech. Teams should return ballots by 10am Sunday or as directed at the Drivers Meetings. After the ballots are counted, all cars appearing on >10% of returned ballots get a Black Flag penalty; all cars appearing on >20% of returned ballots get a nasty but (probably) nonfatal Curse penalty; and all cars appearing on >33% of returned ballots get a totally nasty, mega-fatal, possibly frame-flattening Curse penalty.

In other words, you try and race a “cheater” car, one that everyone knows, or at least believes, to be more than a $500 investment (not including safety gear), and you leave yourself at the mercy of the other teams who may decide, by exercising the democratic power of the ballot, to have your car cursed and/or destroyed.

I was asking Anton about this yesterday, and he quickly threw out a half-dozen, or so, stories about how this has happened to teams, and their cars, in the past, with exacting detail on the pain and misery inflicted on the cursed vehicle.

To paraphrase Marsellus Wallace, when the People’s Curse comes down on your team, they’re gonna’ get medieval on your ass…Well, your car’s ass. Do cars have an ass? Whatever.

This is especially true if you fall into in that last-case scenario, the “totally nasty, mega-fatal, possibly frame-flattening Curse penalty.”

Attached is a YouTube video in which the People’s Curse is enacted on a BMW that everybody at the race thought was worth just a wee-bit more than 500 bucks. It is pure carnage, and I must say that the backhoe work involved approaches fine art.

More LeMons to come …

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