24 hours of Lemons, the real Wacky Races

My first impression of the goofily named 24 Hours of Lemons race competition is the dead-serious din of automobiles roaring by at upwards of 100mph. I am standing behind a chain-link fence at the three-mile Thunderhill Raceway Park, just outside the northern California town of Willows. The scene is at once bucolic – the complex is surrounded by acres of pink-blossomed almond trees and lies between a pair of snow-peaked mountain ranges – and deafening. The air is filled with the persistent roar of speeding cars bereft of mufflers and the occasional pop of a backfiring engine.

Nevertheless, to call the vehicles whizzing past “race cars” is charitable at best. This exhibition is as amateur as can be. Here is a down-on-its-luck white Volkswagen Beetle, an ambitious spoiler rising from its rear and dark-black eyeballs painted on its headlights. There is a brown coupé with a toy stuffed-leopard on its hood and a hand-drawn sign on its grill, pointing downward, that reads: “TOW”. An otherwise sporty number has a three-tiered wedding cake affixed to its top. 

Employees wear T-shirts that read: “This is our circus. These are our monkeys”

It’s at once a legitimate race and an exhibition of pure, zany, hobbyist joy. Everything about 24 Hours of Lemons is a wry play on the high-stakes world of race-car driving, including its name, a send-up of the French “grand prix of endurance racing”, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Races are held throughout the year across the United States, and four-driver teams pay $1,775 to enter. (A valid driver’s licence is the only requirement, though “whiners are not eligible to compete”, according to the rules.) Crucially, entrants must prove they’ve assembled their cars for no more than $500. “Lemons is the cheapest way of getting the most time on a real racetrack,” says Ewan Benefield, a 20-year-old from the San Francisco Bay Area and Lemons regular. There are stakes at play, just not particularly high stakes. The two-day competition is broken down into three classes: A (cars with a prayer of winning), B (cars with a prayer of finishing), and C (cars with no prayer of finishing). The Class C winner gets the biggest cash prize, a princely $600.

The race I’ve come to see on a sunny Saturday in early spring is called “Jank of the West 2024”. In addition to the different classes, there also are a handful of judged awards, including “Winner on Index of Effluency”, defined as the best performance of the worst car. But there aren’t any losers at 24 Hours of Lemons. “Everybody’s just here for the giggles,” Jay St Claire, an investor and contractor in Seattle, tells me. The organisers take safety seriously. All cars undergo a pre-race safety check, and drivers wear protective gear and are subject to various rules, including forced trips to an off-track “penalty box” for infractions such as driving off the course, making contact with another car and ignoring a yellow warning flag. Crashes happen – it’s a car race – but precautions on the track are at least as important as all the fun gimmicks.

Lemons is the brainchild of Jay Lamm, a former automotive journalist who had become disenchanted with an amateur car-racing world that took itself far too seriously. “Historically, car racing was all about separating the heroes from the schlubs,” he tells me. Lamm is 59, bald and preternaturally tanned. He is also my wife’s cousin, which is how I came to know about his racing franchise. He started the business nearly 20 years ago and is something of a legend among car enthusiasts, a PT Barnum surrounded by acolytes who pay him for the privilege of performing.

It became increasingly clear to me that the hobby had been commercialised and made into a hierarchy that was all about money,” he says. “I jokingly put together a street race where the cars couldn’t cost more than $500.” That single race grew into a national series of closed-course competitions, concours and city-to-city rallies. Silliness aside, Lemons is an impressive business. The $1,775 entrance fee, which includes up to four drivers, is its main revenue source. Lemons also charges for additional drivers and non-drivers in the pit crew. Tickets for spectators are available too, drivers pay an annual membership fee, and Lemons makes some money selling merchandise. Lamm thinks of it as “beer-league softball for people who are interested in car racing, not baseball”. A sense of humour at Lemons is more important than the not-particularly-strict cost limit on the cars. Lamm’s employees wear orange T-shirts that read: “This is our circus. These are our monkeys.” An official sign on a racetrack fence says: “24 HOURS OF LEMONS: Racing for real people.” The arbitrary nature of the class assignment is part of the fun. Says Lamm: “We have a saying here: we pull the classes out of our asses.”

His customers enjoy being in on the joke. Jay Morrison, the ringleader of a team that fields a 2002 Porsche Boxster, won’t say how much his car cost beyond revealing “we paid bribes because it’s a Porsche”. Morrison works in sales for a technology consulting firm called Convergint. One of the things he likes most about Lemons is the way competing teams help each other out with inevitable breakdowns. “We’re trying to keep each other in the race,” he says. His team’s car – “it’s really four cars salvaged” – has been assigned to the A class and had been doing well until Morrison took his turn behind the wheel. “We were in the top 10 until I screwed it up,” he says. “We have the car to win but not the talent.”

One entry, made up of students at Sierra College, a community college at the edge of the foothills of the nearby Sierra Nevada mountain range, doesn’t even seem to have a car to stay in the running. When I visit the Sierra College pit, the engine has been removed from their Mini Cooper, which has run only 17 laps that day. The students are investigating an electrical issue.

The college kids have been getting some help from a driver whose skill and resources are at the opposite end of the Lemons spectrum. Renae Lamb has been racing in Lemons events for seven years. She is the owner, with her father, of an automotive repair shop in Sacramento that specialises in high-end European models. Her entry, a 1983 Porsche 944, definitely cost more than $500, especially because it has an upgraded engine under the hood (a certain amount of bribery at the qualification stage is part of the Lemons’ tradition). Lamb is around cars all day for her job, but driving them on a racetrack is another thing altogether. “It is the single most fun thing I do,” she says. “When you’re out there, nothing matters.”

The happy-go-lucky car nuts I have met at Thunderhill are the spiritual children and grandchildren of the auto-obsessed California teenagers described by Tom Wolfe in his essay There Goes (VAROOM! VAROOM) That Kandy Colored (THPHHHHHH!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (RAHGHHHH!) Around the Bend (BRUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...). “They are freedom, style, sex, power, motion, colour – everything is right there,” he wrote in Esquire in 1963. And while there isn’t much sex in the air today, all the other qualities Wolfe observed 60 years ago are present in the paddock. 

In the end, a Class A team from San Jose driving a 1998 BMW 318i places first among 99 total entrants, completing an impressive 330 laps. (Four unfortunate cars never made it around the track once.) A 1993 Mazda Miata from Santa Cruz won the B class, finishing fifth overall. The Class C honours went to a car older than many of the drivers on the course, a 1973 Chevy El Camino SS driven by a team from Sacramento. 

Lemons is overwhelmingly male and equally middle-aged. But the kids from Sierra College more than represented the next generation. Their Notta Miata car made it back onto the course on Sunday. And one of its crew, a welding enthusiast named Erica Snow, earned the affection of multiple teams by wandering from pit to pit with her welder, offering much-needed mechanical assistance. This would never happen in Le Mans.