24 Hours of Lemons

In America’s answer to Le Mans, the cars cost no more than $500, the contestants are amateur and the mood is resolutely zany

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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. 

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