Wed, May 29, 2013
Endurance Contest Is A Parody Of The Famous Le Mans Road Race
You may have heard about the 24 Hours of Le Mans road race, but a lesser-known parody of the endurance contest is the "24 Hours of LeMons" (lemons), which features cars that are supposed to cost under $500. This year's race drew an entry that was cobbled together from the remains of a 1957 Cessna 310 and various car parts made street-legal by Maryland police officer Jeff Bloch.
Writing on the online forum for the race, Bloch says that while the fuselage of the plane cost four times the "legal" price for such a car, the judges for the race are easily bribed with such items as the opportunity to drive the vehicle or "expensive bottles of single-malt scotch." He said they are not particularly interested in notarized bills of sale or receipts for parts. He said his airplane-car hybrid would not be considered competitive, but would certainly be entertaining.
So the self-proclaimed amateur welder/fabricator/mechanic set about building the vehicle, dubbed the "Spirit of LeMons", for the 2013 race. The result, pictured here from a YouTube video posted by Barcroft TV, is street-legal, with turn signals, headlights, brake lights, and such.
Mashable reports that Bloch won an award for the "car" that “has no business being on the race track, and yet is really cool and comes out there and does its very best anyway.”
He reportedly plans to enter it in other races, and drive it across the country with his brother. So don't be completely surprised if you see a Cessna 310 fuselage tooling down the road, and know that only under extreme (and probably very bad) circumstances would it ever be leaving the ground under its own power again.
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