As I never get tired of telling people, I’m one of the few drivers who can claim to have won both LeMons and ChumpCar with completely different teams — Flat Rock ’07 and Buttonwillow ’13, respectively. In fact, I’m not aware of anyone else who has done it. Maybe because nobody else bothers to brag about it.

The photo above demonstrates one of reasons why LeMons has become so popular: the “Ranchero” and “Plymouth Fury” above are both actually E30 BMWs.

There’s no other race series in the world where this kind of inventiveness happens at every single event. Not a single LeMons race goes by without somebody debuting a complete mechanical marvel. Most of the time they aren’t quick, but occasionally, as with the two cars above, they run at a pace that would shame NASA Spec E30. It’s simply amazing to be on-track with a hundred cars like this, even if some of them are driven by complete idiots.

That fact — that some major percentage of LeMons drivers are idiots — leads to some carefree and arbitrary enforcement from the flaggers and the judges. A lot of things happen that wouldn’t pass muster in the SCCA. It’s worth noting, however, that a lot of things used to happen in the SCCA that wouldn’t pass muster in the SCCA nowadays. The rulebooks are written in blood.

By the time my son straps on a helmet and tries his hand at sports-car racing, LeMons won’t look anything like it does now. It’s likely to be safer, more serious, and less interesting. But let the record show that there was once a time that people turned BMWs into 7/8th-scale Rancheros… and during that time, my son’s father wasn’t too bad at winning against them.