Weekend at a Glance: Sept. 28 to Sept. 30

Gator-O-Rama
MSR Houston (Angleton, TX) - 24 Hours of LeMons

LeMons returns for the third of four Texas races this weekend at MSR. Gator-O-Rama will be the Gulf Region's final race of the season. Team Lost in the Dark holds a seven-point lead in the region over both the Z-Wrecks and Pulp Friction whips with veteran Gulf teams Team Miagra, Tetanus Racing and Property Devaluation Racing all within 10 points of the region leader.

The weekend will be 14-1/2 hours. Saturday's session begins at 10 a.m. and concludes at 6:30 p.m. Racing resumes Sunday at 9 a.m. with the final checkered flag at 3 p.m.

Tech inspection begins Friday at noon and runs until 5 p.m.

Gates open for the weekend at 7 a.m. Friday, though there is an early-bird trailer drop Thursday at MSR from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. The cost to drop the trailer overnight is $15 with no Thursday camping.

MSR will hold a Test and Tune on Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with a lunch break from noon to 1 p.m. You can register for the test day here.

Early-week weather forecasts call for 30-40 percent chances of rain on Saturday and Sunday.


Onboard Video

Our onboard video for this race comes from experienced LeMoneer Pat Mulry, whose Toxic Assets Racing Program (TARP) Toyota MR2 was a ragged veteran of many races. Tag along as TARP driver Michael Mosty gives you an annotated lesson on flogging an MR2 at MSR. Of course, the instructions won't be quite the same if you're sailing a (formerly) high-dollar Teutonic tin can around the track, but you get the general idea, right?




2012 Gator-O-Rama event page on the 24 Hours of LeMons' site

MSR Houston official site

Trackpedia page for MSR Houston

2011 Gator-O-Rama official gallery

2010 Gator-O-Rama official gallery

2009 Gator-O-Rama official gallery

Editorial Assistants! Updates! Champ/Chump-ionships

Our editorial assistants slack like few others can slack.

We're back...sort of. The past few weeks have been spend training our newest editorial assistant on our production process, but she's been slow to take. She prefers to eat and sleep all day and who can blame her? Poor management breeds lazy workers.

Anyway, the time-intensive interviews we've conducted in the past are probably a few weeks away from a return, but they will hopefully be back and more better. More to come on that at a later date.

In the meantime, here are a few quick items from last weekend's crapcan races:

* Central Region superstars Tubby Butterman Racing won the ChumpCar World Series Central Division Chumpionship at Heartland Park Topeka. Their victory came after a long duel with the veteran Chump Faces BMW E30, who crossed the stripe just 36 seconds behind Tubby's venerable BMW E36. See the full results here.

* The ChumpCar race at Sebring International Raceway belonged to Flatout Racing, who finished with a commanding six-lap lead. The second-place finisher, 4 Half Men Racing, finished just eight seconds ahead of third-place team SRI Racing Iron Lemon 2. Results are posted here.

* Hong Norrth's "B" Mazda MX-3 took its first win at the 24 Hours of LeMons race at Carolina Motorsports Park. The team's "A" car also finished second. The one-two finish should secure them the Southern Region Championship after the team finished two-three at the region's only other race this season. In Hong Norrth's last seven races, the team has logged an astonishing six outright victories and nine podiums, rendering them the Audi Sport Team Joest of LeMons. By our count, that result gives Hong Norrth 36 points and the lead in the National Championship, five points ahead of California's Cerveza Racing (See next point). Read about the rest of the CMP winners here, including another legendary performance from NSF Racing.

* Finally, if you want to see our compilation of the Unofficial and Incomplete LeMons regional and national championship standings, we've put that together in a Google spreadsheet. We haven't put in the results from CMP yet, but they will be posted as soon as MyLaps is updated. You can see them here.

There's another item of interest brewing, but we can't divulge yet. As soon as some details are ironed out, we'll have a big announcement for our dear readers.

We'll be posting periodically on our Twitter and Facebook pages about assorted goings-on in the crapcan world and we'll have the periodic blog post for you, as well.