Please Call These Cars Lemons

Jeff Bloch, a Washington, D.C., police sergeant, on his Lemons racing cars, as told to A.J. Baime.

I have been a police officer for 22 years, and I have been racing cars longer than that. I first heard about 24 Hours of Lemons racing in 2009 (Lemons, which recently changed its named from LeMons, is a pun on a bad car and the 24 Hours of Le Mans, regarded as the world’s most important sports car race). It’s a nationwide endurance racing series, and at the same time, a contest for who can make the coolest, most absurd racing car. I am overly competitive, but I’m also 44 going on 8. This was for me.

I put together a team called Speedycop & the Gang of Outlaws. My wife Jaime is outlaw #1 and the rest is an eclectic mix. I do the design and engineering. We build the vehicles in my garage, and we race them. In Lemons racing, it does not matter as much who is fastest but who wins the prize for coolest fast car—the Index of Effluency prize. We have won nine times.

Our latest is the Trippy Tippy Hippy Van. We took the body a 1976 Volkswagen bus, flipped it on its side, slid a 1988 Volkswagen Rabbit into it, and built it into a race car, so you cannot see the Rabbit, only the sideways van. Lemons cars have to cost no more than $500; after you have the base vehicle you can spend as much as you want making it cool. I found a Rabbit in Texas for $500, and the build took five intense weeks. We raced in Kentucky last month (the vehicle can hit about 100 mph), winning the Index of Effluency award.



Other cars include Speedy’s Weenies—a hot dog stand welded onto a Suzuki SUV. (At a race earlier this year in New Jersey, we came in 48th out of 124, which means we beat over 75 cars—in a hot dog stand.) There’s the Spirit of LeMons (an abandoned 1956 airplane body mounted onto a 1987 Toyota ), and the Upside Down Camaro (the name says it all). The SpeedyCopter is a Vietnam-era attack helicopter body mounted on a 1986 Toyota. We built this vehicle to be amphibious, so after I raced it, I drove it on a lake on propeller power.



https://www.wsj.com/articles/please-call-these-cars-lemons-1501600953