I guess I should start with how I met another Lee Childers that had way too similar of hobbies as me including racing some old POS cars around road courses with other like-minded lug nuts. I had been posting on the unofficial Facebook group about the Mini Koopa and how excited I was to be starting a team in the Pacific Northwest and several folks that knew of the more established Lee Childers based in Texas starting asking him when he had moved to Washington without letting anyone know. This prompted a fun conversation on Messenger between the two of us getting to know each other and sharing some insights into what I should expect entering this crazy sport. We then proceeded to try and figure out if we could meet up for some races which led me to flying down to New Orleans to race his Plymouth Omni with a group of stranger dangers.
As much as we wanted to dominate on the track it was just as much fun getting to know all the new faces and personalities that had way more experience than I did around the lemons paddock. I don’t want to go into too much detail about our theme because it was less family friendly than I think we all initially had planned but we had a nice choreographed dance for the judges in BS inspection and bribed them with food throughout the weekend, including a pizza that for some reason they chose not to eat (see the recap video for more details).
On Saturday we had some mechanical troubles with the car that seemed like the motor was trying to jump out of the engine bay. After a couple of test drives around the paddock and some exploration under the hood we found that the front motor mount had broken in half so we dug through the bin of bolts and set up the welder for one of our teammates, that just so happened to be a welder by trade, to affix the pieces back together. And though it was like Humpty Dumpty that we had fallen out of contention for winning C-class, we were still having a ton of fun and ready to race for the start of the second day.
On Sunday I got more comfortable driving the car as I had more time in the seat but there were torrential downpours that stopped our racing for a bit. This was my first time experiencing a black flag all scenario where we had to pull everyone off of the track and I chose to go to the paddock because the car seemed to be having issues. Turns out it was the oil cap had magically disappeared from the top of the motor but we still had some oil in the sump and after filling it back up, giving the car a healthy wipe down of cleaner and using a metal safety wire through the new oil cap it was ready to go back out.
All our hard work on the car had paid off as we were not as far down the finishing order as we had thought, at 7th (out of 15) in C-class and 44th (out of 78) overall, but the real prize had yet to come. Because of all of our dancing and scene acting, along with taking our theme on the road to downtown New Orleans and around the paddock area during the extreme wet delay on Sunday, we were awarded the Halloween Meets Gasoline trophy for best theme of the weekend. This was really cool getting recognized for the hard work and even more amazing that the other Lee Childers chose to let me bring the trophy home with me. It may have been because the rest of the team had already had that same wooden lemon hanging up around their house, but no matter what reason I was over the moon about it. After packing up and saying my goodbyes to my friends and fellow racers it was time for me to start focusing on the next race that was less than two weeks away (taking the Mini Koopa back to Pacific Raceway). Hope to see you at the next one!
