North Dallas Hooptie LeMons Day One: 300ZX Leads, Jeep Cherokee Close Behind!

After Friday’s car inspections at the fifth annual North Dallas Hooptie 24 Hours of LeMons, we heard quite a bit of armchair-LeMons-judge controversy about letting a 1987 Chevrolet Corvette compete with zero penalty laps. Well, the Lil’ Pecker Racing Corvette finished the first day’s race session in P12, 14 laps behind the leader. That came as no real surprise to your LeMons correspondent, but the car— truck, actually— that now sits just four laps back of P1 did come as a big shock. Here’s how the day went.
With 191 total laps for the day, the lead team is the Back to the Past Nissan 300ZX “DeLorean.” This team won the Heaps In the Heart of Texas race here at Eagles Canyon Raceway, back in 2012, and they’ve been strong contenders in just about every Texas race during the last couple of years. No black flags, no mechanical problems today, and that’s how you win these races.
But then you look a little bit down in the standings and it gets weird. Here’s the TGTW Offroad Racing Jeep Cherokee, which has been pretty quick in the past (for a truck with early-60s-technology pushrod L6 power and solid-front-axle suspension) but nothing like this. This truck will start Sunday’s race session in second-place overall (out of 67 entries) and a mere four laps out of the lead. This team won Class C with their Jeep Comanche at last year’s North Dallas Hooptie, and they’re leading Class B by five laps in their Cherokee. Meanwhile, a dozen Mazda Miata and BMW 3-series teams are watching the TGTW Cherokee’s taillights receding into the distance. Looks like the most successful Jeep Cherokee in road racing now faces a threat to its supremacy!

The car chasing the Cherokee for the Class B lead is also a member of the “how is this possible?” camp: the Tetanus Racing Volkswagen Passat. We’ve seen just a handful of Passats in LeMons racing, and every single one (including this car) has been irredeemably terrible. Not this race! Tetanus Racing’s Passat finished the day’s session in P7.