How To Budget For An Endurance Racing Season – While some budget-focused endurance series take an anything-goes, lap-time-based approach to qualification and classification, others use price ranges or performance indexing systems that balance cost and competitiveness. are designed to balance.
No one ever claimed that racing is cheap, but among its various disciplines, road racing can be especially hard on one’s wallet. Even for those who want to compete at the grassroots level, wheel-to-wheel racing has long been an expensive proposition with sanctioning bodies like the Sports Car Club of America and the National Auto Sport Association. Out of reach of participants.
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As a result, a group of racers decided to take matters into their own hands and created the 24 Hours of LeMons in 2006. Unlike traditional club road racing, Lemmons deliberately diverted attention from spending more on the competition with less spending. – A cost-effective alternative where the top priority was simply having fun on the track with your team and the wider racing community.
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The series has inspired others to follow suit in the years since, and these days there are many different options for competitors who want to get into endurance racing without breaking the bank. While each series takes a slightly different approach to the overall concept, the core goal of making wheel-to-wheel road racing more accessible remains the same.
Jay Lam said the idea to create the 24 Hours of LeMons budget endurance road racing series in Emeryville, California was inspired by the frustrations he and his friends shared about the various motorsports events they participated in. had been
“People were using their checkbooks to compete instead of their own skills and creativity,” Lam said. “It just seemed like a fun, quirky way to take checkbooks out of the equation.” Let’s drive cars where we don’t really care what happens to them. If something happens, it’s no big deal.
The first race was intended to be a one-time event. Lam and his friends had no desire to create a lasting, systematic series. But Lam’s background in automotive journalism put the 2006 event on the radar of some colleagues who wanted to be involved as well. “It was supposed to be 12 cars. I was going to rent a little circle track, and we were going to have a fun weekend. But as we started putting it together, more and more people wanted to do it. We had 33 cars in that first race and asked if we had room for another car.
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The 24 Hours of Lemons began in 2006 as a departure from traditional club road racing. It’s a deliberately low-cost alternative where the top priority is having fun on the track.
After these journalists published their stories from the event, word quickly spread throughout the automotive community, and a flood of racers wanted to come. In the road race. For example, if you want to do a dirt track race, there’s always a place you can go to figure out what you need to do to participate. But road racing — and especially endurance road racing — always had this artificial mystique around it that made it seem impossible to get there. It was just wrapped up in that sense of immunity. More than anything else, the psychological hurdles were overwhelming. By making this thing cheap and ridiculous, we address it without even realizing it.
The series places a $500 cap on the purchase price of teams’ cars, and for every $10 they go over that cap, the team is given a penalty lap. While the fun nature of the 24 Hours of Lemons brings with it the sense that the events are more about the experience than where a team can possibly place in an event, he admits that there are some who Are there to win.
“Each car goes through a technical inspection at each event to be checked for safety and re-judged for value. There are basically two sets of cars and teams that appear: A, in about 80% of the field. No chance of winning a class B, or C. No matter what class we put them in, we wouldn’t worry too much about those cars, frankly are, or if they have a ‘cheat’ motor, it doesn’t matter that they have no chance of winning but there is a very small set of teams that are going to compete in their class, Or even for the overall win, and with these teams we need to be a lot tougher. ‘You say it’s a $500 car — do you have the documentation to prove it?’ That you sold this expensive lot to a man — do you have the documents for it?’ But the fact is, many expensive, fraudulent things that people do don’t improve their chances. In most cases, it hurts them to be reliable and stay out of trouble is far more important.
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When Jay Lam and his friends created the 24 Hours of LeMons, they expected 12 cars to be in the one-time event. More than 30 cars showed up, and the series has grown since then. “Ultimately the main idea is to go out racing with your friends on the weekend and have a good time,” he said.
As Lam mentioned, teams are allowed to reduce the car’s effective value by selling parts. “So, for example, if you buy a $1,000 car and can prove you sold the seats to someone for $500, we consider that a $500 car.” The components engineered by the teams also do not count towards the car’s value.
“If you want to add force, fine. Do it without overspending, and show us how you did it,” he continued. “We have a team with the Audi A6 that listens. It uses an active aero system made of mobile parts that is mounted on the rear seat. Push yourself out—just don’t overdo it.”
He also pointed out that teams that aren’t really concerned about winning at home have plenty of incentive to bring a car and compete. “We have a lot of guys and girls who show up with cars that regularly get a lot of penalties, and they’re never going to be in contention for a win. There’s a lot of other awards — to make everybody laugh, Or there are trophies for cooking a good BBQ, or fixing some kind of bravery on your car. Many different things can motivate the team, but ultimately the main idea is that you week with your friends At the end go racing and have a good time.
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Founded in 2009 and formerly known as ChampCar, the ChampCar Endurance Series, based in Arrington, Virginia, is a non-profit, member-owned club that primarily competes in the 24 Hours of LeMons series. Started as a spin-off. The idea was to create a series for teams that wanted to take racing a little more seriously while still maintaining a similar approach to cost.
“Even though we have classes, they’re kind of secondary here,” Dana Morrison said. “Our structure is built around the idea that every single car can race for the overall win in the event. The system is centered around equalizing all the cars in the race so that whichever car a team chooses to run is May be the overall winner.
The ChampCar Endurance Series created a Vehicle Performance Index to rank its entries, a metric based on the E36 3-Series BMW. “We looked at its performance and potential lap times and evaluated every other car outside of that E36 metric,” explained Dana Morrison. Photo by Bill Strong/Strong Racing LLC.
During the ChampCar days, the series placed a $500 market value cap on the cars that teams could use — a concept borrowed from the 24 Hours of Lemons series — but Morrison said he eventually abandoned the idea. Completely scrapped, opting to set up a vehicle instead. Performance Index (VPI) system that assigns a point value to a given car based on its performance potential.
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The series essentially caps a given car’s VPI at 500 points, and teams are awarded penalty laps for every 10 points their car exceeds the limit. For example, if a car has a VPI of 530, that team will start a normal ChampCar race with three extra penalty laps. For races longer than eight hours, the penalty is increased—a 12-hour race increases the penalty by one and a half laps for every 10-point mark, while 14- and 24-hour events increase that number. are Two laps
“When we adopted this system, our president at the time chose the BMW E36 3-Series as the benchmark,” explained Morrison. “In other words, if you do nothing to this car other than basic race preparation and required safety upgrades, that’s your 500 point.