The next article first appeared on Rare Car Network 10 years in the past, on February 14, 2017, and has been reposted right here in anticipation of the upcoming 2026 occasion.
Assume 24 Hours of LeMons on snow and you have got Junker Sled Weekend. John Kendall, proprietor of 7Fifteen Motorworks, and Dean Larson from Bike EXIF have been wrecking their 20-something-year-old our bodies within the occasion since its inception three years in the past. The brainchild of their buddy, Chris Dobbins, a snowmobile fanatic turned man who needed to get an actual job, the foundations are easy: purchase a sled for lower than 5 hundred bucks and race it till your arms or the skis fall off—whichever comes first.
Okay, it is barely extra complicated than that, however not a lot. The $500 junker snowmobile needed to be manufactured earlier than 1990 and have a displacement of lower than 600cc if fan-cooled, or 500cc if liquid-cooled. Your all-in funding, together with any upgrades, should be lower than $500. So image hundred-dollar sleds with 4 hundred {dollars} in engine and suspension upgrades. Aesthetic upgrades do not debit your $500 funds, so PBR stickers, spray paint, and duct tape adorn the hoods. The $500 funding is primarily regulated by the respect system, however disgrace and humiliation are solid upon those that blatantly violate.
You may assume that investing a couple of hundred {dollars} in a classic path bomber would not result in any difficult racing, however you would be improper: These boys are critical. The skidsteer-carved snocross course is grueling—dotted with berms, doubles, and banked turns, with speeds hovering round 60 miles per hour. You get air on the jumps, a lot of it, and whenever you land, stuff breaks. Racers simply hope it is bogies, not bones. No one has ever been significantly damage, outdoors of pleasure and ego, however racers are required to put on security vests and helmets. No alcohol is permitted in any means throughout racing, but it surely seems to be strongly inspired afterwards to numb the ache of nearly suspension-less landings.
This 12 months’s occasion drew 21 reasonably insane individuals. Three, five-lap warmth races are carried out with the highest three finishers in every shifting on to the ultimate. The tail-draggers get kicked right down to a last-chance-qualifier race the place the highest three once more advance to the 12-sled last.
The championship race takes place over eight grueling laps. The course is fairly beat at this level, and so are the racers. Some have already run ten laps on machines designed thirty-some years in the past for easy trails and passive driving. However these aren’t peculiar males, no means, in the event you’re gonna be dumb, you have to be robust, appears to be the unstated motto.
The ultimate sadly proves to be not a lot of a battle for first place. Chris Nylund, a seasoned racer on a fast fan-cooled Polaris, runs away with it in fairly straightforward trend. The novice weekend warriors, who aren’t in as race-ready situation, aren’t deterred, although. When helmets come off, most sentences start with “Subsequent 12 months…”, suggesting that knowledge coming with age arrives at a later stage of life.
You is perhaps questioning how our boys did? Properly, Dean made the rostrum with a really respectable third-place end on a 488cc fan-cooled Polaris. His buddy John wasn’t far behind in sixth place on a liquid-cooled Polaris 400. I did not race—I blame it on being too outdated, fats, and sensible. However subsequent 12 months they’re speaking about creating an over 40-year-old class, and man, I am unable to wait to really feel younger and silly once more. If anybody’s bought a sub $500 snow machine mendacity round, I am trying.
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