The Real Fun of a 24 Hours of Lemons Race

Every ad for the 24 Hours of Lemons promises wheel-to-wheel action, budget-beater creativity, and the glory of hustling a “$500” hooptie around a real road course. And sure, there’s plenty of theme-painted cars, judges in costumes, and the constant, glorious stench of high-mileage oil burning off warped headers. But the real fun of a Lemons weekend doesn’t happen on the leaderboard or under the checkered flag. It happens under your car, on your back, in the paddock, covered in brake fluid, surrounded by new best friends who smell like 10W-30 and barbecue smoke. It happens in moments when everything is going catastrophically wrong and somehow still feels right.

Our 1987 Jeep Comanche “Can’t-Believe-It-Runs” entry launched cleanly when the green flag dropped. For half an hour we floated in that dreamy headspace where you start to believe all the late-night wrenching and junkyard scrounging might pay off. Then the rear brake hard line gave up; this was no surprise, because it was so rusty it looked like expired jerky.

Pedal to the floor, followed by instant fear. We limped to our paddock spot and told ourselves, Easy fix. We’ve replaced hard lines before.

Turns out that double-flaring a new hard line with a hand tool, no vise, no bench, and no shortage of adrenaline more resembles destruction than craftsmanship. We mangled flare after flare until a patina-brown, half-oil-drum on go-kart wheels screeched to a stop beside us. The phrase “Tetanus Express” was painted on the side, in house paint. At the helm was a stranger with a grin big enough to qualify as protective gear.

“What’s going on, guys?” We gave him the quick-cut montage: snapped line, useless flares, creeping despair. “Oh! Stay here. I know someone who can help.” He rocketed off before we could grab his name.

He returned, this time lugging a hydraulic flaring tool that looked like it could have been forged by Thor on a union break. “I don’t actually know how to use it,” he shrugged, “but the guy who does is on track. If you can’t figure it out, he’ll swing by after his stint.” A quick YouTube video later and we had the information we needed. Soon, we felt perfect factory-grade flares clicking into place. Spirits soared. We’d be back on track before lunch.

…Except we weren’t. Heads under the hood, while other teams thundered past us, we tried to thread the newly flared line into the underside of the aluminum proportioning valve. This is difficult when you are operating blind, one-handed, and amid a major rush. The fitting bit turned a few turns without much effort, and then it stopped. Fill, bleed… and spray. (Spray is bad.) Brake fluid coated everything like glistening tears of failure. We’d cross-threaded the brake line into the proportioning valve.

Pulling out the proportioning valve revealed aluminum threads that were disgustingly stripped. Replacement? None at a parts store within 100 miles. Our flaring-tool savior finally finished with his stint and arrived to find us buried up to our necks in defeat.

We gave Kevin (now we had a name) a summary of our failure, and he wheeled off on a minibike. He returned shortly after with a whole bunch of goodies: a thread cutter, an adjustable proportioning valve, and an assorted kit of brake line fittings. He had a sketchy idea: recut the threads and try to rescue the valve. The cutter bottomed out on the flare seat. New plan: drill the port to a concave seat and convert the line to bubble-flare. It was a valiant, messy fiasco. The end of day one was closing in, and our brake system looked like abstract art. Optimism was flatlining.

Desperation breeds resourcefulness. Or at least loud phone calls. Someone phoned a friend, who pinged a guy, who alerted a coworker. Miraculously, a used YJ-generation Jeep proportioning valve surfaced an hour away. Two teammates made the dash to claim it while the rest of us inventoried our remaining brake fluid (and self-respect).

They returned, triumphant, with a valve. A valve! We installed it, and the process went exactly as our luck had gone thus far… it didn’t work. We swapped the internal rod and seals from our original unit into the “new” housing, bolted it in, and soon discovered we were out of brake fluid. The team pitted beside us—people we’d only traded thumbs-ups with all day—offered us two unopened bottles of the stuff.

“Pay it forward,” they said. That’s Lemons gospel, right there.

With brake fluid flowing, we spent the next two hours in a well-synchronized relay: one person pumping the pedal, one cracking bleeders, one refilling. The pedal never firmed up. Air pockets seemed to laugh at our optimism. We built a makeshift master cylinder bench bleeder from scrap line, bled that, then did the wheel circuit again. Midnight approached, and our exhaustion won the day. We’d get back at it at first light.

Sunday morning. We found Kevin in his paddock, surrounded by what looked like every automotive tool ever made. We recapped the night to him. He nodded, walked to his toolbox, and produced a pneumatic vacuum bleeder that looked like the miracle we needed. In ten minutes, he yanked every stubborn bubble into a clear hose, performed a quick manual bleed for good measure, and declared us good to go.

The first cautious lap turned into five, then ten. The pedal was firmer than it had been when we arrived on Friday. We still weren’t fast, but we were out there! Drivers from other teams waved as they passed us because they’d offered us fluid, tools, encouragement, or at least sympathetic glances.

We finished nowhere near the podium. Our race log showed fewer than half of the laps we aimed for. But the story we carried home was bigger than any trophy. It was a chronicle of strangers who gave up precious time to help keep us in the fight, with the comforting certainty that the paddock won’t let you fail alone.

That’s the fun of the 24 Hours of Lemons. A plan disintegrating in real time is met with a collective shrug and a helping hand. Swarm of racers served us parts because “they might work.” It’s learning that the guy driving the car with flatscreens on the outside playing the Shrek soundtrack on repeat is also a professional mechanic who can salvage your day. It’s the midnight retellings when you’re too wired to sleep and too tired to stand, trading disaster stories that all end the same way: “…and then somebody I’d never met before saved us.”