What has four wheels, squirts lemonade through a giant straw, debuted in the Kingston Fourth of July parade and less than a week later became a national champ?
It’s Kingston’s own Super Wet Endurance Refreshment Vehicle (SWERV), described as a “mutated lemon with nectar extracting flexi-straw.”
The creation of James Wetter of Kingston, the car was raced July 7-8 by a team of self-proclaimed lemonheads in the 24 Hours of LeMons Altamont Championship Race, “Where the Elite Meet to Beat on Cheap Leaky Heaps.”
Team LemonLappers, led by James, took SWERV down to the Altamont Motorsports Park in Tracy, Calif. to pucker up to the 24 Hours of LeMons, a spin on the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance road race in Le Mans, France where instead of racing a set distance of miles, the aim is to drive cars the longest distance on a course during 24 hours.
In the case of the LeMons, the course is one mile with a “liberal use of wrist-snapping hairpins.” Teams are made up of four to six drivers.
Cars must be purchased and prepped for $500 or less (though required safety equipment doesn’t count towards this), and before the race are inspected by a “BS-Factor judging panel” to roust out cheaters. The usual safety precautions of racecars are adhered to such as roll bars, four-point harnesses and fire-retardant suits for drivers.
After reading about the race – what James calls a “cheeky play on 24 hours of the world’s pinnacle endurance race” – he called up his friends, Jim Eli of Blaine, Josh Sirota who lives outside of San Francisco, Park Wyatt of Los Angeles and Kolin Aspergren, an old racing buddy from Atlanta.
James races Miata specialty racecars nationally with the Sports Car Club of America; teammates Josh, Kolin and Jim also race. James said he always wanted to race and back in the late ‘90s, he and his dad, Dave Wetter, went to a racing driving school together, and since then he’s been hooked.
Many of the other drivers in the LeMons are also seasoned and professional racecar drivers who take part for fun.
Picking the
ripe lemon
Once the team committed to the race, James went to work finding a car. Already familiar with Neon cars that were made specifically for racing with special options, he knew that was model he wanted. He searched countrywide, and when he finally found one, it was sold to someone else. Finally, he prayed to find a car and within days the right lemon dropped in his lap from over in Kent. After telling the owner what the car would be used for, he got it for $300.
But by this time, the race was full. That didn’t stop him though, and he got in touch with the organizer, Jay Lamm, who told them if they came up with a really creative pitch for a team theme, he might consider squeezing them in. With the help of his sister Jennifer Wetter, who was then serving in the Peace Corps in Uganda, they came up with the concept of turning a lemon into a lemon, complete with a giant flexi-straw coming out of the roof to squirt lemonade.
Once the idea came to fruition, they had to figure out how to present it to Lamm. So they created an “over-the-top” PowerPoint presentation interpreting the race name, 24 Hours of LeMons, as “a calling for 2,400 lemons for the people of California to quench the world,” promising to actually deliver 2,400 lemons to the track.
Lamm gave in telling James: “You guys have suffered too much; you’re in. I’ll be counting the lemons.”
Had the team actually bought the lemons, the cost would have probably been more than the car. Instead, they contacted a lemon growers’ cooperative that donated and shipped them up to San Francisco where Sirota picked them up in a rented trailer and brought them to the track. While some were made into lemonade, others were handed out to kids to throw at the cars.
Fruits of their labor
James said he obsessed with enhancing SWERV’s performance, including dealing with a blown head gasket. (Dave said the giant straw came in handy later during the race when they used it to pump water into the engine.) To optimize the power-to-weight ratio, not only did seats, carpet and other interior extras go with the help of his wife Jennie, but James said he also found himself “shaving off bolt heads and spending two hours just to get one pound out of the car.”
The paint job was the work of his mom, Ann, and sister, Jennifer, who sponged on house paint to give it a ‘lemon texture.’ A donated pump was used to squirt lemonade out the straw (or water in the Kingston Fourth of July parade) and another sponsor chipped in tires.
The team practiced pit stops in a mall parking lot until they had the time down to about a minute and a half. Most teams, James said, took three minutes or more. Since laps take about a minute each, saving two minutes on pit stops would earn them a couple extra laps advantage over their competitors.
After the first day of the race, he said it was clear they had a chance to win.
A quick turnaround on pit stops wasn’t the only thing they had to stay on top of; there were wrecks everywhere on the track. SWERV hit the wall, literally, a couple of times when it slid on sand that had blown onto the track. Though bruised, it stayed in the race.
“I think we were pretty surprised on Day 1 that we were doing so well. We just needed to maintain the pace and not get in a wreck to finish first,” James said. “But it was nerve wracking to watch the race and watch the carnage take place.”
The LemonLappers won, beating 82 other teams, with 655 laps; a total time of 13 hours 23 minutes 50 seconds; and top speed of 69.6 mph. Their prize: $1,500 in nickels.
Ann, whose job on the pit crew was to pull the pin on the fire extinguisher if needed, said they had loads of fun. She and Jennie squeezed about 600 of the 2,400 lemons and made lemonade to sell at the track, raising $450 that they donated to charity.
“It was the experience of a lifetime,” James said. “It was the true definition of a team – they came together and made it happen.”
Next year, he hopes to return with a team where the wives drive and the guys are the pit crew. In the meantime, the SWERV car is back in his garage in Kingston. He said they might fix it up and enter it in another endurance race. It still has a lot of juice left.
For more pictures of the race and information on the LemonLappers, go to www.lemonlappers.com. For more information on the 24 Hours of LeMons race as well as photos and videos from the race, go to www.24hoursoflemons.com.
