Driving Sports

The scariest thing about this Halloween won’t be emotionally tortured vampires, lovesick ghosts, or even a horde of sugar-amped little kids scratching your car as they run riot over your driveway – it’s the number of absolute rookies blowing on their racing licenses to dry the ink as they belt in to run the Chump Car World Series in Portland this weekend.

The Chump Car World Series is an offshoot of the famous 24 Hours of Lemons series, and follows the same general format. However, there’s less administrative destruction of cars and more racing. While the Lemons events have migrated to a two-day daylight-hours event, Chump Car in Portland will race from noon on Saturday, October 31st to 1:30 PM on Sunday, with a 2.5 hour break for dinner and trick-or-treating. In a first for endurance racing, the event will actually cover the 1 a.m. hour twice as daylight savings time expires in the middle of the race.

The other thing about this race is the cars. Like the Lemons cars, Chump Car enforces a maximum value of $500 on any race car. This limits their reliability and, to be honest, their appeal to normal human beings. The result is a selection of the best of the worst cars known to man, from trashed Miatas to lumbering Buicks.

Until cable or Directv satellite tv covers the Chump Car races (which doesn't appear to be any time soon), DrivingSports TV will be there. And not standing on the sidelines, either – we’ll be driving the ultimate crappy Miata for the “Naughty Nurses” team. This car was previously raced, crashed, and left to rot in a blackberry bramble. For just $200, Eddie Nakato bought it and set about pulling parts off other junked Miatas to make it go. That’s easier for Eddie than most people – he owns AR Auto Service and Adrenaline Racing in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

“They hid the car in a Raspberry patch where it was near impossible to see or even get to. It was parked like this without a top for the better part of 5 years when I tracked it down earlier this year.  We dragged it out with a tractor and slowly started putting it back together,” Nakato says.

The rest of the 39 car field will be made up of everything from a vintage Dodge Colt to a Honda CRX to a Fiat X1/9, and no one knows what else will show. Each car will have a team of 6 (or more) drivers for the 24 hour contest. Each team’s challenge will be to keep their car running and uncrashed for the whole time. The winner may well be one of the slowest cars, as long as they can keep circulating the entire time.

And that’s where it gets interesting. Drivers in the event range from seasoned pro racers like Cindi Lux and world record holders like Gary Bockman all the way to people who have never turned a single lap on a race track. Right in the middle of it all is our publisher, Ryan Douthit, who signed on to Eddie’s team to experience Chump Car in all its glory.

This writer nabbed a plum assignment as Chief Cook for the team, but I will also be certified to drive and may take a turn behind the wheel as well.

To keep speeds down, organizers are putting up barriers on the front and back straights of Portland International Raceway - to stay within insurance parameters the cars are not allowed to exceed 120 MPH at any time, and must run on street tires – there’s no racing rubber or hot rod components allowed. That’s not to say there won’t be a little creative interpretation of the rules on some teams – this is a race for bragging rights, after all.

The action gets underway at noon on Saturday, October 31. There’s a charge for spectators, but the organizers are still looking for corner workers to staff the course for the event. Show up at 10 AM if you’re interested in that. Drivers will race until 6 PM and then take a break for a Halloween party until 8:30, when they’ll pick up where they left off and race through to 1:30 the next afternoon. If you show up on Sunday morning, admission is free to watch through to the glorious end.

Completing a race like this will be a substantial achievement for both the machines and the people involved. On top of that, this Chump Car event is historic on two levels – it’s the first-ever 24-hour race in Portland’s history, and this is the first outing for the Chump Car brand. But the organizers have big plans to grow the brand, and past experience with Lemons indicates that there’s a hunger for this kind of back-to-basics endurance racing.

Right now, the teams are loading up and heading for the track. All that’s left is to run the race. Why not come down and check it out?

For complete information, visit www.chumpcar.com.