This is a great article talking about the stories and peoples that competed in this weekends race, and they mention the team It’s the Lybians!

From the Detroit News….

FLAT ROCK — The bleary-eyed victors of the 24 hours of LeMons endurance race for junker cars hoisted their hard-earned prize — bags containing $1,500 in nickels — and posed for pictures that will be sent to a soldier in Iraq to prove they kept their promise of doing something special with his car.

The 1985 Toyota Supra with 146,000 miles had belonged to Paul Whisman, an Army reservist from Hilliard, Ohio, now on duty in Iraq.

“He was going to scrap it because he didn’t want his wife to have to keep moving it around the parking lot to keep it from getting towed away while he was gone. So we bought it for $200 and promised we’d do something special with it,” said Mark Matics. “We had no idea what we were doing, but we sure had fun.”

The team from throughout the Midwest, including Fasil Acmad of Bloomfield Hills, pulled together online through a forum for racers called trackaddicts.net, made 2,433 laps in 24 hours around the tiny go kart track inside Flat Rock Speedway’s quarter mile oval. That’s roughly 730 miles. They also were 50 laps ahead of the second place car, a 1987 Mazda RX7 fielded by writers and editors from Car & Driver magazine.

“We spent another $1,000 putting in the roll cage and other safety equipment, but then, we forgot to change the original oil,” Matics said.

This was typical of the stories at this event where no race car was supposed to cost more than $500.

Three of the big car enthusiast magazines had teams entered — Road and Track, Hot Rod and the Ann Arbor-based Car & Driver actually had three teams. This is the kind of event that is important to them because it’s all about enthusiasm. Car & Driver’s team that finished in second place has competed in the two prior 24 hours of LeMons events in Altamont, California too. Stories in their pages about the Motor City adventure are bound to follow.

“It’s a really quirky thing and it’s a blast,” said K.C. Colwell, assistant technical editor at Car & Driver. “Racing cars is fun but relatively expensive. This isn’t. And the guys who put it together are really creative so it’s crazy.”

White bird feathers floated around the pits on Sunday, remnants of competitors being “tarred and feathered.” Actually maple syruped and feathered by officials. The woman who provided welding services which were essential to keeping some of these heaps moving, also wore big feathered wings and was referred to as “The Arc Angel.” Taking a car off the track for penalty laps was sometimes disguised by having artfully cut-out metal images of hens or rabbits welded to the roof of a “chicken driver” or one that seemed too fast. A pair of rabbits were tacked to the roof of the car that won the race.

In the middle of the night,”The People’s Choice Award,” and $1,000 in nickels was voted to a team of designers from the General Motors Tech center in Warren for their artful attempt at making their Toyota look like the DeLorean in the “Back to the Future” movies. And a former police car from Massachusetts was voted “The People’s Curse,” and called into the pits to be beaten with sledge hammers.

“I think we lost maybe one position before we had it back on the track,” said Terry Kehne of Knoxville, Tennessee and organizer of the national Chevrolet Caprice SS Club’s team. The GM designers had donated $200 of their prize money to the big Chevy’s cause — raising $6,000 over the weekend for Cure Autism Now.

“I’ve driven race cars for years and this was the most fun I’ve ever had in a car,” Kehne said.

By dawn, half of the four teams with engineers and technicians from the Big Three automakers remained in competition. Ford’s Formula Un and Chrysler’s SRT Team were packed up and gone. The GM team replaced the radiator in their aging Toyota in the middle of the night with one borrowed from a Chevy Blazer. They finished 28th.

A second team of Ford engineers managed to keep their car running to the end too. And although they admit it probably was the slowest car on the track Team Volvolution finished sixth. The 1984 Volvo 240 was purchased for $300 and another $100 was spent on preparation.

“The durability of our car and clean driving kept us out of trouble throughout most of the race. After being as high as 4th with less than two hours to go our motor mount let go causing us to use a ratchet strap and a wood wedge to put the engine back in place,” said Mark Wilson. “When we got back out on track 40 minutes later we were in sixth place which is where we finished.”

The team used about 45 gallons of gasoline and a total of eight hard to find used 14-inch all season tires.

Up and down pit row there were empty spaces where tents, trailers and cars had been. Considering the tired condition of these cars to start with, it’s amazing there were still 23 of the 39 cars on the track at the end.

A team with members who flew in from Florida and Tennessee to drive a very stock-looking old Cadillac managed to complete fewer than 300 laps, and the beast was limping around the track in the final hour with one of those tiny little temporary spare tires on the left rear.

One hour from the finish, Pat McArdle of Forest Lake, Minnesota, flipped his 1991 Ford Escort onto its roof. McArdle announced to the team as he and the car arrived in the pits on a wrecker, “We’re going to need some more oil.” Less than 25 minutes later, the car was back on the track racing again. In its street life, the Escort once survived a collision with a bear.

At the end, the creator of the race, Jay Lamm, thanked the participants, “for coming to do this unnecessary, inconvenient, ridiculous 24 hour race.” And he invited them back next year.

“We wanted the first race outside of California to be in Detroit,” Lamm said. “Next year, we hope we will have up to six races at places throughout the country. And we will have to come back here.”

Thanks for the link Nick.