Low-Buck Tech: In Lemons Racing, Music Matters

The real innovator was Licensed to Ill’s pickup, a Chevy S-10 wearing a period-correct 1990s minitruck paint scheme. The colors, the white steering wheel, and the cabin accoutrements were great. The 300 pounds of functioning subwoofers and amps anchored firmly in the pickup bed? That’s the stuff of legend right there.

The truck itself was properly quick after a couple years of development, finishing regularly in the top 15. The Chevy 283 out of builder Jesse Cortez’s mother’s Chevelle propelled the killer minitruck for more than eight years of racing until the engine finally died at Road Atlanta in December 2019. It will return, we are assured.

In Lemons, weird cars often don’t need a good theme, but a good theme ends up on the cars anyway. Sir Jackie Stewart’s Coin Purse Racing (kudos for a great team name) themed its Ford EXP as RUN-EXP with Licensed to Ill levels of speaker setup. They bumped a playlist of classic early hip-hop as the naturally aspirated, 70-horsepower ‘80s Escort two-seater dawdled along. That’s style, and real style is really winning.

Of course, if you have an otherwise boring BMW, you can always spice it up with an ear-splitting setup. Texas racers TARP Racing, for example, fitted their E36-chassis BMW with graphics that depict Hatsune Miku, some kind of musical avatar that holds holographic concerts. That qualifies as Lemons levels of weird, and the car has a speaker setup-set for additional amperage when it returns to racing this year–to blast Hatsune Miku classics like “The Leek Dance.”

And if weaponizing your sound system to demoralize your opponents is more your style, a pair of teams running 1980s BMWs have demonstrated that nothing will ruin others’ races like putting a horrible song in their head for days at a time. The NYANCAR team blasted internet-meme favorite “Nyan Cat” for entire weekends, while the RaceBar team upped the ante with an entire weekend of cortex-wrecking renditions of “Baby Shark.”

Go ahead, google “Baby Shark” and imagine the nightmares after a full weekend of that.

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