The 1988 Yugo GV
Me in the fire suit
Team Yugo2L at Thunderhill: John, me, Bill, and Justin
So I guess I’m a racecar driver now. Sort of.
The 24 Hours of LeMons is an endurance race for cars that cost less than $500. It’s a play on words to make fun of the hoity-toity 24 Hours of LeMans race in France, while poking fun at car culture in general. Basically you take the worst car you can find, and make it go around a race track for 16 hours. Driving hard for 16 hours even in a new car is likely to break something, let alone a junkyard special. Half the point is to heroically fix stuff when it breaks. Which means it combines two of my favorite things – driving on a race track, and fixing things. It is totally awesome.
There are really two types of team at a Lemons race: teams that are trying to win, and teams that bring the worst car they can find on purpose. My friend John asked me if I wanted to drive with the second kind of team, which would be bringing a 1988 Yugo – possibly the worst car ever made.
A sampling of other cars at the race: 1986 Olds Cutlass, 70s VW Vanagon, a Honda Del Sol with the body panels of an El Camino – called the Del Camino, 1989 Volvo station wagon, 1956 Nash Metropolitan, 1977 Volvo 244, 1976 Ford Pinto, 1963 Studebaker Avanti, 1974 Lotus Elite, and a bunch of Porsche 914/944s, BMW E30s, and Miatas.
Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme race car dressed as a horse
VW Vanagon racecar with Italian police theme. These guys blew up their engine on test day and had to do an entire engine swap the first night.
We showed up on Friday morning to get in a day of testing and get acquainted with the car. My first 30 minute session on track was terrifying. I felt uncomfortable in the cockpit (Bill, the owner of the Yugo, has longer legs and shorter arms, so I could never get the seat in a great driving position for me), the car felt a bit sloppy, the brakes barely worked, it was loud and hot, and it understeered like nothing I have ever been in. After that first session, I was unsure I’d make it through the weekend.
Seriously, the front tires started sliding at probably 20mph. There was no way to drive around the track without the front tires sliding to some degree. It was horrifying. After the first session, I asked John and Bill how the hell I was supposed to drive the car when it was sliding so much. John said – “just mash the throttle when it starts to slide. It’ll still slide, but it’ll also go forward.” This was a serious WTF revelation for me. I’m so used to controlling understeer in my Miata by braking or lifting off the throttle – this was totally the opposite. But I went back out there and HALLELUJAH! it worked. Turns out you can control the arc of a turn in this car by using the throttle to bring the nose around a turn, even while it’s sliding. So you are literally reverse-drifting every single corner. It’s a blast!
It slides like this for two reasons. Number 1 is that the Yugo has got to be the most front-heavy car I’ve ever been in. When we jacked it up from the middle, the rear wheels lifted off the ground. As far as I can tell, the rear wheels are mostly for show. Whenever I imagine the weight balance of the Yugo, I think of a Segway with a swivel caster mounted behind it:
Diagram of the Yugo’s weight balance
Adding to this, the Yugo is known to be one of the least durable cars of all time. When Bill bought it, the frame was literally ripping apart. I think it’s probably made mostly of tin foil folded over on itself. Or whatever was available that day at the factory.
Because of the durability issues, Bill has to use the worst and slipperiest tires he can find, which is reason #2 for the sliding. Sticky tires would mean more grip, and more grip would mean more force on the frame. More force on the frame would mean parts ripping off the car.
This tire was pretty new when it went on the car at the beginning of Sunday
Honestly though, it’s not that slow. It accelerates about as fast as a first-gen Miata.
All in all, the Yugo is a perfect Lemons car.
The first day of racing, I was nervous. John did the first stint. The right rear wheel tore a brake line a few laps in, so John had to pit. We couldn’t find a spare line, so we did our first real hooptie fix of the weekend – we blocked off the right rear brake entirely, and raced with 3 brakes. Guess what: the brake feel got BETTER. Like I said, I think the rear wheels are mostly for show.
Rear brake splitter. The bolt on the right is where a brake line is supposed to be
The car ran as well as can be expected for the rest of the day, including during my stint. And by “as well as can be expected”, I mean for a Yugo. I had a 30 minute period where the track was under caution and we were driving slow. The car started to overheat during that time, because we weren’t going fast enough to pass air over the radiator. The carburetor starves for fuel whenever you’re going up a hill or around a hard corner – built in traction control! And later that first day, Bill was driving, and we noticed a weird noise when he came in for gas. Turns out the front brake pads were completely gone and he was out there braking with steel-on-steel.
Utterly destroyed front brake pad on the left, new pad on the right
But the car ran, and ran, and ran. We were in 5th place in the "C” class (cars that are not expected to finish the race), with slow but respectable lap times!
That evening, we fixed the issues with the car as best we could – we found another brake line, we changed out the brake pads and bled the brakes, and we checked over the suspension and frame for signs of failure.
Oh, and John and I also devised a way to keep it from overheating – we figured we should block off the headlight holes to get better airflow over the radiator. In order to do that, we had to build a “cold air intake” out of cardboard and duct tape. Hooptie fix #2!
Custom made cold air intake
On the second day of racing, I was feeling good. Justin did a 1hr turn first thing that morning, and then I was up for 2 hours. I did my best laps of the weekend, running about the same pace as John and Bill (which made me feel proud – perhaps I’ve learned to drive if I can get the car around the track as quickly as those guys!).
By the end of my stint, the handling was starting to feel kind of loose. Sometimes under throttle and braking, the car would pull to one side or the other. I figured it was a degenerative suspension bushing issue (which the car had last year), and I backed off the pace to preserve the car for John and Bill. John did his turn, and ran some really fast laps despite the handling. Then Bill did about 10 laps and had to come in because the car was getting way too loose to drive safely. He said it would basically change lanes if he used the throttle or brakes.
We inspected the car, and the suspension looked fine. Weird. But Bill had noticed that whenever he hit the throttle, the shift lever in the cabin would bang back and forth. So he checked the engine mounts. One was completely severed, and he could rock the engine back and forth with almost no force.
On a front wheel drive car, if the engine is moving around, it pushes on the drive shafts that connect to the wheels. Which means that if you accelerate or brake, the engine is going to push on the wheels in one direction or the other – exactly the symptoms we had on track. Apparently the mount was going bad when I was driving, and completely failed while Bill was driving.
As John said, “sometimes the car has to remind you it’s a Yugo.”
But at the end of the second day, we’d completed a respectable 145 laps. The car ran for 15.25 of 16 total hours. Which is way better than some of the cars that should have been way ahead of us, like a cheaty 2006 Pontiac GTO someone bought for $500 after it was in a fire, or a bunch of 80s BMWs and Porsches. We ended up in 4th in C class!
This was such a fun weekend. What a blast. Camping, driving cars, fixing broken stuff. Doesn’t get better than that. And the atmosphere was great, too. Nobody seemed to be taking it too seriously, even the guys in the pit next to us that came in 2nd place overall by a hair. And the best part was the focus on safety – Lemons is way safer than a normal car race. The organizers emphasize safety by penalizing dangerous driving, and the fact that it’s an endurance race makes preservation of the car important, so very few teams drive aggressively.
I can’t wait to do this again.
