My Favorite Car From This Past Weekend’s Lemons Race Has The Most Baffling Livery I’ve Ever Seen: Cold Start

This past weekend I was out at Carolina Motorsports Park in a part of South Carolina that strangely looked like a desert, complete with sandy soil and scrubby vegetation, or it did until it started to rain, torrentially and unrelentingly. I was judging the 24 Hours of Lemons race out there, and, as always, it was a blast. I’ll likely have more stories and little videos about it over the course of the week, but right now I want to focus on one of my favorite cars at the race, and one that has one of the most deep-cut and obscure livery themes I’ve ever seen. It was the 1959 Jaguar Mark I Saloon from the Piston Liberation Front team. The livery was clean and simple, and combined two things that demonstrate this team’s thumbs are firmly pressed against the pulsing veins of modern American culture: a long-dead and very funny comic actor big in the 1970s on shows like The Carol Burnett Show and an Australian chain of “computers, electrical, furniture & bedding” stores.

Yes, that’s right, I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now, this team took the well-known-only-among-people-45-and-older Harvey Korman and combined it with the almost entirely unknown in America retail chain called Harvey Norman. Get it? Korman-Norman, all combined onto a lovely old bit of iconic British iron!

It’s perfect! Just perfect! People have been trying for years to pull this off, mostly via failed attempts to somehow combine Tim Conway and Dick Smith but could never quite make it work; then, out of nowhere, the Piston Liberation Front kooks re-thought the whole alchemy from the get-go and came up with this triumph.

There is a particular Harvey Korman character they’re using as their touchstone reference, the character Hedley Lamarr that Korman played in the Mel Brooks’ masterpiece comedy-western Blazing Saddles. Here he is, the one who isn’t Slim Pickins:

You remember him from there, right? And this reference is hinted at in the license plate:

…and in this really nicely done charicature of Korman as Lamarr:

It’s all delightfully baffling, I think. I wonder what percentage of the people at the race actually knew what the hell these references were? Actually, at a Lemons race, it’s probably a pretty high number.

The Jag was technically inteteresting, too – the original straight-6 Jag engine was taken out and replaced with a more modern Jaguar 4-liter straight-6, but when they installed it, it was shoved way way back, making it almost a front-mid-engined car, and the driver now sits next to a huge, hot doghouse that houses much of that engine, which extends into the cabin a good two and a half feet, at least.

You can see how far back it’s set here in this open bonnet shot:

The covers there at the front duct air to the radiator, so you can see the engine itself doesn’t really start until right about the front axle line.

I’ll show you more great Lemons cars soon, but I had to show you this one first because, well, you can see why.