LeMons: Leave behind LS interchanges, drop a turbo Saab engine in your Z-Car

We know a certain garage in Pennsylvania where the crazy shadetree mechanics gather in fine shoals. There, the twenty four Hours of LeMons team Rust in the Wind cultivated one of the most bewildering engine exchanges in series history: a turbocharged B234 Saab engine wedged into a Nissan 300ZX. Such strange ideas, while not commonplace, aren’t uncharacteristic in the series, but Rust in the Wind have somehow managed to win several races with their Swedish-Japanese contraption. However, after an encounter with Fresh Hampshire Motor Speedway’s wall in October, the NiSaab (as its owners call it) is headed to the superb road course in the sky. Let’s take a look back at its racing life.

Actually, before we even get that far, the NiSaab wasn’t Rust in the Wind’s very first LeMons car. In 2009, the team turned up to Stafford Motor Speedway in a horribly rusty (even by LeMons standards) one thousand nine hundred eighty four Nissan 300ZX with the original VG30 Three.0-liter V6 under the fetish mask. Not content to run a naturally aspirated V6, the team plumbed a leafblower into the intake — a practice familiar to Roadkill’s followers — with the leafblower and engine throttles linked.

The leafblown engine might have given a slight power bump at low RPM but most likely restricted the engine higher in the powerband, the team said. Ultimately, the engine overheated and hardly lasted through the race with the team’s last driver pounding the everloving crap out of the V6. The engine seized just feet past the checkered flag and the team vowed to use a different powerplant in their next build. Still, their dedication to bad ideas earned them the Dangerous Homemade Technology award (a trophy that the Joy Police have since discontinued in the interest of not rewarding people for dangerous ideas).

When it came time for a fresh 300ZX to build for LeMons, the engine choice was logical: Boosted Saab engines are cheap, plentiful, and make pretty darn good power for LeMons.

Wait, did we say “logical?” We meant “achingly confusing.”

Nevertheless, a running-ish $600 Saab nine thousand and a $150 Nissan 300ZX shell later, the plan came together. The early days of LeMons permitted a Roadkill-able cooling setup (i.e. no rubber hood) so the crazy turbo plumbing and the canted Saab block (based on the old Triumph Slant Four) provided no problems aside from visibility issues.

Of course, the astute will note that all Saabs are front-wheel drive and the 300ZX is, of course, rear-wheel drive. In order to make the engine glad, then, Rust in the Wind had to fabricate a gerrymandered adapter plate for the Nissan transmission’s bellhousing. One would think the switch to a longitudinal arrangement would affect engine oiling under cornering explosions, but the engine suffered no adverse effects.

Naturally, the engineers on the team were not content with just an engine exchange. They also mounted to the roof a massive, articulating wing. The initial setup brought the wing into a high angle of attack when the driver stepped up on the brake and then left the wing at that angle for two seconds after the brake was released. However, a brown moment during testing when the aero abruptly failed mid-corner led the team to redesign the wing in 2013. The reworked design left the yam-sized wing at a high angle of attack normally and let the driver by hand toggle it to a more streamlined angle by holding down a button on the steering wheel.

More importantly than any of that, of course, the team remembered to route their blow-off valve decently.

At the fresh car’s debut at Stafford in 2010, the NiSaab clocked the fourth-fastest lap of the weekend and its thickest drawback—beside typical first-race issues—was getting collected by the Trailing Throttle Oversteer Chevy Corvair that was (unsurprisingly) exhibiting trailing throttle oversteer. The harm was superficial and from their rhythm, it became clear that Rust in the Wind had weaponized an otherwise-docile Z-car.

When two thousand eleven spinned around, LeMons HQ mandated rubber hoods on all cars to keep flaming engine parts from piercing windshields and so forward. Having long ago discarded their 300ZX’s fetish mask and knowing it wouldn’t fit anyway, Rust in the Wind cut up an old wheelbarrow and stitched it back together over the engine bay.

It looks pretty close to stock.

When the car returned for its 2nd race at Fresh Jersey Motorsports Park, the team found mid-Saturday that their Saab motor, on which they had cranked up the turbo boost by fifteen percent or so, had pulverized the 300ZX’s transmission. A team member arrived at LeMons HQ to serve up a dish of gear remnants.

Through some form of witchcraft, the team mended the transmission overnight enough to engage the transmission in fourth gear only and gutless along all day Sunday with a surprising lack of issues otherwise. That earned officially earned them the Heroic Fix trophy and unofficially crowned their car The World’s Fastest One-Speed Saab-Powered Nissan 300ZX.

The team substituted the trans and continued plugging away at East Coast races until October 2012, when Rust in the Wind just slightly edged out the sleeper Honda Accord run by the Bill Danger team at Fresh Hampshire Motor Speedway. The two cars each led significant chunks of the race, but Rust in the Wind resided at the front for the last sixty seven laps and draped on to win by just 13.Four seconds over Bill Danger’s Accord. The cobbled-together NiSaab was no longer merely a bizarre idea; it was a bizarre winner.

Just five months later, the team backed up that win with another close victory at Monticello Motor Club in Fresh York. The NiSaab spent much of the race pursuing the Duct Gauze Motorsports BMW E30, but a late pit stop for the Bimmer meant Rust in the Wind inherited the lead in the final hour with the long-suffering Team Pro Crash Duh Nation Alfa Romeo Milano in close pursuit. In the end, Rust in the Wind held on to a narrow win of just more than a minute with an axle screaming for grace by the race’s end.

The implausible combination of turbo Saab engine and oversized-wing-on-Z-car somehow looked like perhaps the magic bullet in LeMons, but the very next outing in 2013—again in Fresh Hampshire, which will become a theme)—proved that petite failures can have big consequences. A failed coolant hosepipe let the engine overheat. The team attempted to salvage it with a head gasket switch Saturday night, but the overheating had also massively warped the head. The gasket switch was futile and for the very first time in years, the NiSaab failed to take the checkered flag.

Before the coolant hosepipe failure, however, the NiSaab’s onboard cameras caught the accomplish and utter devastation of the Rusty Dragon Racing Volkswagen Golf’s Honda A18 engine at about forty mph. As one might imagine, Rusty Dragon’s story is one of the longest, most convoluted, and abysmally puzzling things to have ever happened in LeMons. Naturally, we’ll tell their tale here in due time.

Rust in the Wind managed a duo more Top ten finishes until, once more at Fresh Hampshire in 2014, the NiSaab took a knock to the rear bumper from an inattentive racer under full-course caution. The jolt was strong enough to break the turbo off the harass manifold. It was a bizarre failure and, even stranger, a screenplay that repeated itself (minus the turbo failure) at the car’s next race in 2015. Even for good LeMons teams, wins are hard to come by and failures occur unexpectedly.

Ultimately this year, after more than two years of harsh violates, the NiSaab found itself at the front of the field at Thompson Speedway Motorsports Park in Connecticut. And yet again, Rust in the Wind found themselves racing hard with another long-suffering runner-up team, the Massholes’ Ford Escort ZX2. The Massholes led something like seventy five percent of the race, but a late-race charge from the quicker NiSaab snuck them past the Escort with less than thirty minutes remaining.

The Massholes stayed glued to Rust in the Wind’s bumper until the race’s final lap, when the ZX2 transmission broke, providing the Saab-powered 300ZX its third victory by thirty one seconds. There have been several three-time winners, but none whose total margin of victory measures less than two minutes across three races.

The NiSaab, however, met its untimely demise at—you guessed it—New Hampshire Motor Speedway last month. Embarking the soggy 2nd day of racing from the lead, the driver spun the car on the day’s very first lap and plowed into the wall, also collecting the second-place Massholes. With the chassis already well worn from seventeen races and very likely somewhere around Ten,000 race miles, Rust in the Wind elected to scrap their 300ZX bath. However, expect the healthy drivetrain to reappear in a fresh shell, maybe even with a fresh fetish mask redesign.

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