One of the greatest things about having spent so much time working for the 24 Hours of Lemons race series—14 years and 161 races since that first one in South Carolina—is the enjoyment of the incandescent creativity behind some of the best bribes given to the kindhearted and fair judges in exchange for… objectivity.
When you race a Miata with a fastback roof made from an industrial trash compactor housing and a Cadillac HT4100 engine, you don't need to bribe the judges… which makes the Suitcase O' Spaghettios even more necessary.
How do you top that? Here's how.
Right. So, for the 2021 B.F.E. GP 24 Hours of Lemons race in Colorado, Deferred Maintenance Racing showed up with an incredible new theme on their 4.3 V6-swapped Chevy LUV pickup. To start with, they'd obtained Thai-market badges to convert it to the LUV's Southeast Asian-market sibling, the Isuzu Faster.
Then they studied all the liveries applied to the legendary Bigfoot monster truck over the decades and distilled them down to a new concept: BIGFONT!
The Bigfont truck looked great and went around the track pretty quickly for a 43-year-old Japanese minitruck with 3/4 of a small-block Chevy V8, but an unfortunate rollover crash ended its career that weekend. We're happy to report the team's well-built roll cage spared the driver from injury.
Forgotten in all the excitement over the crash was the spectacular bribe given by the team to the Solomonically wise justices of the Lemons Supreme Court: Guess Hooptie? It took a while for me to dig this box out of the usual post-race detritus, and longer still to appreciate what it was all about.
Supposedly, the Guess Who? board game came to America in 1982, when I was a 16-year-old Toyota Corona pilot, but I must have been too busy playing Dealer's Choice to be aware of it at the time. In any case, the pinnacle of this game's success appears to have come long after that, so I'd never heard of it. It wasn't long before special-edition versions of the game appeared, with a special focus on popular TV shows. The Deferred Maintenance personnel decided to make their own interpretation, entitled Guess Hooptie?, inspired by the term for a terrible car popularized by Sir Mix-a-Lot.
In the original game, players ask questions to narrow down the identity of the human faces presented on the flip-over cards on the boards.
In Guess Hooptie?, however, the players must determine which car manufacturer the other player has on his secret card, by asking questions. Deferred Maintenance Racing included some diabolically clever choices in car brands, including dead ones (e.g., AMC, Geo) and marques never sold in the United States (e.g., Dacia).
So, I brought my copy of Guess Hooptie? to a South Denver bar with outdoor seating and invited two members of DAE Racing to give the game a real-world test.
We learned quickly that you must be incredibly knowledgeable about both obscure makes and models and know how to phrase a question to elicit the kind of meaningful response that you need to narrow down the list of manufacturers.
For example, Suzuki still exists but no longer sells cars in North America; if you ask if this manufacturer still exists, period, the answer is yes. But that might mess you up if you are just thinking about four-wheeled, highway-legal machinery sold new in the United States.
So, much more difficult than the original Guess Who?, but also far superior for car experts with a few beers under their belts.
