A Pair of Honda N600 Monsters

When life gives you LeMons, build something crazy and put an S2000 engine in it.

If you’ve not already heard of the LeMons racing series then you’re missing out. At its heart, LeMons is an accessible racing series for amateurs. At its second heart, it’s based around having fun and not taking things too seriously. Intrepid motoring journalist, and friend of the site, Eric Rood caught up with two LeMons monsters and took a walk around with his video camera.

These two cars don’t wholly fit with the spirit of Lemons racing. They definitely cost more than $500, so they are running on the track with waivers from the tech inspectors. And thankfully so as they are both absurd and amazing at the same time.

The car with the Japanese Rising Sun painted on the roof is built and run Team Baka. Baka translates as the word “idiot” in Japanese, but while taking a 30-horsepower Honda N600 kei car and turning it into an extended track and wheelbase race car with an S2000 engine swap for a race it can’t qualify to win may be silly, these guys aren’t idiots. The fabrication standard looks fantastic and things like the swinging steering column are rather elegant solutions to the problem of tiny cars and large people. Not so elegant though is the 350 CFM Holley carburetor the stuck on the S2000 engine because the fuel-injection intake manifold wouldn’t fit in the engine bay.

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The mixture of brilliant and just making something fit seems to suggest Team Baka are just warming up to the task of building something insane. We don’t know for sure, but we do know they found more than one cheap N600 when they were sourcing the car.

Team Apathy certainly aren’t trying to convince you with their aesthetic that their N600 is fast. Under the hood though, they have done a fantastic job fitting in a 160-horsepower Saab engine. It’s a turbo engine and they’ve even managed to fit the intercooler in there. By the time Team Apathy got to the cabin, they had hacked up a lot of the car. So they carried on and moved the driver’s position to the center of the cockpit.

Two completely different takes on the same car and, as ever, something wonderful coming out of LeMons.

Ian Wright

Ian Wright has been a professional writer for two years and is a regular contributor to Corvette Forum, Jaguar Forum, and 6SpeedOnline, among other auto sites.

His obsession with cars started young and has left him stranded miles off-road in Land Rovers, being lost far from home in hot hatches, going sideways in rallycross cars, being propelled forward in supercars and, more sensibly, standing in fields staring at classic cars. His first job was as a mechanic and then trained as a driving instructor before going into media production.

The automotive itch never left though, and he realized writing about cars is his true calling. However, that doesn’t stop him from also hosting the Both Hand Drive podcast.

Ian can be reached at bothhanddrive@gmail.com