People's Curse Award

I have raced since the end of 2010 and never seen a people's curse as in car get destroyed by heavy equipment. They used to hand out ballots at the races, but hardly anyone would vote.

I voted one time, because a certain team was driving like complete a-holes. I believe the curse for them was a 3 hour park job.

The only other curse I remember seeing was that everyone got to come up to the cursed car with a wrench and remove one part from the car. I did not take part unfortunately, because that curse is funny to me and does not totally destroy a car, just makes the team have to thrash it back together.

And then there was the rx7 team in Sonoma who had radios on the police frequency, which delayed the start of the race, they got the people's curse even after they bought a bunch of free beer that Saturday night. Their curse was that every piece of their engine had to fit into a cardboard box the judges found, so they cut it into strips, taped it together, made a giant ring of cardboard, and drove their car through it, ingenious, then they were allowed to race again.

Pure speculation, but I am guessing that with the added cost of the safety equipment and investments in these cars on average of $5000 to get them to the track, people did not have the heart to destroy another person's car. Most likely the ballots probably just became a pain for Lemons staff to deal with and they finally determined it was not worth printing them up.

The curse was on it's way out because a lot of people were not submitting the forms.  If HQ had 20 forms, then the cursed team might only have 4-5 votes against them to get the curse.  Those 4-5 votes might have been only for a car looking too nice, the porsche at Nelson ledges comes to mind, even though they were not on track hardly at all.  From there, HQ put a very high requirement on getting the curse (51% of all the teams must vote on one car) which caused no one to get it and then they quietly did away with it. 

As a side note, some of the later curses here on the east coast were people volunteering their cars.

There was that car at Stafford that got "disassembled" by the crowd.

The last curse at MSR was the top three cars, and they decided that wasnt going to happen, so they dismissed it.

It was the People's Curse at Nelson Ledges that made us decide that the idea no longer worked (here's Jay pouring "Cash For Clunkers Juice" in the People's Curse winner's engine). A Porsche 944 that looked shiny (but wasn't cheaty) blew its head gasket a couple laps into the race, got the most votes in Curse balloting, got its engine destroyed in spite of not running all day. How many votes? Eight. Also around that time, contending teams were spreading rumors about all the other contending teams on Saturday night, trying to get them Cursed out of the race. On top of that, teams had gone from disposable who-gives-a-shit cars to cars with lots of blood and sweat invested, so the entertainment value of The Curse stopped outweighing the misery inflicted on winners (who, as time went by, were clearly the victims of gossip and/or bad perception instead of their own overaggressive driving).

Once we started doing the 3-hour timeout for the fourth black flag of a race session, there wasn't as much reason to hold the threat of the curse over the crashy/aggro teams, because on-track antics calmed down a lot once we removed the worst few offenders for a few hours at a shot.

And yet the legend of the Curse lives on in the minds of people who've never been to a Lemons race.

It seems like at least 3 or 4 times a year I correct someone's incorrect perception about that.

Yeah, same here. I got into Lemons late 2010/early 2011 when factually the curse was already on its way out, but given the internet hype around it, it was definitely haunting us during the car build. "OMG, what if we get the Curse? We've worked on this fucking car for MONTHS!!!"

The Bradley GT crush was after the VW Bus crush, but that wasn't a People's Curse. That was Dave Morrow hating the car so much that he wanted us to destroy it. He took the engine out first (and it lives on in the Reatta, or maybe the Gremlin).

I rather enjoyed this amazing curse....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQChF-jGQIc

Morrow really hated that Bradley.  NJMP, April 2010. 

IMG_3828 by dougkirchberg, on Flickr