Average number of laps completed for a team during a Lemons race CMP

Here are the number of laps completed by the winner-on-laps for the last 6 Lemons races run at CMP:

Fall South 10: 684
Spring South 10: 728
Southern Discomfort 10: 670
Fall South 09: 587
Spring South 09: 595
South 08: 512

Now, how many laps should you expect to complete in your maiden voyage? First off, you are assuming in the wrong direction. To be accurate, you should assume that all things will not go right, that the car will break down (how often and with what severity is up to you), that you will have black flags, and it's no better than 50-50 that you'll see the checkered flag from inside your car.

I'd say 300, but that's just a wild-assed guess. Good luck.

IF you assume things will go right, well, you know the rest.... 

Unless you are VERY lucky or skilled at setting up a craptacular car to perform a near-impossible feat and stay on the track all weekend, expect 200-400 laps. 

CMP eats brakes like you would not believe.  Upgrade, or enjoy the savory aroma of fire extinguisher dust mixed in with burning brake fluid.

We had 402 scored laps including 1 major (About 2 hours) and several minor mechanical stops. That was middle of the pack.

200-450 is a good range to expect. Full standings for the event are here:
http://www.mylaps.com/results/showrun.jsp?id=1706276
Unfortunately MyLaps doesn't give you some necessary info like veterancy levels, and the car being run - but it's a starting point.

I posted the stats for a race a while back, showing the distribution of laps completed and also lap times.

For laps completed, at Thunderhill, a fairly high proportion of cars completed 0 laps, but if you somehow managed to do better than that you still had a fair chance of dropping out after less than 25 laps, and this trend continued but diminished until about 75 laps. If you made it this far then your chances of not completing 25 more more laps was about the same as everyone else. We'll statistically speaking, the same, but that doesn't mean your chances were as good as Eyesore's or Death Cab's. Basically, 6-8 cars would drop out after every additional 25 laps.

For a rough estimate, I'd just go with a 7% dropout rate per 25 laps.

Here's the original post, with real charts and everything: http://forums.24hoursoflemons.com/viewtopic.php?id=5928

So what you are saying is ditch the E30's ETA and swap to something that fell over 30 degrees..

And I suspect we'll have a handle on the brakes, we've set up nearly 4,000 pound cars for enduro racing..

Since brakes are safety, is there such thing as too nice?

and you need to.

Yes, ditch the E30. I love me some Bimmers, just not in Lemons. They're too common and too easy. I'm not saying you have to go the Wartburg/Dauphine incredi-swap route, and especially not for your first Lemons effort. But bringing an e30 to a Lemons race is just not bringing a party. And that's what makes Lemons really fun and different from everything else out there. IMHO. Not everyone agrees on this point.

While brakes/wheels are "free" from a budgetary standpoint, I've always thought that a team that shows up with really expensive & light wheels and a multi-thousand dollar Brembo or Willwood-type non-factory setup on their brakes is more likely to get sweated hard in judging. Not that those parts aren't swapped illegally, but if I were a judge and saw that setup, my suspicion would be that the team is very concerned about going fast and winning the race, and teams that are primarily concerned with winning the race tend to have a hard time not putting cheaty parts on other non-free parts of the car or having expensive work done on other non-free parts of the car.  But that's just my speculation, that's never been confirmed (nor denied) by a member of the Lemons Supreme Court. YMMV. Good luck.

But to answer your direct questions, I would say, "It could be as many as 900 laps (1-minute lap x 15 hours), but could very well be as few as 0 laps."