The 24 Hours of Lemons races at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca for 20th anniversary celebrations

Forty-five teams race cheap cars for seven hours on Monday, Oct. 12. Spectator tickets are free and include Paddock All Access

MONTEREY COUNTY, CA, UNITED STATES, September 25, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The 24 Hours of Lemons will mark twenty years of cheap-car endurance racing with “Twenty Ridiculous Years,” a one-day race at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca on Monday, Oct. 12. The series has never raced at the circuit before.
The premise has not changed since 2006. Buy an inexpensive car, prepare it to a serious safety standard, and race it wheel-to-wheel against a full field on a real road course, with real flags, real rules and real penalties. What has changed is the scale: more than 40,000 people have now raced in Lemons, covering nearly 18 million official race miles.
Jay Lamm, Chief Perpetrator and Chief Executive Officer of the 24 Hours of Lemons, said:
Back in 2006 I was just throwing a one-time fun thing for myself and some car-whacko friends — it wasn’t supposed to be anything more. And my real expectation was, we’d attempt to race 24 hours, all of our cars would blow up by about Hour 3, and we’d all spend the rest of the weekend in a bar.
Most of the racers have never raced wheel-to-wheel before. In a 2026 survey of its racers, the series found that 8 out of 10 said Lemons was the first place they had ever done so. The same survey asked what had kept people out of racing before starting with 24 Hours of Lemons. Of the 735 racers who answered that question, 63% said cost, 41% did not have a car, 40% did not have a team, 36% did not know how to start, and 35% did not know that accessible options existed at all.
Lamm added:
Racing never needed to feel as exclusive and unapproachable as it did — it’s like skiing or golf, not like going to Mars. While it’s incredibly hard to be great, it’s actually not all that hard just to go out and be safe and have fun.
The $500 rule is more specific than it sounds. A team buys a car for a maximum of $500, and safety equipment does not count toward it. Neither do wheels, tires, brakes, wheel bearings, ball joints, windshields and wipers, exhaust downstream of the header, or most fuel-system components. Going over the figure does not disqualify anyone. At tech inspection a panel reviews what each team spent, and teams over the limit have electronic penalty laps deducted from their score rather than sitting in a penalty box. Teams can spend whatever they need to on safety. What the rule discourages is spending on speed.
None of that applies to the safety standard, which is not negotiable. Every car goes through technical inspection before every race. The series requires a fully welded roll cage. It requires an onboard fire suppression system certified to SFI 17.1 or an FIA equivalent and serviced every two years, a five- or six-point harness with an anti-submarine belt, a one-piece racing seat, a collapsible steering column, a sealed engine firewall, a bulkhead separating the fuel system from the cockpit, and a master electrical kill switch operable by the belted-in driver and from outside the car. Airbags come out. Drivers wear a full-face Snell SA2015 or newer helmet, an SFI 38.1 or FIA 8858 head-and-neck restraint, and a fire-retardant suit, gloves, shoes and socks. First-timers sit in on a rookie meeting on top of the mandatory drivers meeting, and full fire, rescue and ambulance crews are on site at every event, covered by the entry fee.
Contact is penalized. Black flags are issued for contact of any kind, for putting wheels off the pavement, for ignoring a flag, for speeding in the pits, for overly aggressive driving and for unsportsmanlike conduct, escalating through a stern conversation, a time-consuming public penalty, a mandatory one-hour penalty, a mandatory three-hour penalty and, finally, ejection of the entire team. A driver is entirely responsible for what happens while they are at the wheel, regardless of who hit whom, and anyone who rolls a car is out of racing for 12 months. Penalties are handed down in the paddock, where spectators can watch them happen.
Getting a place in the anniversary field was its own problem. More than 320 teams signed up in the first 48 hours for 45 places. The organizers wrote the team names on 10mm sockets, dropped them into a pan of used motor oil and drew the field out by hand on camera. Those 45 teams have entered 268 drivers between them so far, and with teams still adding names the series expects the figure to pass 300 by race day.
Spectators get in free, and Paddock All Access comes with every ticket at no extra cost. There is no paid upgrade tier and no rope line between the audience and the sport. The same access applies to press: there is no credentialing process, and media attend on the same free ticket, with the same paddock access, as the public.
Then there is the setting. Laguna Seca caps every race at 45 cars, and that cap is the reason the 24 Hours of Lemons has never raced there before: The series is usually known for large fields, including the Guinness World Record for “Most Participants in a Car Race” set in 2014. As a result, a circuit best known for professional motorsport will give a Monday in October to a field of cheap cars, in front of a paddock the public can walk into for free.
On bringing the anniversary to Laguna Seca, Lamm said:
As a driver, Laguna is my favorite track. But they also have a max-45 car limit, so it never made sense for a low-cost/high-volume series like Lemons. Throwing ourselves a party just means we don’t have to care. It’ll cost us a pile of money, but I’ll be able to race my favorite track in a hooptie from my favorite series with a lot of my favorite people. Once every couple of decades, I think I just get to do that.
Jay Lamm, Chief Perpetrator of the 24 Hours

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