28/09/2026
We were lucky enough to have the New Zealand Land Speed Record holder Deanis the Ginge (The Worlds Fastest Ginge) driving with us in the Mega Motorsport NZ day/night 20 hour event over the weekend!
Deanis has provided us Honda advice since we started all those years ago and It was awesome for us to be able to give him the opportunity to experience endurance track racing!
Words from the legend himself:
Lemons 20 hour race report from the drivers seat:
I got invited to drive the Lemons 20 hour endurance race by old Air Force friends, the Dads Army Dive Bombers race team. The team has two Honda EK civics, one called the Hurricane with race number 717, after the form you fill out to leave the Defence Force. And another slight faster car called the Typhoon with race number 718. 717 was entered for the full race distance and 718 would be taken out for a few laps here and there for a bit of fun. We unloaded the cars, fuelled them up, checked the tires and got ready beat on them for the next 20 hours.
The team wanted me in the car for the practise session to shake down the car and get used to the larger international track. Everyone else is experienced, I’m the new guy! The session starts behind the safety car so everyone eases into it, especially in the rainy conditions, unfortunately I got stuck behind a driver that wasn’t keen on pushing at safety car speed so I had a slow few laps until they let me passed. I sped up a whole lot to catch up with the rest of the field behind the safety car and without thinking too much about what I was doing, completely forgot I was in a car I hadn't driven, on a wet track I had no experience with. I hit the braking point I usually use in my own car in the dry along the front straight at 170km/h and the rear end stepped out completely sideways! I slid about 150m down passed hundreds of people on the pit wall who had come out to see the start, all cheering and clapping as I went passed looking like a goose.
Luckily I stayed off the wall and came to a stop on the edge of the sand in turn 1. Engine stalled, dead in the water. It was going to be a looooong 2 days if this was just the start!
Now every driver comes armed with a good excuse on why they suck so here is mine. Max reckoned the brakes can be a bit grabby when they are cold, and this car is pretty twitchy on the rear until it warms up a bit. Max had similar issues at the start of the second day. So chalk it up to some inexperience, bad driving and a twitchy car.
The rain stopped, the track dried, and the race started proper and we were cutting some good laps. I jumped in for a session and couldn’t get much speed out of it. I was having trouble getting down into second gear and often put it into fourth instead, leaving me trying to accelerate out of a corner with no power. I would punch it straight back to 3rd but that was still too slow. This happened over and over an I was consistently slow. I was being nice to the engine too, shifting at 7500rpm thinking it would be a long 2 days and I didn’t need to blow anything up. Max explained later that you gotta give it a bit of up and over and then down to get into second and he recommended to “rev the s**t out of it” for a faster lap time. This I know how to do!
I was pretty dehydrated and hungry after the stint so took on some water, Powerade, and race track hot dogs. They are the best reason to go to a racetrack, the cars are second place! Everything out on track was going well and then 718 came in with a rattly CV joint. We pulled it apart and ball bearings and broken bearing race bits fell out all over the ground. It was done for the day.
The day before I had looked through my garage in case we might need spares. I don’t have many EK Civic parts apart from some brakes that I use on my Honda Fit for when I go drag racing, and a spare CV joint leftover from my CRX that used to shear them off at the hub nut launching at the drag strip. Luckily I brought these along and we were able to put a new CV joint back into 718 and get it back on track. The brake discs were also developing huge cracks so they were replaced at the same time with some of the DADB spares. Max took it out and laid down his best ever time of 1.56. Awesome stuff.
I had hoped before the race that I would get to drive the sunset session going from day into night and luck was on my side. The driver rotation had worked out in my favour and I hopped back in the car around 6pm. Its my favourite time of the day to go for a drive when the light looks amazing, the air temp drops (more power), the track is still warm (more traction) and you can absolutely send it. And send it I did, managing my best time of the weekend at 2.04 minutes, still 2 seconds off Max and Casper but not bad for a bloke who almost put it in the wall in practise. I was managing to find second gear this time and ring the little B16 engine out to 8400 rpm for all of the horsepowers. I was in the zone!
The comms on the cars are fun, the garage and the two cars are linked together, helpful when calling for fuel and driver changes, but way more fun when the two cars are battling and you can trashtalk to the other car! The race control is also linked in so you get advised of cautions around the track, safety cars and drive through penalties for speeding in pit lane! Whoops. The best radio call was during the twilight stint and Casper had just caught up to me. “I’m following Ginge and he’s driving like a man possessed”.
As the night closed in however, things stated getting a little sketchy. At first it was hard to see the gauges. There are no lights on the gauge cluster, this made gear shift points into a guessing game, and fuel levels had to be read when you went past one of the track tower points. Then the track disappeared!
Braking points are pretty easy to pickup at night as there are signs. Corner apexes are a little harder but the red and white ripple strip is a good indication. The exit points are a whole lot harder, some of them are just black tarmac straight into a sand trap! This happened on two occasions, pitch black, middle of the corner, tires fully loaded, stand on the gas to blast out of the corner and suddenly you are looking at the edge of the track with the beach right after! I managed to not get completely stuck however and drove out both times with the only damage being to the lap time. Luckily the fuel was almost out and it was time to hand the car off to the professionals.
Over in 718, Casper was having some drama, A huge oil leak had sprung out of the engine and was spraying oil on the front tires and through the bonnet vent onto the windscreen. With no traction he made the decision to come in and park it up. The fault was diagnosed down to a cam seal that was trying to escape out of the head. It was fixed quickly and ready for action but we kept the car in the garage ready for a thrashing in the daytime.
Ben put in a decent stint battling throughout the night and then swapped out with Nigel around 8.30pm, who did 2 laps and quickly came in with a bad vibration on the front left wheel. A quick inspection revealed two completely missing wheel nuts with some very short looking wheel studs left in their place. Who had taken those off!
With the wheel studs shorn right off we couldn’t run and couldn’t fix it quickly. We had to either replace the hub or the studs, or cannibalise the whole front upright from 718. We had a spare hub, but no bearing press or vice to get any of it apart. Max made the call to cannibalise the upright from 718 so Ben and I got to work on that while Casper and Nigel got the upright out of 717. Then they had a crack at taking the hub apart with the greatest tool ever invented. A great big hammer.
Over on 718, it was getting very very messy. The blown cam seal had leaked a litre of oil out through the left had wheel well and this had mixed with half a tin of CV grease that had come out of the blown CV. This had coated the entire wheel well in the stickiest mess I had seen since one of the kids had one escape the nappy. The challenge was to get the car apart while not looking like a seabird in the gulf of America.
Luckily the big hammer was working on 717’s hub and they were able to fix it. 717 was back together and back out on track while we put 718 back together ready to run the next day. The broken studs had cost us about 50 minutes and we went backwards from 11th to 15th. Not great but some decent damage control. The car ran for another 30 minutes until the finish of day one where the cars were parked up, awaiting dawns crack.
The next day was forecast for a whole lot of rain and on the drive to the track the sky was looking ominous. Huge rain clouds were dumping so much water we could hardly drive at 100 on the motorway, let alone 180km/h on a racetrack. We got into the garage and started swapping the tires over to wets and I got to do something I had heard about but never got the chance to put into play, remove the rear sway bar link. This softens up the handling a bit and makes it a little less likely to stick the rear out in the rain. But this did not seem to help at all! With Max out on track first he was reminiscent of Keiichi Tsuchiya, the Japanese drift king.
After a while, the rain stopped and the track started to dry. I was due for another stint in the car and we made the decision to switch back to dry tires at the same time. I was putting in some decent lap times but there were showers of rain that slowed the pace a bit and while a dry line was helping out, anything outside of that was wet and quite dicey. I had another visit to the beach when someone cut up the inside of me and pushed me off the dry into the wet through a corner leaving me heading to the sand trap with no grip to stop. The engine stalled too but I managed to get it started and get out of the sand. For the rest of the session I was gritting my teeth as every corner was a gamble on how much traction was available at any given moment. Casper was having some fun over in 718 and managed to collect a cone somewhere which got dragged all the way into the penalty box. As a penalty, the rest of the team were made to dress up in cone costumes while Casper drove around them to prove he knew how to avoid cones!
The last sessions were pretty uneventful for our team and we were looking good to make it to the finish line. Max took 718 out for another few laps to get a 2 car side by side finish photo when someone's car lost a drive shaft. Then another car apparently hit the driveshaft, ripping open the sump and dragging oil right around the track on the racing line and into pit lane. With 5 minutes to go, race control had to red flag the race as there was a huge mess to clean up. A bit of an anticlimactic end but we had high fives and hugs all around for finishing. Beers were cracked and prize giving got under way while we loaded cars onto trailers and packed everything in the garage away.
I cant thank the lads behind Dads Army Dive bombers enough for the chance to run this event. Its a huge amount of work to prepare the cars and they deserve all the praise for making all this happen. Also thanks goes to the Mega Motorsport team who run the lemons events. Its a great weekend of racing with a huge team working together to make sure everyone has a good day out and comes home safe. Thanks for the mad weekend and the chance to catch up with old friends and make some new ones. I cant wait for the next one.
Pic below, me in the twilight session, setting my best lap time of the day with brakes glowing red hot! Cory Mewis Photography.
