LeMons Good/Bad Idea of the Week: Bribing with Diorama of Judge’s Beloved Impala

LeMons Good/Bad Idea of the Week: Bribing with Diorama of Judge’s Beloved Impala:

The 24 Hours of LeMons Supreme Court, the members of which take as their model the frontier judges of the American Wild West, have sanctioned bribery as a means of ensuring mutual respect in the racer-judge relationship. In fact, so central is the judicial bribe to the LeMons BS Inspection process that we apply a BRIBED stencil to the car of the generous team. How does it work? Let’s say the documentation on your LeMons car is a little shaky, and you need to convince the judges that you really did find those Bilsteins and that nice header at U-Pull-It for 25 bucks. If you have a cheated-up BMW E30 or Acura Integra, you’re probably unlikely to get away with it, although the LeMons Supreme Court still appreciates the gesture of a nice bribe, which means we’ll refer to you as a “rule-bender” rather than as a “shameless fraudster.” But bribes from teams running quasi-credible $500 cars grease the wheels of justice for gray-area calls. The most common bribe is a bottle of quality alcohol or some of the local cuisine, but some teams get quite creative. California-based Dirty Duck Racing raised the bribery bar to new heights last fall, at the Skankaway Anti-Toe-Fungal 500 at Infineon Raceway, and it left me uncharacteristically speechless.

A little background for those who haven’t been avidly following the Murilee Martin Lifestyle Brand™: I owned a hooptied-out 1965 Chevy Impala sedan that evolved from college art project to daily driver to 13-second drag-strip toy over the course of a decade, and I chronicled my adventures with this car in a series of autobiographical essays. Many LeMons racers followed this series last year, and Dirty Duck Racing took bribe inspiration from the “Road to Victory” illustration above.

The Dirty Ducks have been running a VW GTI in West Coast races for years now, and for the Skankaway 500 they Halloween-ified their magician-themed car.

The Ducks, it turns out, have a pro model maker on the team, and so they commissioned him to build a 1:25-scale replica of the “Road To Victory” image of my Impala. When they gave it to me during the BS Inspection, I was stunned by the magnitude of this gift.

My Impala was a sedan, and the only die-cast or plastic toy ’65 Impalas available are fastback coupes. But, really, who cares? Let’s look at the details of the Dirty Duck bribe.

The patina on my Impala evolved over the course of a decade; it started with a thick coat of some sort of gloss-gray industrial paint, to which I applied various helpings of gray and black rattle-can paint plus greasy hand prints over the years. As you can see here, the 1:25 Impala Hell Project car very nicely captures the look of the original.

The road and backdrop portion showed real inspiration as well; rather than just replicate my black-and-white illustration of my Impala driving on California’s Interstate 5 into the Nagasaki mushroom cloud, the Ducks created their own color artwork. (Aside: My original image was the first serious work I ever did on Photoshop back in 1993, using a 386 with four megs of RAM—that’s megs, not gigs—running Photoshop 2.5. I recall my computer requiring 25 minutes to save the file between changes.) The mushroom cloud in the diorama appears to be from the Upshot-Knothole 1953 test series.

In honor of the Dirty Duck GTI, the VW Rabbit emblem has been worked into the clouds.

In fact, you can see the Dirty Ducks GTI itself off at the side of the road, complete with spin-out skid marks leading to its final resting place. The Road to Victory is treacherous!

The model maker clearly read every word of the Impala Hell Project saga, judging from the number of obscure details worked into this thing. For example, after moving from California to Georgia, I fixed the rust around the rear window—rust in that spot is a GM-cars-in-California certainty, by the way—using beer-can metal and J.B. Weld. Above you can see the patch on the 1:25 Impala . . .

. . . and here’s the patch on the real car, circa 1995.

The cryptic serial numbers on the doors (intended to call to mind archetypes of full-size “official vehicle” Chevrolets) that I applied soon after buying the car in 1990 were recreated as well.

Here’s the original, soon after application. You can see that the Ducks’ model maker went for the patina the car accrued later in the 1990s.

I find it interesting that the model maker opted to go for a blend of the various incarnations of the Hell Project Impala’s life stages, instead of a slavish reproduction of the car as depicted in the “Road to Victory” image (which is based on a 1991 photograph of the car heading up I-5 to the original Lollapalooza Festival). In the photograph above, I am posing in 1996 at Atlanta Dragway. On the trunklid is an apparatus made from plumbing pipe, which I used to lock my bicycle atop the trunklid during my move to Georgia.

Sure, it’s anachronistic in the diorama, but having the bar was important as part of an effort to capture some of the Impala Hell Project’s more memorable accessories.

Even the 1991-vintage Doll Hut sticker on the trunklid, in its much-oversprayed-and-weathered glory, is reproduced. Truly, this is one of the greatest LeMons Supreme Court judicial bribes ever, and I’ll say it again: Thanks, Dirty Duck Racing!

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