It was early autumn when two “dubbers” in Boothbay Harbor thought it would be a bright idea to try their luck at auto racing. 

Ben Bulkeley and Ryan Leighton had never stepped foot on a race track before. But they convinced themselves to get behind the wheel of a late 1990s "crapbox" to endure what became14 hours of high octane terror on the New Hampshire Motor Speedway.  

Joined by the likes of three other dubbers and one veteran racer, the motley crew called themselves the Headgasketless Horsemen. They donned their racing gear and went to battle with hundreds of other rusted out crapboxes, better known by the term,  “lemons.”

This was 24 hours of LeMons. 

As for the car, saying it handled well wouldn’t be correct.

That’s not to say it handled poorly, either — because even that denotes that it handled at all.

No — the car just kind of squished around corners.

Try as we might to wring any sort of aggression out of it, we were still racing a white marshmallow around the course.

Yet, still we soldiered on for 337 laps. The five cars behind us — a Mazda Miata, BMW 325i, Audi A6, Datsun 280Z and BMW325 — were all unquestionably faster but we were better. Whereas those teams drove their cars too hard and wound up in the garage or in trouble, our squishy little sedan just kept puttering around the course.

By the end of the endeavor, all might have taken away one lesson. If life gives you lemons, squeeze the life out of them, because it’s better to be squishy and reliable than fast.