Hella Sweet Lemons Car of the Week: Team Babel’s M-Ark-2

Sometimes a Hella Sweet race car looks spectacular on the track and would have been the focus of everyone’s attention at a Lemons venue with fewer than 100 entries— say, GingerMan or High Plains— but gets overshadowed by even crazier builds at Sears Point or Thunderhill, where we’ll see more like 200 teams. The Team Babel M-Ark-2, which competed at Sears and Thunderhill in 2012 and 2013, was such a car, and we think it deserves more admiration than it received when it had to compete for eyeballs with the likes of the E=MC Hammered Jeep DJ-5 or a drifting Sunbeam Imp. Let’s take a look!

Team Babel picked up a first-gen Toyota MR2 for cheap and put a great deal of work into crafting a wooden body to go over the stock sheet metal, including a beautifully seaworthy bow. With the addition of paint and the appropriate stuffed animals (which stayed on board while racing), the Team Babel Noah’s M-Ark-2 showed up for its debut at the 2012 Vodden the Hell Are We Doing race at Thunderhill.

The M-Ark-2 looked glorious on the track, and it would have been an instant Organizer’s Choice winner at 95% of our events. The absurd stretched-snout Postal Jeep took the prize that time, though. Team Babel turned 154 laps that weekend, finishing 119th out of 166 entries. That’s non-shabby for an MR2 at its first race, given the notorious lack of reliability for Toyota’s mid-engined sports car in our series.

For the 2013 Sears Even More Pointless race, Team Babel returned with a fishing-boat re-theme.

The “waterskier” towed through the inspections was a nice touch. Team Babel finished an impressive 13th overall at that race and finally grabbed the coveted Organizer’s Choice.

After that, the M-Ark-2’s drivers tired of dragging around several hundred pounds of wood with their 100-horsepower race car, so they converted it to a purist-enraging “Lamborrari” for the 2013 Arse Freeze-a-Palooza.

The team, now named Team Lamborrari, had one of the better “Ferraris” we’ve seen in the series. This car hasn’t appeared in a Lemons event since 2016, though some of the drivers have been wheelmen for other cars. We hope to see the M-Ark-2/Lamborrari back in action soon.