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Hella Sweet Lemons Car of the Week: The “Alpine 210” of the Mulsanne Straightjackets

We’re back with another Hella Sweet Lemons Car of the Week, this time with the Organizer’s Choice winner from the 2015 Doing Time In Joliet race. The Mulsanne Straightjackets built this beautiful replica of a 1966 Alpine A210, of Le Mans fame, and it ran flawlessly for most of the weekend at our race.

The Straightjackets started out with this rusty but reasonably complete 1979 Alfa Romeo Spider. We’d have been happy to see this car race as-is, but the team had big plans in mind.

We’re not sure what kind of car donated the roof. Something French?

The $500 budget limit doesn’t apply to labor expended by the team, and we’re not going to look much at the nickels and dimes for the sheet-metal and paint they used— not with a car this spectacular.

The Alfa Spider is quite distinctive-looking, so it took plenty of metalwork to hide the Italian lines and add some French ones. To the teams that ask how they can be sure of being accepted to an overcrowded LeMons race, we suggest that you do what the Mulsanne Straightjackets did.

The team wanted to maintain the car’s original Midwestern rusty purity, so there are a few blemishes here and there.

We were astounded when we saw this masterpiece roll up to the inspections.

A fine racing automobile.

The drivetrain stayed all Alfa Romeo, of course.

I happened to be driving a 2015 Alfa Romeo that weekend, so I had to photograph it with the “Alfine Renault.”

We put this car in Class B, with the medium-quick cars, and it was a bit slower than most of its class competition. A Malaise Era engine and all that extra metal must have slowed it down. Next time, we’ll probably put it in Class C.

A broken axle sidelined the Alfine late in the race, but the Mulsanne Straightjackets still finished 65th out of 94 and took home the much-prized Organizer’s Choice trophy.

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