It was Saturday, and I needed booze. Nothing too heavy; just a bottle of gin for cocktail hour and some Lillet to serve before dinner. So I hopped in the Telstar Logistics fake-fleet vehicle, and drove down to the glamorous BevMo on Bayshore.

When I emerged from the store a few minutes later, I found this note stuffed under my windshield wiper. Awwww. Thank you, anonymous reader! You made my day.

Those grease-huffing papas from the Bernal Dads Racing Team had an excellent adventure during last weekend’s 24 Hours of LeMons endurance race at Thunderhill, and they represented Bernal Heights with honor. A few highlights:

• Two of the Dads flew to the race track in a private plane, which gave the whole team a little bit of jet-set flair:

• Both of the Dads’ cars received new paint jobs. The Whale, a battered a survivor of 12 previous LeMons races, adopted a new olive-drab livery, with a Flying Tiger-style shark mouth painted on its nose, to commemorate its war-weary status:

• Meanwhile, the mutant Miata-Volvo cross-breed “Molvo” was repainted gold after a vertigo-inducing trip to a Walmart, where six cans of gold spray paint were discovered on an aisle not far from the Gatorade. Naturally:

• The Whale blew a head gasket late Saturday afternoon. The car managed to limp through the day, then two Dads rushed to Sacramento (rather stylishly, in a borrowed Porsche convertible) to buy replacement parts. By morning, the new head gasket was installed, and the car was ready to race. Go team:

• The Molvo accrued so many penalties on Saturday afternoon that it was banned from the race. Luckily, some desperate pleading (while using a 6 year-old kid with a broken leg as a pity-generating prop) morning yielded a reprieve on Sunday morning, as the LeMons judges allowed the car to return to the track:

On Sunday afternoon, when the checkered flag was finally waved after some 15 hours of racing, both of the Dads’ cars were still running smoothly out on the track. They finished in the middle of the pack in their class, and in the middle of the pack overall, which was not exactly great but not shameful either. Most importantly, all the Dads returned home safely to father another day, and a very good time was had by all:

PS: Lots and lots and lots more photos from Thunderhill right here.

PHOTOS: Telstar Logistics

On top of all the other fun stuff going on this weekend, the ever-manly Bernal Dads Racing Team will take to the track this weekend to participate in the 24 Hours of LeMons “Vodden the Hell Are We Doing” endurance race at Thunderhill Raceway in exotic Willows, California.

The Dads will be bringing both of their race cars: One is the valiant Whale (#245), a battered Volvo 240 wagon that has already survived 12 LeMons races — and which now carries a new olive-drab livery to commemorate it’s war-weary status. The other is The Molvochero (#243), a Mazda Miata disguised as a Volvo that’s been converted into a pickup truck. Naturally.

Your Bernalwood editor will be embedded with the Bernal Dads throughout, so keep an eye on the Bernalwood Twitter account for regular updates from the track… and the driver’s seat. Wheeeeee!

Bernal Heights is the kind of neighborhood where you’ll find a group of gearhead guys from the Bernal Dads Racing Team banding together to help rebuild the engine of a 1965 Ford Falcon that one of our local bartenders relies upon as her primary mode of transportation.

It’s also the kind of neighborhood where one of those same gearhead guys decided to make a time-lapse video of the engine reinstallation process, set to the madcap theme of the Benny Hill Show:

I’m not really sure what exactly all this says about Bernal Heights, but that’s most definitely the kind of neighborhood this is.

PHOTOS: Telstar Logistics

Our fashion-obsessed friends at 7×7 recently published some useful information about San Francisco parking regulations that may be of interest to the residents of our parking-challenged neighborhood.

Specifically, the question has to do with how close to a driveway “curb-cut” can you park without getting a ticket. The short answer is to avoid the sloping parts of the curb cut. The longer answer goes something like this:

“My bumper was in the part of the curb that curves down into the driveway.” It would make sense that you thought of the sloped portion of the curb as being part of the curb, because it is part of the curb. You are correct, and the best argument you could make would be: when the curb was constructed, that’s when that sloped part was made. It was not part of the driveway construction, it was part of the curb construction. So, you did not, by definition, block a driveway.  This argument, as logical as it is, may be worth a shot, but to win, it would mean overturning the law, because I am sorry to tell you my friend, the sloped part of the curb, or the “curb cut” as SFMTA calls it, is actually legally considered to be part of the driveway.

One thing I’ve learned in this life is that the law isn’t always so logical…or maybe it is. Maybe there is some wisdom in making that sloped part of the curb legally part of the driveway. I would bet that when they were making the law, some engineer considered this: In order to turn into a narrow driveway, your front car wheel must be just on the outer edge of your driveway when turning into it so that your back wheels can make it in too. And if your front wheel is just at that very edge, the fender and bumper are going to go into and over the space in question and hit another car if it is parked in that space. I think that’s the reasoning, but only those in that situation would ever have thought of it. And that’s why there were 28,277 of these citations handed out last year.

PHOTO: Telstar Logistics