There are a few key differences between the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the most prestigious sports car race on the planet, and 24 Hours of Lemons. One, of course, is a letter of the alphabet. You might already realize this if you made a typing error in your "Le Mans" internet search and stumbled upon this article.

24 Hours of Lemons, which like the 24 Hours of Le Mans features endurance racing, is a series that was created for the amateur racer who can't spend millions to run a sports car into the ground of the French countryside each June. Instead, it's a war of attrition among cars worth no more than $500. Yep. Five hundred dollars.

The result is the third major difference between 24 Hours of Lemons and the 24 Hours of Le Mans: the guiltless presence of humor and fun.

"The idea is to keep it accessible to people who aren't these hard-core car guys," Nick Pon, one of the three men who created 24 Hours of Lemons in 2006, told Sporting News. "Because, frankly, hard-core car guys are kind of a pain in the ass."

MORE: How to watch the actual 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2019

This isn't to say the 24 Hours of Le Mans is completely devoid of such amusement, but, for example, crew members for cars running in a 24 Hours of Lemons race don't sleep on a cold, hard garage floor in between pit stops.

And while attacking the corners of the Circuit de la Sarthe in a Toyota TS050 Hybrid might be exhilarating, there's something less stressful about limping around a race course in a 1990s Toyota Corolla that's molded and painted to resemble the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile.

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Jay Lamm, the official originator of 24 Hours of Lemons whose title is "Chief Perpetrator," thought of the name as a parody of the big race staged each year in France. (Lemon is a slang term for a car deemed to have defects related to utility or value — basically, pieces of you-know-what.)

But when 24 Hours of Lemons was created, Lamm, Pon and a third founder, Jeff Glenn, never imagined it would grow into what it is in 2019. What began as a simple bet is now 20 to 25 races in the U.S. each year, not including a handful of international races, plus spin-off events like car shows and rally races.

"One of our mutual car friends was one of the guys behind the California Mille, which is really high-end; tens of thousands of dollars to drive for a week your fancy, vintage Ferrari on California back roads," Pon explained. "Jay kind of challenged our friend and said, 'I bet that you can get a $500 Toyota and it would do better than these million-dollar Ferraris.'"

So the test came in another existing event called the Double 500, a road race in which $500 cars raced for 500 miles.

"Not only was (Jay) right, but he was so right that the Double 500 was easy," Pon said. "There was no challenge to it at all."

The trio then transitioned this theme to a race track. Pon said their first race featured only themselves and their buddies, plus "a couple of guys who had done the Double 500." Because the three men at the time were in the car magazine business, in attendance for that first race were writers from publications like Car and Driver and Road & Track.

After the inaugural 24 Hours of Lemons event, Lamm, Pon and Glenn were overwhelmed with one question: When is the next race?

"We were like, 'Uh, I guess we’ll plan one then,'" Pon said.

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Today, 24 Hours of Lemons' website, which is littered with the same humor on which the series' events are based, lays out the rules in simple terms.

Not including safety equipment, breaks and wheels/tires, each car must be bought and prepped for $500 or less. There are safety-related rules, but any modification is allowed and counts toward the build total (with the exception of ridiculous, non-advantageous props). Only a valid driver's license is needed for a person to race, with each car allowed up to two drivers and any number of crew members.

"We created it for the type of car person that's into cars but wasn't either rich or talented enough to do anything serious on the track as far as wheel-to-wheel racing," Pon said. "That's a large chunk of our participants, but there's also a large chunk of guys who are more experienced racers who want to do something on the side, or something they can share with their non-racer friends."

Most 24 Hours of Lemons races are 14-15 hours long, spanning two days with an overnight break. (Many of the venues the series visits don't allow a 24-hour race.) There is one actual 24-hour race per year. Pon said that one "is just awful." Even when split among multiple drivers, he said, 14 or so hours is plenty.

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Many of the cars that compete in a 24 Hours of Lemons race are nothing more than a punchline on wheels. Others, though, are actually aiming to finish the race, and there can be a ton of competition. A couple years ago, 24 Hours of Lemons set a Guinness World Record for most participants in one race with 216 cars. Some of the series’ smaller events will fall in line with the 30- to 50-car range.

"The first couple of races we did, we expected there to be two cars running at the end," Pon said. "Because of the surprising durability of certain cars, and then just the amazing mechanical ability that some of these guys have, a surprising number of cars can just soldier through.

"As far as how many of those survive until the end, it's such a moving target. Let's say the race ends at 4 on Sunday. If you stretched it to 5, you might actually have more cars running, because whoever was working on it (fixed it). Or less — there could have been a car on its last legs. It's a very fluid thing. There's constantly cars coming on and off track for various issues throughout the weekend."

The awards handed out at the end of each race, naturally, are also parodical. The grand prize, for example, is called the Index of Effluency, which arbitrarily goes to whoever did the most with the worst car. It’s a play on the real Le Mans race's Index of Efficiency, which in the 1960s was awarded based on fuel mileage.

The prize money attached to the Index of Effluency award is $501, a dollar more than the maximum cost of the car. Like the cash for all Lemons prizes, it's awarded entirely in nickels.

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One would think the sanctioning body that stages the actual 24 Hours of Le Mans would be less than thrilled about a satirical endurance racing series that bares such a similar title. That was never a problem … until it was.

A couple years ago, 24 Hours of Lemons — then called 24 Hours of LeMons (note the upper-case "M") — expanded to Australia and New Zealand. It was then that the folks from the 24 Hours of Le Mans contacted Pon and his friends.

"They were actually very civil," Pon said. "They said, 'We’ve known about you guys. We think what you're doing is great, and in the U.S. it's fine. But now that you're international, the play on words doesn't work in non-English-speaking countries.'"

All the Le Mans sanctioning body requested was for these jokesters to change the capitalization in their title. Make the capitalized "M" lower-case so it wouldn't resemble "Le Mans" so closely.

The Lemons guys considered it a fair request.

"The fact that they even were aware of us was pretty exciting," Pon said.

MORE: How to watch the actual 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2019

Now 24 Hours of Lemons carries on as the equivalent of a pick-up basketball game for people who like to watch the NBA. The series operates under the mantra that even motorsports can function at an amateur level.

To race in a 24 Hours of Lemons event, you don't need a contract with Rebellion Racing or Ford Chip Ganassi or Porsche, and you don’t need an extensive auto-racing background. You don't need a multi-million-dollar motorsports operation complete with some of the world's best engineers and strategists. You won't even need to spend the night on that cold garage floor.

You just need a sense of humor and a desire to have some fun on a race track.

And 500 bucks.