We Entered the Electric Lemons Endurance Test and, Well . . .

Car and Driver

5 hours ago

One million nickels. Real nickels, like, physical money. I say that because there are plenty of mirages on a 101-degree day at Thunderhill Raceway Park in Willows, California. Even though these nickels are not symptomatic of heat stroke, they are just as out of reach.
It's not that I doubt that the 24 Hours of Lemons would cough up its promised prize of $50,000 in five-cent pieces for winning a race overall in an EV. It's more that I doubt it's worthwhile, or even possible. It'd be like buying a PlayStation with arcade tickets; you've surely spent more to get there than the prize is worth. There has to be another reason to enter a 2018 Chevrolet Bolt EV in the longest road race in North American history—and there is. You can learn a lot about racing when you're forced to do it with no chance of winning.
Lemons racing is famous for crapcan cars and wacky builds, but it's also a place to experiment with new technologies like electric drivetrains for considerably less money than an entry in Formula E. Choosing an unusual vehicle or drivetrain may not be a quick ticket to the overall winner's circle, but as the shimmering nickels highlight, the Lemons team encourages the outrageous and unlikely.
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James Gilboy
Forrest Iandola has put together a team of outrageous and unlikely drivers to match his unlikely electric entry. It's a revolving cast of tech-industry colleagues who want a taste of racing and, in this case, one Lemons-loving automotive writer. We'd built camaraderie over racing crappy cars, and when he dropped an invitation to race his Bolt in Thunderhill's 25-hour I was happy to join the chase for the nickels.
What About the Lemons $500 Rule?
Those familiar with Lemons' $500-car rule may object to the $16,800 spent on an off-lease Bolt, and the thousands more to make it race-ready, but the boundaries of crapcan racing have expanded as used cars have become more expensive and Lemons racing more competitive. The $500 guidance predates Cash for Clunkers, when that money went further. $500 will hardly get you a parts car these days, never mind the gear to pass Lemons' safety inspection. I like to say that $500 is a vibe, a means of steering you toward Lemons' ethos: endurance racing in cars that are bad at it. In that sense, there are few cars more Lemons-worthy than a high-mile commuter EV.
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James Gilboy
It's not that the Bolt is from a forgotten or disreputable brand. It's not poorly made or unreliable (at least, since the battery recalls), and on decent tires, it doesn't corner like a cruise ship. It's just bad at racing on account of having a battery that needs charging. At full tilt, Iandola tells me the Bolt will burn through a full charge in 20 laps of Thunderhill, or about 45 minutes. It'd then be sidelined for an hour to DC fast-charge back to 70 percent, while all the other cars are racking up laps. Unlike cross-country EV records, the strategy in endurance racing isn't to go flat out, but to conserve energy and prolong the time spent on track. It's full-on hypermiling, but it's in the middle of a hot track, and you have California's most impatient beater-E30 driver in your mirrors.
Lemons officials say they codified EV rules because Lemons people wanna build weird stuff and race it.
Lemons is the only prominent amateur endurance racing series where you can race an EV. WRL, AER, Lucky Dog, and ChampCar don't even have EV rules on the books. Lemons has allowed electric cars since 2019, when it announced the aforementioned $50,000 prize to the first team to win overall in an EV. At the time I considered it an impossibility, and more a publicity stunt than an invitation to EVs, but Lemons officials told me otherwise. They say they codified EV rules because Lemons people wanna build weird stuff and race it. Only recently has it become possible to power said weird stuff with lithium-ion batteries.
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James Gilboy
Lemons' EV rules, which are based on Pikes Peak regulations, look onerous to follow. They require consulting series safety officials before fabrication begins, as the risk of an EV's battery spilling its Greek fire and red-flagging a race—perhaps for a whole weekend—is too great to neglect.
That's why it comes as a surprise how little the Bolt had to be modified. In the end, Lemons and Iandola agreed that the safest thing was not to meddle with high-voltage safety systems that GM spent billions engineering (and later fixing), only to add new points of failure.
The Bolt's performance mods aren't much more auspicious either. Slim options for 5 x 105 wheels leave it on cheapo 17-inchers with 215-section tires, with the rears hidden behind corrugated plastic moondisc covers. A plastic undertray flattens out the underbody. Performance brake pads, a stiffer rear anti-roll bar from a Cruze, and front camber plates round out the chassis changes. Quicker cornering speeds are a big piece of the efficiency puzzle, and race strategy plays an even bigger role. But it can't control the wildest variable in any race team: the drivers.
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James Gilboy
As mentioned, Iandola's volunteers run the gamut from experienced sim racers to total novices, so we never had much chance of sticking to his well-planned race strategy. In theory, two drivers would split a charge evenly, maximizing regenerative braking by racing in Low gear. The second driver would leave the track with around 5 percent charge to visit DC fast-chargers in town, about 10 minutes from Thunderhill. While the fastest cars could run under 2:20, our target was a leisurely 2:50 with 2.1 percent energy use per lap, for an average stint of about an hour. That's about all the human could take with track temps soaring past 100 degrees anyway, cool suit or not.
Those times proved deceptively hard to hit. Saving juice required going not much quicker than 70 mph down the straights. Making the most of regen required slowing twice as far out as you could with friction brakes, too. As a consequence, traffic tended to come in red-hot, and we often couldn't see them dive-bomb us on account of the Bolt's poor rearward visibility (a trait of almost all modern cars). When cars didn't make aggressive moves, they often assumed they could barge past in the corners. They quickly learned otherwise.
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James Gilboy
From the factory, the Bolt might be the worst-handling new car I ever reviewed. The steering is quick, but its weight signifies nothing, and the pedals add nothing to the conversation. Rock-hard tires didn't help either. But with the modifications? It's a tiny hatch with a short wheelbase, a low center of gravity, and its understeer tuned out. I could latch on like a lamprey to the back of an E30 through any corner, and waggle the rear to bring the nose in line. Even while conserving energy, the Bolt had pace to make the occasional pass. We mainly preyed on our chief EV competitor, Arcblast's converted Datsun 620 pickup with a battery hot-swap setup that kept it out on track (and importantly, ahead of us in lap count). I added a C5 Corvette to the tally too. It may have been an automatic convertible hauled out of a field, but a Vette is a Vette.
I might've been frustrated driving what felt like a permanent full-course yellow had I not known what I was getting myself into. This isn't a wheel-to-wheel showdown, it's an efficiency challenge. What is "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" but a maxim about conservation of energy? Learning not to waste momentum is just as important to mastering the Mazda MX-5 as it is endurance-racing an EV. Distill the experience down to the very fundamentals of driving fast, and you learn more. I certainly gleaned more about technique in an hour in that EV than I did any of my previous three 24-hour races.
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James Gilboy
The overall winner of the 25 Hours of Lemons was, in fairly predictable fashion, a beater BMW. And we were nowhere close to catching them, but I'd still give an electric another try. Twenty-fours are hellish affairs that are just as likely to break you as your car. I've subjected myself to heat stroke and exhaustion-induced auditory hallucinations in the name of anonymous finishes before, and I will again. If I'm going to finish 81st of 118 cars, I might as well relax while I do it. Eat some ice cream. Do some yoga. Think about how to inch closer to those five and a half tons of nickels.