You might not think endurance racing and EVs are much of a match, and you might consider a used Chevy Bolt an unlikely choice for the 24 Hours of Lemons series. But the Electric Turtle team and their modded 2018 Bolt could change your mind. The Lemons organizers have certainly been happy to waive their $500 limit rule for the Bolt because it has to leave the track for extended periods to charge. EVTuners has posted a video of team lead Forrest Iandola reviewing the assorted changes to the car, and Iandola himself has documented Electric Turtle’s racing history on Medium.
For an even deeper dive, Car and Driver‘s James Gilboy chronicles, in entertaining fashion, a recent race at Thunderhill in California, when he joined the team as a driver. Here he is offering the rationale for entering the Bolt in a competition better known for showcasing, as he puts it, “crapcan” cars:
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.
We’ll never know if they don’t try
Nonetheless, according to Iandola, Electric Turtle has been racking up some decent overall mileage totals. And of course since 2019 the 24 Hours of Lemons has been dangling a $50,000 prize for the first EV to win a race, so there’s an incentive to quixotically keep at it.
I wrote a book about the toughest race in the world, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, which confirmed my view that no racing is harder than endurance racing. And while maybe drag racing is the best forum for EVs, it really cheered my heart to catch up with Electric Turtle’s endurance efforts. On top of all that, Lemons has really come a long way from its mid-2000s origins and has proven that the pure joy of doing weird race car things alongside ease-of-entry can attract some people with long-term goals. Iandola is certainly one of them. This year is his team’s second; in 2024, they entered three races, with a major performance improvement from number one to number two, and a commendable effort to survive number three in rainy weather on a wet track.
Turning slow laps
Slow and steady wins the race, right? Or at least has prevented Electric Turtle from having to yank their Bolt off the track to charge more often than they’d like (the team has had to run down the battery and then drive to nearby fast-charging locations to rejuice the vehicle, contending with the Bolt’s limited charging capabilities in the process). In Gilboy’s account, Iandola’s strategy required that the car turn laps 30 seconds slower than entrants aiming to, you know, win the race.
At this stage, winning isn’t everything. Or really, anything. The Lemons $50,000 seems pretty safe, as Electric Turtle notched 81st place at Thunderhill in the May event. Still, the racing was intermittently competitive, as Gilboy notes in his tales of passing a ragged Corvette and keeping the marauding Lemons bimmers at bay. Who knows, maybe amateur EV tracking will catch on and enough modded cars will enter races to justify a Lemons sub-series. Iandola has reported a friendly rivalry developing between the few EVs that have become Lemons regulars. The “racing” – “full-on hypermiling,” as Gilboy admits – would be strange. But isn’t that what Lemons is all about?
h/t InsideEVs
