THE ARCBLAST DATSUN

Running 1,095 Miles at Lemons

- JEROME ANDRE

THUNDERHILL Raceway, Northern California—It's three in the morning, 95 degrees of heat are still radiating off the tarmac, and a beat-up 1970s Datsun 620 pickup is howling through the darkness.

It's not the howl of carbs or a straight pipe. It's the turbine-like whine of a Hyper 9 electric motor, buried inside one of the most improbable endurance race cars ever to roll into a 24 Hours of Lemons paddock. In the driver's seat is Nick Chimento, a Colorado engineer who, along with teammate Tyler Joy, ripped this truck down to the rails and rebuilt it into a science project on wheels. Under him: Miata suspension, Jaguar I-PACE batteries, and a water-cooled charger rack in the pits that looks like it came straight out of NASA. On the dash: a simple switch panel and regen toggle. On the line: 25 hours and one minute of nonstop racing against 115 teams of gas-burning junk. By dawn, the ArcBlast Datsun would do something no EV had ever done at Lemons before: cross the 1,000-mile mark in a single race.

Why an EV Lemons Car?

“Honestly, it just seemed like fun,” laughs Tyler. “I had this truck for years. It kept blowing gas engines. Lemons had this standing challenge: $50,000 in nickels for the first EV to win a race outright. I figured, why not?” It was never about winning on pace. In Lemons, endurance and creativity matter more than outright speed. ArcBlast’s goal was to prove an EV could survive 24 hours where hundreds of gas cars had cooked clutches, blown head gaskets, and grenaded gearboxes. The truck had already failed once, managing just 48 miles in its earliest attempt. “We knew we had the wrong approach,” Nick recalls. “So we went back, redesigned the packs, built a swappable system, and cut everything down to the essentials. If it didn’t make the truck faster or last longer, it got cut.”