Next year, a Chevrolet NASCAR will start the Le Mans 24 Hours in the Garage 56 invitational slot, which got me thinking about what I would do if I had an unlimited budget to design and build a clean sheet racer that doesn’t conform to the rulebook.
Le Mans is probably the ultimate challenge for a vehicle because it requires very high energy density, so battery-electric powertrains won’t make sense there until battery capacity is enormously increased. I was racing at Le Mans in 2014 when Nissan brought a Garage 56 project, the ZEOD RC, which completed the first lap of the Circuit de la Sarthe with electric power in the warm-up but retired 23 minutes into the race with gearbox problems.
