We made it! 8th in our class. And first of the rookie teams! And while enduro events tend to ensure that things get worse over time, our team and car improved quite a bit from Friday testing to the final flag.
When you are 90% done, you have 90% of the work left to do. Making things fast, cheap and reliable is super hard. Then keeping them that way also requires diligent work like inspection and there usually still is some maintenance. For example, we could have skipped our rear suspension fix on Saturday night in favor of a few drinks, but there is a good chance we’d have seen a pretty spectacular failure and some great content, but then a very expensive fix and no more driving.
Better, faster, cheaper usually beats rules and lectures. In the US and EU we spend the last few years regulating and lecturing and this didn’t end well. All the while batteries, EVs, solar were getting better.
It’s true that EVs made up less than 1% of the racers at Lemons this weekend, but the paddock told a different story. EVs are good for camping (giant battery with AC) and they’re more reliable – in our area, about 20% of folks had an EV parked at their campsite.
It’s going to take a clever fast charge strategy or battery swap to win Lemons. But every year this gets easier. Then it will just be a matter of a few more years to get all the parts used and cheap, so this is the preferred default to beat LS-Swapped things.
LLMs have real limits when institutional knowledge doesn’t make it to the internet. Over and over again there were reminders about deep proprietary, hard won insights from people who have worked on the same problem for decades. How to make a shitbox lighter (it’s not just more rust). How to design a kill switch that passes tech, but also allows for hot pits. Ask me how I know. Even a few short conversations reveals so much about what LLMs just can’t see.
We’re not ready for Gen Z. They were more than half of our team. They already know how to get the best from AI. They already know how to filter out BS from AI and media noise that has trapped everyone older than them. The main source of confusion, I think is that they haven’t been offered real tests. They’ve been asked to live in a bubble by overprotective parents. When they need to worry about high risk things like safety or going faster, they really step up. Don’t underestimate them.
Thank you again to our sponsors.
Outrun Carbon 