ArcBlast Datsun 620: The Electric Pickup That Redefined Endurance Racing

Running 1,095 Miles at Lemons

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.”

The Cockpit: Quiet, Blunt, and Busy

Open the door (lightened), drop into the bucket (low), and your feet land in a footwell cut and boxed to fit long legs and racing boots. The seat sits slightly off-center toward the middle, a packaging play that gives extra room around the column while nudging weight toward the chassis centerline. The switch panel is fully functional, featuring a regen selector, fan and pump toggles, drive/reverse rocker, brake-bias reset, data logger, livestream, comms, and E-stops. A simple multimeter-style readout currently stands in for the BMS temp display the driver really wants. The next big upgrade is proper battery telemetry in the cockpit and live data to the pit wall to sharpen stint strategy.

No power assistance means feedback you can taste. Steering loads rise with fatigue. Brakes demand a square hit, lap after lap. The reward is remarkable clarity. Without engine thrash, you can hear the tires. Without vacuum boosters and ABS logic, your left foot knows what the pads are doing. It’s raw and old-school—and somehow more modern than any gas car on the grid.

Hyper 9 Muscle

A NetGain Hyper 9HV motor, water-jacket cooled and paired to a stout single-speed reduction drive, is present. It’s rated around 120 horsepower with 173 lb-ft of torque. Those numbers don’t sound wild until you realize the Datsun weighs barely over 2,000 pounds. It’s raw, as there are absolutely no creature comforts: no power steering, no power brakes, and no ABS. Regen braking is adjustable via a cockpit switch. Off is free-coast, soft feels like mild engine braking, and full regen is brutal and loud enough to mimic a turbo blow-off valve. You back off at 7 mph, and it’ll just whine like a banshee.

The Batteries: Jaguar DNA

Power comes from Jaguar I-Pace modules, repackaged into three custom packs of about 12 kWh each. One runs in the truck, while two more sit on standby in the pits. During each 70- to 80-minute stint, the truck drains roughly 28 kWh. When it pits, the crew does a driver change and slides in a fresh pack. “We built it like a cartridge system,” Nick explains. “The pack sits on spring-loaded rails. Rear locating pins slot it into place. Two front bolts clamp it down. One Anderson connector does HV and all the CAN interlocks. That’s it. Swap time is about three minutes.” Safety was non-negotiable. The Orion BMS won’t let the contactors close unless every interlock reports safety. Unplug the pack, and it’s dead. No sparks, no live ends, no drama.

The Cube Farm

If the packs are the cartridges, the paddock is the charging bay. Each of ArcBlast’s two giant charging cubes contains 12 DIY water-cooled chargers, paralleled to deliver ~140 amps at ~160 volts—about 22 kW per cube. With both cubes running, the team can pump nearly 45 kW into a pack while chilling it. The cubes feed from whatever the paddock offers—RV pedestals in Colorado and Blink J1772 stations at Thunderhill. Inside, coolant loops run across plates, with a pump, radiator, and fan system keeping the chargers at safe temps. Battery cooling gets an extra layer: an industrial laser chiller that pre-cools packs before they’re loaded into the truck. “We’ll drop them below track temp so they heat up more slowly on-track,” Tyler says. During the Thunderhill 25-hour, live readouts showed a comfortable 25°C in the pits even as the ambient soared past 100°F.

Underneath, almost nothing of Datsun remains. The entire suspension was cut away and replaced with Mazda Miata subframes, chosen for their cheap availability and proven track performance. Coilovers, racing bushings, and Lemons-legal safety gear round out the package. The aero is a homemade but effective stack: a front splitter, a flat undertray running from behind the front wheels to ahead of the rears, a rear diffuser, a cab fairing, and a tonneau cover over the bed. The result? Stability at 70–80 mph on straights and corner speeds that humbled faster cars. “We were one of the slowest on the straights, but absolutely one of the fastest through corners,” Nick recalls. “It’s a total cat-and-mouse game.”

At Lemons, reliability is king. Early on, ArcBlast discovered how cruel endurance could be. A cracked wheel snowballed into a broken hub. A power outage at High Plains cut off their chargers, while ICE rivals simply drove to a gas station. Torque lockouts, heat soak, and regen tuning all tested the team’s patience. But by Thunderhill, the truck had matured. Stints ran to 75–80 minutes. Swaps took under three minutes. Drivers rotated like clockwork. “We never had a single fault with the truck itself,” Tyler says. “Not once. Everything just worked.”

From 48 Miles to 1,000

The breakthrough came in Colorado—701 miles completed in one race, shattering their own previous EV record of 48. That earned them Lemons’ coveted Index of Effluency, the award for doing the most with the least. Months later, they went further: 711 miles in 14.5 hours at High Plains. Then, at Thunderhill’s 25-hour-and-1-minute race, the big one: 1,095 miles completed, with drivers cheering as the Datsun crossed the 1,000-mile mark in the dead of night. “1,000 miles,” Tyler said, half-delirious at dawn. “That was our goal. We just did it.”

The Next 1,000 Miles

You can only sharpen the same knife so many times. The ArcBlast Datsun stands at an inflection point: the team has systematically squeezed weight, drag, and heat out of this platform. What remains will cost real money or demand a new shell. Tyler and Nick talk openly about a smaller, slipperier car with a higher-voltage drivetrain to cut I²R losses and lift continuous power. The swappable battery concept is non-negotiable—it’s the whole thesis for EV endurance, and their pit ballet now looks like any top-flight refuel, minus the fumes.

Back on the business side, ArcBlast isn’t just a team name anymore. It’s the germ of a company. There’s a gap in the market for customer EV race cars built to finish, not just to sprint. The Datsun’s lessons, pre-chilled packs, off-board charging, independent coolant loops, drag-first aero, and driver-tunable regen translate cleanly to sprint endurance, club racing, and even time attack. If you can run a reliable 25-hour in 110-degree heat with RV plugs for a fuel station, you can do a lot.

Somewhere between romantic and reckless sits the idea that a few clever people with CAD, a welder, and stubborn optimism can move a sport forward. The ArcBlast Datsun does more than win trophies and set records. It proves that EV endurance isn’t a punchline. It’s a plan.

When the night is long and the heat won’t lift, you hear it if you listen: the whisper-whine of a Hyper 9 HV on full regen, the tick of hot aluminum under a flat floor, and the click of a relay accepting that all systems are happy. Then the truck disappears into the darkness, taped X’s shrinking to pinpricks, apex lights catching the inside of the next corner—another lap, another set of numbers on a scoreboard nobody thought would have an EV at the top. But at the core, it’s just us proving that EVs can do what everyone said they couldn’t—survive 25 hours of racing on junkyard parts, with a couple of engineers and a lot of duct tape.”

And maybe, just maybe, win $50,000 in nickels along the way.

How the ArcBlast Battery Swap Works

Forget plug-in pit stops. ArcBlast’s Datsun runs on modular, swappable packs that slide in and out of the chassis like cartridges in a giant Game Boy. Each pack weighs around 500 pounds, houses Jaguar I-PACE modules (~12 kWh each, 36 kWh total with ~28 kWh usable per stint), and comes pre-chilled in the paddock before being slammed into the truck mid-race. The mounting system is brutally simple and brilliantly effective: spring-loaded rails guide the pack into place, rear locating pins lock it down, two front bolts clamp it tight, and a single Anderson connector carries high voltage plus eight control pins for CAN and safety interlocks.

The safety logic is strict: the Orion BMS won’t let contactors close unless the truck, inverter, and kill switches all report happy. Unplug the pack, and it’s instantly cold, with no live terminals and no drama. On the ground, an off-board trolley of chargers feeds from four 240V/50A RV plugs, cooling and topping the next pack while the truck pounds out laps. When the driver pits, the crew jacks the rear, cracks the bolts, unplugs the Anderson, and rolls in a fresh block of electrons. Swap time is down to minutes.

Result: Instead of waiting 45–60 minutes for a charge, ArcBlast can be back on track in the time it takes a gas team to refuel and check tire pressures. In endurance racing, that’s the only number that matters.

ArcBlast Datsun 620 EV Race Truck

Base Vehicle: 1970s Datsun 620 pickup
Chassis: Stripped to rails, custom cage, Mazda Miata front and rear subframes
Motor: NetGain Hyper 9HV (water-cooled), ~120 hp, ~173 lb-ft
Transmission: Single-speed reduction drive
Batteries: 3× custom packs using Jaguar I-PACE modules (~12 kWh each)
Battery Voltage: ~160V nominal, Orion BMS with CAN interlocks
Battery Cooling: Water-glycol loops, industrial laser chiller, radiator/fan in pits
Swap System: Spring-loaded rails, rear locating pins, two front bolts, Anderson HV connector, and 8 LV pins
Charging: Two cube chargers, each with 12 water-cooled modules, ~22 kW each (~45 kW combined)
Suspension: Mazda Miata subframes, coilovers, reinforced geometry
Brakes: Manual race brakes (no ABS), ventilated discs (Miata donor)
Weight: ~2,000 lbs (est.)
Aero: Front splitter, full aluminum flat undertray, rear diffuser, cab fairing, bed tonneau
Top Speed: 75–80 mph on straights
Pit Stop: ~2–3 minutes (driver and battery swap)
Endurance Record: 1,095 miles at 25 Hours of Thunderhill 2024 (Lemons EV record)