Wow !
Hanging with Randy Pobst after day 2? Impressive for an SUV !
Photography by Tom Suddard and Andy Hollis
By Tom Suddard and Andy Hollis
After two days with our Hyundai Ioniq 5 N on the Tire Rack One Lap of America Presented by Grassroots Motorsports, we’d learned a lot about the car. We’d realized it wasn’t a big deal to road-trip an EV, and we’d put it shockingly high on the leaderboard: 12th overall! Spirits were high as we topped off our battery at a Tesla Supercharger.
But now it was time to hit the track. One Lap’s first road course stop would be World Wide Technology Raceway, previously known as Gateway Motorsports Park. This small roval features beautiful banking fit for Indycars and pairs it with a worn-out infield of rough pavement and disjointed elements. Hey, at least it’s lined with walls!
This would be our first session driving the Hyundai on track, so we chose to put Andy out first–he’s raced here before in other cars. That meant his only challenge would be learning the Ioniq 5 N, not the track.
With wet grass just off the pavement and lots of nearby walls to hit, we opted for a more conservative approach to learning the Hyundai’s limits. Andy found more time on each of his laps, solidly placing the car into 34th place. That would be our qualifying position gridding up the rest of the week. Getting used to the high seating position versus the low center of gravity, especially over the bumpy Gateway infield pavement, was going to take some time.
Morning and afternoon sessions were carbon copies of each for the pointy end of the field, with Andy Smedegard once again putting significant time on the field in SuperK. Just after he came off track in the afternoon, however, fluid was found around the differential area. Quickly traced to an axle seal, the team spent the next hour replacing it before starting their transit.
Runner-up in each sessions was the GR Supra of Andrew Brownfield of Toyota PE Development. Sadly, the car never made it back to the paddock under its own power as the engine exploded in dramatic fashion just as he came off the throttle for the cooldown lap. They always run best right before they blow.
Rounding out the podium each session was teamPGR with Andrew DeKoning at the wheel of their Tesla Model S Plaid.
While we were disappointed by our pace, we were pleasantly surprised by how little energy the Hyundai burned on course: Andy used just 13% of the battery over his session. Our car wasn’t hungry for energy but we were, so we went back to our friendly neighborhood Supercharger to top off while we dined on a gourmet One Lap lunch (Wendy’s burgers).
After lunch it was Tom’s turn to learn the track–and the car–so he strapped in for a game of “don’t crash Hyundai’s car into any of those walls.” To further this goal, we went ahead and left one tier of stability control engaged, partially as an insurance policy and partially to see if the Ioniq 5 N might be faster when we let it drive. And, uh, oops. It certainly worked–we could basically do whatever we wanted without consequences–but the system was ultimately too intrusive and cost us too much time on track. More importantly, though, our brakes seemed noticeably hotter after letting the computer squeeze them constantly for three laps straight. We finished our session 3 cumulative seconds slower than Andy’s morning time, proving the gamble hadn’t paid off.
Racing completed, we packed the car, hit the road, and set a course for Hedge Hollow Raceway. That’s when we had our first drama of One Lap. Andy always says “the track time is easy–it’s the transits you have to worry about!” And he proved that true by smacking a pothole the size of an oil drum on the way out of St. Louis. Oops. The steering wheel started shaking, and we resigned ourselves to changing to our spare at the next stop. It wasn’t a badly bent wheel, but it was annoying and we didn’t want to risk damaging the car further.
How do you pass the time on transits when you’re not hitting potholes? By building electrical adapters, of course! The teamPGR Tesla team has been an invaluable resource throughout our prep, and they told us about the tasty, tasty 240V dryer outlets in the garages at Hedge Hollow. The track is in the middle of nowhere and charging options are limited, so we could save some of headaches (and money) by plugging our car into the garage between sessions. We found a Supercharger in the parking lot of a Home Depot, grabbed the necessary parts to build a wiring adapter, and built our dongle from the passenger seat. It should let us charge at 6.6kW, adding about 8% per hour to our Ioniq 5 N.
We finally rolled into Harrisonville, Missouri, at about 8:30 p.m., plugged into the only DC fast charger in town, and walked across the street for a gourmet dinner at Dairy Queen before parking our fully charged Hyundai in the hotel’s parking lot. We’d held our own, finishing Day 2 23rd overall, tied with Team Enrique’s 2021 Ford Roush Mustang Stage 3 driven by Randy Pobst and Jason Stormowski.
Wow !
Hanging with Randy Pobst after day 2? Impressive for an SUV !
Loving these updates! Keep the tech info coming. Can't wait to get my Ioniq 5N on the track this weekend.
Ow on the pothole.
Love this. Please keep us updated on progress and experience. Bonus for charging experience reviews.
Did you have a full size spare or are you going to have to source a new wheel/tire?
Andy actually bought a curbed stock wheel on eBay last week, so we have a full sized (but ugly) spare.
Just finished our first charge stop en route from Hedge Hollow to NCM in Bowling Green. We're back on the road now, so I might as well talk more about charging.
The Hyundai is based on an 800V architecture, which is one reason it can charge so quickly. Most EVs are based on a 400V system. Higher voltage means lower amperage to hit the same amount of power, which means less heat, smaller wiring, etc.
This becomes a problem when visiting Superchargers: All Teslas aside from the Cybertrucks are 400V, so the vast majority of their chargers are, too. This means the Hyundai can only charge at about half of its theoretical max rate. (to turn 400V into 800V, it uses its rear motor as a converter).
So, that's why this charge stop was slower than ideal.
In reply to Tom Suddard :
That's pretty good though all told... I don't see anywhere what year/model of Ioniq 5 you guys have, but from my research on BEVs when I was looking at donors for the DMC's conversion that stop looks like it would have gotten a standard-range model to over 80% charge and a LR version to over 60%, and going by at least the predicted ranges for the car around 200 miles of range. And given gas around here is at about $3/gallon for regular you'd need a vehicle that got nearly 40mpg to go the same distance for the price you paid for the electricity.
It's a 2025 Ioniq 5 N
This is seriously freaking cool. Loving the updates. My lust for the N is strong. As is my desire to do one lap. Somewhere, there's an interview that aired on "TNN" with Brock Sr, my brother and me from Road Atlanta in 2003(?) We watched a guy blow up his crx with nitrous, so we bought his nitrous kit to blow up our crx with.
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