Electrons & Adrenaline: Our First Dance with the 2025 One Lap of America

There we stood in the staging lanes at Tire Rack headquarters in South Bend, Indiana, leaning against what might be the most audacious entry in the 2025 Tire Rack One Lap of America—a brand-new all-electric Dodge Charger Daytona Scat Pack with the Track Pack: 670 horsepower, all-wheel drive, and enough torque to rearrange your internal organs. At the wheel was Dodge engineer David Carr, ready to put this next-gen muscle car through the ultimate endurance test. I was there to chase the data, the drama, and the story—capturing every charge stop, track lap, and all the electric mayhem in between. No trailer. No support crew. Just two guys, one EV, and 3,500 miles of racing, road-tripping, and rolling the dice on America’s charging grid.

“This is as much a learning experience as it is a competition for us,” explains David Carr as we prep for the wet skid pad, our first competitive event. “The primary thing is to show people what this car can do. We want to demonstrate that it’s comfortable, fast, and fun on the track and on the transit stages between tracks where we’ll absolutely crush everyone in terms of comfort and style.”

Looking around at our competition – the usual motley crew of modified sports cars, sleeper sedans, and track-prepped monsters – our electric Charger had already become the belle of the ball. Before the competition, we’d shown the car to over 20 or 30 curious onlookers, each departing with the kind of smile that Dodge engineers undoubtedly hoped for when designing this EV muscle car.

The wet skid pad at Tire Rack headquarters is seemingly simple yet deceptively challenging: Drive around a circular course flooded with water as quickly as possible without spinning out. Do two laps clockwise and then spin it around for two laps counterclockwise. It’s a test of grip, finesse, and vehicle dynamics that showcases every vehicle’s handling prowess for all to see.

“I put it in Track mode, ASC off, just to allow the most control over what the car is doing,” David recounts after his run. “The surface has been repaved since last time, which smoothed things out a bit.”

The Charger’s torque distribution in Track mode heavily favors the rear wheels, making it more lively and controllable for a skilled driver. David explains, “I managed between understeer and oversteer with throttle application. The way we set the torque distribution up in Track mode makes the car quite manageable.”

For spectators, the highlight came on David’s final lap when he pushed the car harder, approaching the finish line, resulting in an impromptu drift exhibition with a crowd-pleasing slide after crossing the timing beam. “I charged a little extra hard toward the start-finish line, knowing I wouldn’t stay online after the checkered flag,” he grins. “Everyone watching was like, ‘Finally! Someone pushed it!'”

The results were promising – we finished 39th overall out of 83 participants, placing the Charger solidly in the top half of the field. Respectable numbers that suggested our electric adventure might not be completely insane after all.

After the skid pad, we caravanned for about an hour to Grissom Air Force Base for an autocross competition. A tight, technical course designed to test precision driving rather than raw power. For the Charger, with its instant torque, this would be another revealing test of its capabilities.

The autocross format brought a different energy. Multiple cars waited in staging lanes while others attacked the course, cones occasionally flying when ambition exceeds grip. The local SCCA chapter managed the timing, with seven or so lanes to choose from and an efficient flow that kept competitors moving.

Smooth is fast whether at an autocross, on a road course, or on your favorite twisty road.

Or, you can be like everybody else, go wide, slow, and do whatever you want.

Our approach across our three runs showed thoughtful progression. Run one was reconnaissance – learning the course, feeling out grip levels, and understanding how our Charger would respond to the tight turns. For run two, David’s enthusiasm got the better of him, pushing deeper into a few corners than our tires were prepared to handle. The result? A toppled cone and a valuable lesson in restraint.

“Cones don’t lie,” as the autocrossers say.

For the third and final run, David took a deep breath, smoothed everything out, and focused on precision over aggression. The more measured approach paid dividends, resulting in a session-best time of 51.0 seconds flat for the Charger. When the digital dust settled, we’d claimed 39th place out of 83 cars – a respectable showing inside the top half of the field for a production car on street tires against multiple purpose-built track weapons.

One Lap—the transit stages. These long highway stretches test the competitors’ endurance, planning, and the true versatility of the vehicles competing. For our electric Charger, this presented both advantages and challenges.

I am confident we are going to win every transit stage. Comfort triumphs over speed on these long hauls, and we’ll arrive at the next event more rested than everyone else not driving a Charger!

But there was also the matter of charging – a novel challenge in the 2025 edition of this storied event. “We’ll have a lot of data for charging stations along the way to pass along and be able to tell you what it’s like to actually go cross-country in a true EV,” David noted. “It’s going to be a learning experience for me as well.”

This additional logistical layer adds a fascinating wrinkle to our One Lap adventure. While other competitors fill up in 5-10 minutes, we’ll strategize charging stops, perhaps taking advantage of the downtime for much-needed rest during this sleep-deprived week.

Looking Ahead: Gateway and Beyond

As we left Grissom behind, our thoughts turned to Gateway International Raceway in Madison, Illinois – our next destination and the first proper road course of the week. This would be where the running order would finally take shape, replacing the somewhat arbitrary car numbers assigned at the start.

As I write this, David is behind the wheel for the first stint of our 300+ mile drive to Gateway. The track features an oval with an infield road course, and we’ll be running the 1.6-mile configuration that uses most of the front stretch before diving down into the infield at turn 1. From there, six more corners end with turn 7 transitioning onto the backstretch and through the banking of the oval’s third and fourth turns. In short, this will be David and the Charger’s first taste of a proper road course for One Lap of America 2025.

The Charger is running great and performing well, and David and I have already declared ourselves the overall event winners for the transition stages. The Daytona Scat Pack chews highway miles in style—it’s smooth, 23 steps beyond comfortable, and generates multiple thumbs-ups, pictures, and videos from everyone we’re sharing the road with. I’d say the Charger is doing its job as intended.

Follow our journey through the rest of the 2025 Tire Rack One Lap of America right here. We will detail each track, long drives, charging adventures and update you on our finishing positions for each event and overall standings!