A man, a Caravan, a bold plan to Lemons race across America

Come February, one man will race across the country. In his minivan.

This is not a Cannonball Run, but rather an endurance racer’s true-to-form exercise in attending every 24 Hours of Lemons event of the upcoming 2024 season. That’s no small feat, given that the calendar is packed with 23 races at 21 tracks across 17 states. Sometimes the schedule accounts for less than a week to commute between events. The projected final tally to the van’s odometer will be 30,000 miles over the road, and that’s not even counting the laps it will generate over 14 hours of racing each weekend.

The hero van in the making is a track-prepped 2006 Dodge Grand Caravan. Its driver is Zac Caldwell of Kentucky, a Lemons participant since 2022. He’s doing all of this to raise tens of thousands of dollars for charity.

(For the uninitiated, the 24 Hours of Lemons series stipulates that any car purchased for $500 or less—with a budget exemption for safety equipment—can be turned into an endurance race car for a weekend of racing.)

A feat on this scale would be impressive in any old car, which makes the attempt in a 17-year-old Chrysler minivan that much more bananas. Fortunately, Zac already did a kind of dry run earlier this year—a 30-day trip in May and June that covered 1800 miles on the track plus road trips to Colorado, New Jersey, and Michigan. (The Mitten State was not part of his initial plan, but the 24 Hours of Lemons staff in New Jersey enticed him to participate via the gift of free admission to Michigan’s GingerMan Raceway.)

I was one of the New Jersey Lemons Judges that greenlit Zac’s prize of free track time at GingerMan. Seeing his face light up when he received the award of more long days behind the wheel of a stripped-out Grand Caravan was a joy for me, one that would be difficult to replicate outside the magical world of Lemons racing. My fellow staffers couldn’t envision a better use of the prize than Zac’s aptly named “Great American Bro’d Trip” for the 2024 race season.

This kind of creativity naturally sprouts from a series like Lemons, which lets just about anyone and anything on track. As Zac said,

“Endurance Racing remains the ultimate challenge in motorsports, but it has largely been conquered by smart people with money. What mark can an idiot on a budget make?”

Apparently a pretty large mark. The tale of Zac’s Caravan is, in my view, a modern expression of Aesop’s Fable, The Tortoise and the Hare. The minivan is very much the tortoise here compared with the hares of Lemons racing: retired Spec Miatas, E46 BMWs with bolt-on upgrades, and any number of V-8-powered muscle cars from the last 40 years. So many of these “real race cars” will have to contend with Zac’s team of arrive-and-drive racers who plan to exploit the Grand Caravan’s slower speed for consistency and better reliability.

Of course, fun and fundraising are the main rewards. And the joy this minivan brings to a race paddock can only be summed up in photography:

The van itself was purchased by Zac’s family in 2007. It was a grocery-getter for about a decade, and then Zac stripped the interior and had a roll cage installed before its first Lemons race in 2022. It’s a great tribute to Zac’s mother, the original owner of the Grand Caravan and a car lover herself; she was a cancer survivor who inspired his journey in Lemons.

She passed away in early 2022, and that’s why Zac intends to raise at least $23,000 for Lemons of Love, a favorite charity of Lemons racers that provides care packages and support for chemotherapy patients.

Zac’s first race in “The Great American Bro’d Trip” will be at Barber Motorsport Park on February 3, 2024. Join him on his journey as he will document milestones on Facebook and YouTube.

Zac jokes that he is “no good at moderation. If I’m going to do one race, I’ll do them all—and drive 30,000 miles there and back in the same terrible race car. An LMP2 prototype can’t do that for 100 million dollars.”

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