If you thought electric vehicles didn’t make great race cars, think again. A Tesla Model 3 Performance has just taken victory at a Targa Cup event in WA.
The Targa South West tarmac rally is broken into different categories and the Targa 130 Category featured 16 stages ranging between 2.9 and 15.48km. Jurgen and Helen Lunsmann achieved the best combined time of 1:00:17.
The next closest competitor was more than 4 minutes behind and some of those in the category were pretty decent competition including a Porsche 911 and a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo 9.
You can see the full results here.
Gemtek EV Racing has been racing a Tesla Roadster for a number of years and taking the learnings from that car, then upgraded to a Tesla Model 3 Performance to have a real crack at the checkered flag.
By racing Electric Cars we push boundaries in performance and infrastructure. Join us on our mission to win an FIA / CAMS Targa event in a Tesla Model 3, to demonstrate that electric cars can be competitive and sustainable.
The car is a dedicated race car with a full CAMS-approved roll cage, along with sponsorship from Western Power, Mcdonalds and ABB to name a few.
Congrats to all involved on this fairly historic win. This result acts as a window into the future where an increasing number of races are dominated by electric vehicles.
Racing an EV also comes with the obvious recharging requirement, so you may be thinking, how does someone charge their car, hundreds of km, south of Perth?
User Robin Dean shared a photo from the Tesla Model 3 Australia Facebook group that helps answer that question. What we see in the photo is the Tesla Model 3 Performance, being charged from a Hyundai Kona.
This vehicle has a Plugshare sticker on the rear bar and for those who aren’t familiar with EVs, Plugshare is a great website that allows you to find the nearest chargers on a map. This site also features lots of community data, including photos of each charging location, comments and ratings from people who’ve used the charger before.
As more of our racing transitions to electric vehicles, it’ll be important that we see EV infrastructure be built in key locations to assist a growing number of competitors to charge during the event.
Congratulations to Jurgen and Helen. Great positive exposure for EVs in Australia.
Fantastic effort raising awareness of all electric vehicles.
Going all electric house and car with PV saves me $5000 a year plus reduces relience on fossil fuels.
Thanks to all involved
This is great. I wonder the charge rate and capacity of the unit in the Kona.
Kona charges Green Theme at 50kw