I recently had the opportunity to compete in the renowned One Lap of America in an unmodified Lucid Air Sapphire. If you’re not familiar with One Lap, it is an amazing 4000-mile, week-long competitive road trip to racetracks all over the Midwest. While the Sapphire is a luxury electric sedan, it also happens to be capable of extreme performance beyond that of even some purpose built two seat sports cars, so it surprised a slew of track-prepped sports cars from the likes of Porsche, Chevy, BMW, Lotus, and more, ultimately finishing 12 overall out of a total of 85 entrants! 

Given my background as a lifelong professional road racer, automotive journalist, and video host, I have a good feel for performance potential from my experience with more than a thousand timed competition events. While my partner/sponsor Jason Stormowski and I were honored to have the opportunity to enter a Sapphire in the One Lap, we did not quite know what to expect. Our Lucid was from the press fleet, a pure street car on a new set of original-equipment Michelin PS4S tires. It showed 7,700 hard miles when we borrowed it, and as a journalist I can bet you that at least half of those were flat-out zero to sixty blasts to verify all the stories about the incredible performance the Air Sapphire is known for. And now I can also confirm that all the praise and the uncontrolled expletives about this electric super-sedan are true!  

The One Lap of America always starts at event-sponsor Tire Rack’s headquarters in South Bend, Indiana, with the first One Lap event occurring on their skidpad, in the wet, with sprinklers. While we did our very best, we could only manage 56th of the 75 entries.  But the heated and massaging seats were amaaaazing!  Okay, we knew this would not be our best event, so we hit the road for the next one, a speedway road course in Nashville, TN.   

One reason we asked Lucid for a Sapphire for One Lap is because the short-session format suits an electric car very well, which we were able to confirm in Nashville. We made our first Nashville run in Endurance Mode, allowing us to preserve electrons for all three sessions, and it was a huge success, putting us in 10th overall and allowing us to claw up the leaderboard considerably! I was so pleased, impressed, and yes, even relieved that Sapphire had that kind of all-round performance capability. 

As the week went on, we finished consistently around tenth among these hot rods, including in the wet at High Plains Raceway outside Denver, and even on the quarter-mile banked oval of Slinger Speedway in Wisconsin.  The car was fast and performed flawlessly from the twisty Hallet Motor Racing Circuit in Oklahoma to the epic Road America circuit north of Milwaukee, where we hit over 160 mph on its long straights. And the consistency showed on the overall leaderboard, as we gradually moved from the top 20 into the top 10! 

On the road, we would typically run 250-300 miles a charge, and found the new generation Electrify America fast chargers to be the quickest and most reliable. At High Plains and Blackhawk Farms, friends brought out their own Lucid Airs and we tried out RangeXchange, which allows one to charge another, sharing electricity. What a cool feature!   

As we rolled back into Tire Rack HQ for the final event, the huge carbon-ceramic brakes were still very effective, even after multiple track sessions and thousands of miles, and our Michelins were worn but still showing well on the tread face. Both had endured a lot of high-speed track times, helping us get to eighth overall, but I had concern about that darned skidpad, dry this time. 

We tried what little setup we could for our luxurious and fast fine automobile, scoring an improved 41st.  Alas, this dropped us a bit, but still a truly amazing twelfth overall. This is an overachieving result for a big, comfortable, premium sedan, with 427 miles of EPA rated range¹, putting itself near the front of a field of prepped roadgoing race machines! We raised a lot of eyebrows and in the process earned well-deserved respect from our worthy competitors.  

After the final timed event we took Sapphire out for fun celebration of an event to remember, and let me tell you, it knows how to party! Put it in Drag mode, turn the wheel and floor it, North Georgia style, and Sapphire simply  disappears in a swirling cloud of Michelin’s finest tire smoke. An incredible ending to an incredible event with an incredible car!