Vannonball Run: Lemons Racer Plans To Enter Every Race Next Year in An Old Dodge Minivan

In a Lemons field full of colorful characters and oddball vehicles, Zac Caldwell might not stand out at first glance. He campaigns a 2006 Dodge Caravan in races up and down the country, traveling great distances to do so. It’s by no means the flashiest car in any given lineup, and certainly not the fastest. However, this humble family conveyance has taken him a long way, and next year, he’s planning to go farther and wider than ever before. He’s plotted a 30,000 mile route that will see him take on every 24 Hours of Lemons race in the United States next year. It’s the Vannonball.

It sounds mad on the face of it. Sure, plenty of racing teams take on a ton of races in a season, no problem. But they do it with trailers, mechanics, expensive hotels and those performance trainers that can also give you a massage when you need it. Caldwell has none of that, and he drives his racing minivan to and from every event. 2023 saw Caldwell do four races on consecutive weekends, but next year, he’s ramping up in serious fashion. The 24 Hours of Lemons has 23 races on the calendar, so it’s no mean feat to get to every single one, let alone while keeping the racecar in good enough shape to roadtrip between each one. Thus far, the Dodge’s 3.8-liter pushrod V6 and automatic transmission have both proved hardy, but Caldwell will be asking a lot from the largely-stock van in 2024.

As you might imagine, there’s a deep underlying motivation driving this thing. “My mom was a cancer survivor, and her passing in early 2022 is deeply ingrained in this whole experience,” Caldwell told The Autopian. “She was a car enthusiast, and as much as my risk-seeking behavior would terrify her, this trip is an extension of my habit to keep her heart rate up when she was alive.” It’s in part due to his mother’s influence that Caldwell is using this run to raise funds for charity. Lemons of Love is a favorite charity for many in the broader Lemons racing community, and it’s the target of Caldwell’s fundraising effort. He’s hoping to raise at least $1,000 at each race on the calendar, or a total of $23,000 over the year. That money will go to help Lemons of Love in its mission to provide support and care packages to patients undergoing chemotherapy.

The family links run deep with the 2006 Dodge Caravan. “My parents purchased the van in 2007… and it was our daily grocery getter for many years,” he explains. “It became the farm truck for a while, we used to load in hay for my mother’s [horse] riding clinic.” Eventually, the car was left to sit as a spare car for the family, but Caldwell had something different in mind when he decided to prep it for track use in 2022.

Like many astute Lemons competitors, he’s taken a safe and steady route with his build. “I’ve found a lot of success with just leaving things alone,” he says. “It’s designed to do long hauls on the highway, so it’s pretty sturdy and reliable if you don’t futz with things too much.” The fact that the van doesn’t have a sharp, pointy racing setup is a major boon for the long drives to and from events, and should serve Caldwell well next year. Beyond the usual safety mods, it’s largely stock. “The most expensive thing I’ve done to it is try to put wheels that fit good tires and I use Carbotech brake pads, which really did make a huge difference,” he explains.

It’s easy to imagine something going wrong with a 2006 Dodge Caravan in 30,000 miles of highway driving, to say nothing of the dangers of racing it on track. Caldwell has his concerns, but he’s not unduly worried. “I’ve kind of worked through it, and have a lot of solutions to a lot of problems.” He notes that the schedule next year isn’t too punishing for what he’s planning, noting he can break it up into five or six chunks of two to five races at a time.

Regardless, contingency planning is a big part of his efforts to pull this off. “It’s very likely I’ll end up having three parts cars in different parts of the country, and carrying another most of the drivetrain on the trailer with me.” The benefit of choosing such a workaday vehicle is that finding bits and pieces is never excessively difficult, too. “The joy of racing a car that Dodge made thousands of is that I am never more than about 50 miles away from the parts I need,” says Caldwell.

Along his journey thus far, Caldwell has often been asked if he’s independently wealthy to fund such adventures. It’s a lot more budget-minded than it might seem from the outside, according to him. “I finance these trips with arrive-and-drive fees,” he explains. “The sacrifice I make to keep those fees affordable while making the trips ambitious is choosing a car that can be operated very cheaply and very often sacrificing my own seat time.” While Caldwell will be taking the van to all 23 events, he won’t necessarily personally drive at each one. “I’ll only race at about half of the events, but if you think about it, I get plenty of time behind the wheel of the van,” he says.

He promotes the page and available arrive-and-drive slots on his Facebook page, and makes some additional money selling T-shirts and calendars online. He’s looking to fill 100 driver slots next year to help fund the mission. “I love when the van is someone’s first Lemons car,” says Caldwell.

Ultimately, beyond raising some money for a good cause, Caldwell is just out to enjoy the ride. “I don’t know what I hope to achieve with this trip beyond continuing to live the life I feel like I have been handed,” he told me. “In many ways I am the luckiest person I know.”

The world of Lemons racing has inspired grand feats before; Neal Losey won the hearts of many when he ran an entire season last year, flying across the country. Trying to achieve a similar feat in a longer season, all the while driving the racecar between events seems like an even greater challenge. Regardless, it’s easy to imagine the warm and welcoming Lemons crowd cheering on the mighty Dodge when it pulls into races across the country. It will surely take a Herculean effort to keep that van alive through an entire 11 months of racing, but Caldwell has set that as his aim. Here’s to the Vannonball, long may it run.

Image credits: Zac Caldwell