(Moved from another thread since this one is more active).
I work in an area similar/adjacent to the EV industry and design battery management systems and motor controllers, so I was pretty interested to see this news come out. Sadly $50k isn't going to get you very far if you're designing much from scratch, especially given you'll probably need 3 or 4 race-ready packs per day, plus a few backups. A tesla model 3 has around 2000 18650 cells. At volume pricing the "good" 18650's are about $3 a cell if you have contacts, x6 packs and you're at about $40k just in cells. Then you have to set up a mini production line to assemble 12k cells into modules/packs.
My napkin math says that no teams are going to be designing and building their own packs, unless they plan on losing a lot more than a $50k investment. The ideal path is probably getting used EV battery modules from the junkyards and constructing your own pack lego-style, then getting a power-train from some written-off EV. The tricky technical part would be making everything talk together, and figuring out the fast pack swapping. Then there's all the diagnostics and telemetry you would want to go with it.
Building an overall winning EV really needs a decent sized constructor team who knows what they're doing, plus has the support (official or not) of a factory (tesla etc), or some rich benefactor who wants to advance crapcan EV racing and doesn't mind dropping $50k for some seat-time (not at the Lemons race though, since you want to win that race).
I think the interesting news here is that Lemons is going to be more open to batteries and EV tech in cars, not just stock prius'. This opens an interesting door for some crazy hybrid builds. There's a lot to be done, from just improving mpg to adding "push to pass" electric boost systems. I can definitely see a custom race hybrid winning overall before a full EV does.