Re: Is winning an overall race with an EV vehicle even possible?
(a) EVs are budget exempt -- currently.
richv70 already covered that.
(b) There are EV race cars with the speed to win overall. The key issue is fuel -- batteries. I doubt any of the teams with such cars even have enough batteries to last an entire day, much less the two days of a race. Plus, do you really want 3 semi's worth of shit showing up for a single car?
I can build a Class A paced EV. It just takes money. (about $10-15k) I can build hot-swap battery systems -- expense is a matter of what Jay wants w.r.t. safety. However, I'd need about three dozen of those systems. For the not-remotely-class-A-fast 007, that's $150k worth of batteries; a class-A pace might take 10x that.
NOT THAT I WANT TO DISCOURAGE ANYONE FROM ATTEMPTING IT. By all means, I want to see more "Class E" cars. Yes, it will be a few more years before Jay's nickels are in danger. (unless Bream wants to bring his warehouse of batteries to a track.)
Who said anything about speed? You can't win a Lemons race (overall) with a car that has to stop every hour. There's no way to make up that time off track, even if fueling is instantaneous. We can talk about why that is if you want, but I should think it would be reasonably obvious.
I also think you are under-stating the difficulty (and cost) of building an EV that can reliably maintain the kind of duty cycle road racing requires at the sorts of high power levels we are talking about and over a race distance. But that's just an unsupported assertion on my part and I may very well be wrong.