Lawn Mowing Can Be Your One-Man Motorsport

I’m rapidly approaching 40, and I recently became a homeowner. Right on schedule, I’ve gotten really into lawn mowing—not so much for the sake of the grass’s appearance, but mostly because mastering my new-used zero-turn mower has become one of my new favorite motorsports.

Mowing a lawn with a little tractor tickles some of the same senses as high-performance driving. You’ve got to balance speed and control, read the terrain, and become attuned to your machine. Well, you don’t got to, but you can, and it makes it a lot more fun.

Our patch has a fenced-in section for dogs and an outer moat of grass before turning into dense forest. Mowing along the fenceline requires precision, and then chopping each section of the property takes strategy. Is it more efficient to cut down small sections or keep doing giant laps of the whole place? I haven’t decided, and keep trying to divide the lawn into different sub-sections. Then there’s the blade height to tune—I like 3.75 inches.

Finally, you get faster as you master your machine. I’m running an electric zero-turn, which has very sensitive and somewhat jerky throttle sticks. Because its left and right drive wheels are independently powered, you can spin it in a circle and turn like a tank (hence—”zero turn”). I’ve found there’s a way to flick the throttles in such a way that the mower will do kind of a spin-slide, letting me alter course and cover ground even more quickly. Well, maybe not more quickly, but it definitely looks cooler and feels more fun.

And of course, progress is easy to measure. I’ve been timing myself on a full-property mow, and have already improved from about two hours to less than 1.5. The speed challenge pushes me to maximize efficiency, just like you would on a race track. I want to get around the lawn as quickly as possible without damaging the equipment or missing spots. This, my friends, is how I’ve convinced myself that lawn mowing is motorsport.

My wife and I are lucky enough to have a few acres of property in the boondocks between New York City and Albany. A lot of it is woods, but a big swath is grass. Initially, I mowed with a borrowed 1996 Craftsman push mower, which was effective but arduous. It had no grass chute, so I taped a used pizza box to the mower deck, which could survive one mow (with a mid-way stop to add reinforcement tape) before grass punched its way through and resumed hitting me in the face.

I was telling my grandfather about this, and after laughing, he told me he had a superior solution, and I ended up with an indefinite loan of a Cub Cadet ZT1 42E from his side of the family’s construction and estate management business.

Apparently, it’d been deemed unworthy of whatever use his brother bought it for. It’s a 2022 model, but only had 18 hours of run time on it when I powered it up. As such, I ended up with my first EV.

Electric power makes a lot of sense for residential lawn maintenance. You don’t need much range when you’re not leaving your property, plus the reduced noise and lack of exhaust are excellent for quality of life. This particular mower turned out to be pretty much perfect for our property—I only use about half a charge to cut all the grass on our 3.3 acres, and it recharges in just a couple of hours. Some weekends I’ll cut one section, thwack it on a charger to do something else, then finish up later. I’ve only used the headlights once, while taking these pictures, because my mow ended right as I ran out of daylight. Perfect way to kill the last light of a weekend.

I don’t think I would have gone out and bought an electric ride-on, but one doesn’t look a gift mower in the mouth. The main detractors I’ve found so far are that it struggles with really tall grass (just means I need to mow more often), and I’ll have to store it inside this winter. That last part really sucks, because it takes up most of a garage bay. Might need to find an alternative home for this mower this weekend so it doesn’t displace a car.

I’ve read that the blades on EV mowers are a little more light-duty to eek out more range, but I’m pretty sure all Cub Cadet 42-inch decks use the same cutting blades.

Anyway, if people are interested, I’ll circle back to this topic and talk more about my EV mowership experience with the electric Cub Cadet in a separate post. I had a rough start with the thing and broke it in a pretty expensive way on my first lawn cut. But I fixed it, learned how to use it properly, and since then, I’ve been humming almost every weekend. And this summer, lawn mowing has become one of my favorite motorsports.

Are you into mowing your lawn, too? Hit me up at andrew.collins@thedrive.com.