Club Arnage

You can see it here in action: http://bbc.in/146AFbf

Not much quieter than the diesels really.

Interesting, but surely a dead end from an endurance racing perspective without secondary power of some sort?

I'm sure hybrids may have a bit of a future but if racing is supposed to improve the breed and trickle down to the real world where's all the development in Hydrogen fuel cell powered racers?

Pete B.

Ahem!.... there will be a Hydrogen fuel cell car racing at Le Mans this year, the 'GreenGT H2'.

http://www.greengt.com/en/greengt-h2.php (http://www.greengt.com/en/greengt-h2.php)

The Drayson car hasn't actually been developed for endurance racing - they're using it as a test bed for Formula E. In theory, you could have longer races  - but you'd have to bury a lot of very powerful induction coils in the road to enable wireless charging. Might make sense on city circuits, where they could also be used to charge elctric buses etc - but not much point on a semi-rural circuit like LM.

There is a much simpler solution to the recharge time problem than fannying about with coils in the road. You just change the battery for a charged one and recharge while the car is on the road. But that means building-in a way to swap-out batteries quickly and safely.

Oops, my mistake. How could I have forgotten that one?

Will be interesting to see how it goes....

True - but the batteries would need to be a lot smaller than they are at the moment. In Formula E they're planning to have pitstops where you swap the entire car.

>>>would need to be a lot smaller than they are at the moment

Why?

Batteries already have to be small enough and light enough to fit in the car, but they are never attached or positioned in a way that would allow them to be changed out . The challenge is to invent a system that holds a battery module safely while racing, but that allows it to be efficiently swapped-out at a pit stop. I wouldn't have thought that would be beyond the reach of human ingenuity.

The Drayson car can run for about 15 minutes, flat chat - and the battery pack is pretty big. I'm sure you're right, though - it shouldn't be impossible. Packaging would probably be an issue - as Boeing has found out, you have to be a bit careful.

Cars towing trailers with the batteries in?  ;)
Just change the trailer, Audi will do it in 2 seconds.
WCC, World Caravan Championship.
Don't think it will catch on.

So you don't think racing cars with trailers will catch on eh?  They allowed that "racing car" the DeltaWing on the track, so why not.  FIA World Caravan Championship.  It has a certain elegance to it....... :-[ 

I think you may have something there... Time for a bit of photo-montage to mock up an R18 with trailer hitch.

What is the point of formula e. Electric cars aren't the way forward. On a cold winters night with heater and lights on how far will an electric car go?
With formula e they change cars, how 'green' is that ???

>>>What is the point of formula e?

At current rate of (still escalating) use, oil reserves will start to run out in our lifetime. As oil gets progressively more scarce, the price will rise and running a car on petrol or diesel will soon become prohibitively expensive for personal transportation. We will reach that position quite a long time before fossil fuel reserves run completely dry. Even if you are unconvinced by tree-hugging hippy new-age clean and green claptrap, there remains the fact that petrol pumps WILL run dry one day, so we need an alternative, and we had better start preparing for it NOW.

Motorsport has always been the hothouse for breeding new automotive technologies so it isn't that strange that electric propulsion is making its first tentative steps. Electric motors might, or might not, be the final answer to the problem, but it makes complete sense to see how far we can get with them.

Electric cars make sense in cities, where most journeys are short, it's easy to set up charging points and you don't actually need motorway-type performance. They aren't an all-round substitute for petrol/diesel cars, and the mistake people make is in expecting the two to to be interchangeable. So they have a role as urban transport. Motorsport can help develop the technology.

It is true that commercially viable electric cars thus far have been city cars, but that doesn't mean they have to be.

The Tesla and other electric sports cars have shown that electric propulsion can make a car go fast. Efficient electric motors are already well developed. They are not the problem. The crux of the barrier to the range of electric vehicles is energy density. Petrol is relatively safe and simple, and has an energy density of about 46 MJ per kilo. Lithium batteries on the other hand have an energy density of about 2 MJ per kilo. Electric motors used in cars have an efficiency of up to 90% but petrol engines peak at about 30 to 40%. Even adding efficiency to the equation, petrol still comes out as having just under 10 times the range for an equivalent weight of batteries.

When some bright spark invents a small, light and safe battery with an energy density of over 12 MJ per kilo, the range of electric vehicles will be extended to match their petrol powered counterparts.

Edit->>> 1MJ of energy will run a single bar electric fire for about 17 minutes.

But what's the point of formula e. Yes oil will run out one day but having formula e does what? Hybrid systems, alternative fuels i can see but having a formula which requires 2 cars per driver just looks bloody stupid to me.

I think we're waiting for Di Lithium batteries (The engines won't take any more Cap'n, the Di Lithium crystals have had it)

If you remember the old mobile phones, the batteries were bigger than a fag packet. Now they're the size of a book of matches.  Give it another 20 years and its feasable.  Until then, please can we keep the experiments in the laboratory

Is two cars per driver any stranger than three drivers per car?

What? A race where you need three drivers for just one car... madness!

My first 'mobile phone' had a battery the size of a house brick and was clipped to the top of it, connected by a cord. I think the point is (as GF has already said) how much energy can you get into a small enough package to make the performance and/or range of a purely electric vehicle practicable. Granted the Tesla has great performance and a reasonable (but still small) range but the energy still has to come from another generated source. That is why I originally questioned why there was not more development in fuel cell technology in racing.  I look forward to more projects like the Green GT, and more explanation as to why the Hydrogen approach is not more vigorously pursued.

Governments might not be to keen to promote this tech, because it might be differcult to tax?
Cynic me?

I can't see why it would be more difficult to tax liquid hydrogen fuel compared with petrol, diesel or LPG. What would be the problem?