Speedleague's partnership with race supplier STARD to create a new electric rallycross series E/Racing will begin later this year with the start of the rallycross season, with five stops included in the North American circuit. The first race kicks off in October.
The five North American stops will include Los Angeles, New York City, and Las Vegas and will be banking on the superior performance capabilities of electric-powered race cars in rallycross, with short and intense elimination heats to capture the imagination of motor sport fans.
Speedleague was founded by Red Bull Global Rallycross Championship creator Brian Gale, who knows better than
most what kind of ingrediants make
for assucefful racing brad.
“Besides the clear environmental
and technological benefits, it’s
obvious that, when it comes to
rallycross, electric powered
race cars will provide us
with a superior
ompetition platform "says
Gale.
"They also make available
more venue options, offering
a better experience for fans.”
“The idea has intrigued me for years but, until now, I haven’t found a partner able to provide a comprehensive engineering solution for the race cars. That’s why we are so excited about teaming up with STARD to create E/RACING.”
In an exclusive arrangement, the Austrian firm STARD, which is part of former
WRC & WRX Star Manfred Stohl´s Group, will be the Principle Engineering
Partner for the series and supply engineering support, unique components
and complete cars to
the League and teams.
The STARD engineered
cars will be based on variety
of production models and
built to the existing F.I.A. (
Federation
Internationale
de l'Automobile) r Regulations.
Car features include a power output of 500 kW (670hp), an integrated all-wheel drive system with differential torque vectoring and aerodynamic kits unique to the series. Crucial to the flow of racing is a driver push-to-pass feature and a proprietary battery swap system only requiring 15-minutes. Also unique, will be certain design elements allowing for convertibility between rallycross, stage rally & short-course road racing specifications with relative ease, a capability the League and STARD are exploring further.
Trent Price spoke with Manfred about the potential of the series and what hurdles were encountered in incorporating electric technology in such a robust motor sport category.
What made Brian Gale’s proposal to you for an Electric Rallycross series so attractive?
As one of the GRC initial founders and strongly involvement in x-games organisation Brian has a strong and promising reference as an Event Promotor with deep passion in Racing. Also the ideas and plan he has for the series itself is very promising.
The STARD Hiper Mk1 is based on the racing version of a Peugeot 207. What
made you chose the Peugeot as a starting point?
Basically the main reason is that the car was available in our workshop with many parts and this gave us a good base structure on the chassis side. On the other hand we have a close relation with Peugeot Sport which also was taken in mind.
What kind of hurdles did you encounter in the conversion to electric power?
Endless Hurdles! It was really a tough job, being specialised in vehicle and mechanical engineering, to encounter the HV and electric drivetrain hurdles. We also established our own Electric and Electronic engineering department just for that purpose.
Honestly speaking we started with existing products available on the market where we quickly realised it simply does not work in the rough high performance and racing application we are running it.
We pretty often had to analyse sourced components of the drivetrain package, and replace them by our own optimised solutions. So yes it was a very tough path but we are very confident with the knowledge and experience we have gathered by this. To “assemble” the components together is the easy bit. To have all of it working together in racing mode is a really big job and we had to develop a lot of strategies completely from scratch. The possibilities with that technology are breathtaking.
What kind of infrastructure or onsite track do you envisage to make these cars reliable?
I don´t see any problem in reliability as for now. Of course, the charging structure for the batteries is a challenge, but surely we need to reconsider everything around the races as well, not only the drivetrain itself. Parc fermes with inductive charging possibility, Pit Lanes with inductive charging, there are so many possibilities and challenges around EV propulsion and it doesn´t even have to be battery powered. EV technology will change the entire motorsport world!
Currently, the cars work with two motors, which I suspect would give an advantage in cornering. You’ve mentioned that four motors is on the cards – do you plan to introduce torque vectoring technology?
The 2 Motor solution (each axel a Motor and a LSD) is very comparable with an actual internal combustion engine powered race car from the handling point of view and instead of having a mechanical center differential we use the superb possibilities of the E-motor controllability to freely decide upon the delivered torque on each axle.
For the 4 motor project we are in a 3 years government funded project to develop torque vectoring control strategies for exactly the case where you have a full sequential torque control possibility with 4 individual motors. In that project we have a cooperation with the department of vehicle dynamics at the Technical University of Vienna and are mid-way with the project start having taken place in january 2016. Torque vectoring is where huge potential can be unleashed especially in high performance and racing applications of EV dirvetrains.
You plan to introduce energy recovery. How effective to you think this will be in a rally environment?
We have it already in the Hiper MK1 however at the moment only by driver input. In rally conditions an automatic energy recovery function is particularly difficult to develop because of the always changing surface conditions (weather, debris,…). However this makes it particularly interesting, as the technology we work on, which is also related to the torque vectoring research project, could be extremely useful for road car torque and safety systems like e.g. VSC especially in “low-mu” (mu = friction coefficient) situations.
One would expect a substancial increase in torque with the electric drivetrain. Do you think this will have a significant impact on the spectacle of Rallycross?
As we know electric race cars polarize the audience a lot, which happens always when new, entirely different technologies are introduced. Take Audi in LeMas for example. The diesel motor doesn´t exactly sound nice generally, but still made a fantastic “career”. Today we enjoy cars with power but more over we like the noise, tomorrow I am sure the spectators will be impressed by the massive torque/Power output you mention, but also the futuristic noise of high performance electric motors.
You’ve mentioned that the torque output would potentially make a co-driver sick in a rally sprint situation. Would de-tuning these cars be an option is such circumstances or place an impetus on the abilities of the co-driver?
I am not worry, as well as drivers adapt to these cars also co-driver will do and the de-tuning on Rally cars will come automatically with the energy management.
The format of rallycross seems well-suited to electric technology - enabling crews to change battery packs without impacting on the competition like in Formula E?
Fairly saying RX is 110% perfect for E-Racing but also other E competitions will manage sooner or later that the batteries change or charging has no effect in the race.
With the extreme power these cars are producing, what are your estimates on battery life?
This is extremely depending on the specification, application, and life cycle of the batteries. In general, for very high performance applications, where the batteries run up to their maximum power delivery you can expect them to last for between 1000-2000 cycles depending on the acutal usage profile before replacement is needed.
Volkswagen have expressed an interest in electric rallycross. Have you engaged in any discussions as yet?