Is winning an overall race with an EV vehicle even possible? (Page 4 of 9)

Cheat suggestion number 5:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRAP_w0eYDA

Can you show me this?  I've found that the top teams spend <15-18minutes in the pits.  Typically ~5 or 6 stops in the 3 minute range.

OK, so you are timing one lap in with your pit stop time and not just the time stopped in pit lane and then you were halfing that time (60 minutes to 35)?    You should subtract their average lap time from each of their stops to get an estimate of time stopped in the pits.  At thompson, we lose two laps when we come in to pit (3 minutes stopped on a 1:35 lap time).

By doing it solely based on time, you could also be getting double yellows in there too.  Trust me when I say that no leading team is coming in more then 3 times a day for fuel. 

--Rob

I downloaded Rust in the Wind's times for you.  This is their winning run at NJMP in 2018. 

Use this race and not Thompson.  I can tell you that this race was all done under green flag and in the dry.  This team is very consistent and they come into the pits almost exactly every 50 laps for fuel.  It looks like they make 7 stops (and either a BF or broken car at lap 326) all weekend and their average stop is in the 3:00-3:30 times (which includes either their slower out lap or slower in lap depending on where they cross the timing loop in pit lane). 

http://gofile.me/6ulKe/xbC2QOht7

Using a big heavy battery would work to beat Class C, not class A.
To win Class A, you use a very small battery pack and swap/recharge very frequently,
an EV can be very light and very fast for a short time.

EVs have dominated racing over gas cars for a long time..in short races..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaXLtPGrTGQ

Gas cars need air to perform, so you get an advantage at high altitudes over gas cars,
so the track to compete on is Denver (High Plains Raceway) which has small car counts too as I recall.

^ I tend to agree here.  Most everyone seems to be sorta ignoring the problem of keeping one of these things cool enough to last for a single 1-2 hr stint, much less an entire day.  It sounds interesting to stuff a Tesla battery pack and a forklift motor into a miata but when that m-effer catches on fire at hour two its gonna be a big mess. 

Do I think it's possible to build something that could win the $50k?  Yes.  Will it cost more than $50k to do?  Yes.  Much more.  Conversely, we do have to keep sight of the fact that a pointy end of the field team is spending more than $400 to get those $400 worth of nickels so really the only new twist to this is a much elevated budget.  Plus knowledge/experience.  There are very few undiscovered advances in making a 20 year old car last in an endurance race.  I don't believe there is much knowledge/experience in the arena of endurance racing an EV on a budget. I'm also reminded about the time my older brother (Stanford Masters in EE specializing in power supply) visited a an old colleague for lunch that was working at Tesla a while before the launch of the Model S.  They gave him a mini tour and he was rather struck by how crude some of the workings were, he also asked them "what are you doing about the frazzmastat effect" or whatever it was called.  Apparently it's some adverse effect that occurs when you are building an electric car the way they were.  They grabbed my brother, pulled him into a conference room and asked "what do you know about the frazzmastat effect?" and all he could think of was "Holy Shit, these guys are this far down the road and they haven't solved this fairly base problem yet?  What else don't they know?"  That leads me to believe that this is gonna take a lot of testing to discover what you don't know.  Not saying he's Einstein but if someone gets stuck on something in their EV quest, I can certainly call on him to see what he knows.

I hope someone tries this but also hope no one gets hurt doing so.

I think this is the problem that makes winning so damn hard. You can't stop that many times and keep a lead, unless your pace is significantly faster than everyone else. Assuming the rules are the same for an EV where you must get out of the car to "refuel", there is a minimum pit time you will bump into just for strapping a driver in safely. Figure that with pit lane speeds and swap time, and driver change time you're loosing at least 2 minutes per stop, at most tracks that means you loose a lap every stop that you then have to chase back.

Oh yeah, and the AC motor and controller play hell with the timing loop at CMP. They were not super-pleased about that.

Does anyone on here have some speed data for a race lap? I would like to use that to do a more detailed calculation of the power requirement based on the car speed profile over the course of a lap.

Now I know how to win!.  Two car team.  One electric and trying to be fast with an EM pulse generator.  Trigger each time it goes near the loop.  Other car with class A potential and an ICE engine.  Final, and most important, a pack of adorable puppies that your distract Roland and his lovely wife with so they do not notice the effects and start manually timing cars.

Edit, Oh, and switch transponders on the two cars.

[Kobayashi Maru ;-) ]