Racing an Electric Car

[AutoXracer]

I thought you guys might get a kick out of this.
We are the UBC E-Racing team and we've actually been racing our converted 1984 Reynard Formula Ford car for the past year now. We still have a crappy lead-acid battery pack, but even with 250lbs of dead weight we do ok with the car. Here's some video from our last race:

[youtube]eKKfPB_dWO4[/youtube]

[youtube]3nP4hynnzcc[/youtube]

 

[Doctorbass]

What type of motor?

Emrax?

Doc

 

[zombiess]

Nanotech packs and more volts/amps!!!

Seems like it needs some more gearing for that course and by Auto X standards that course seems pretty open (is the car geared for road course?). Awesome car, makes me want to race / wish I had the funds to play with something like that.

Details on the setup? Volts/ amps / motor / controller? Run time in other events?

 

[AutoXracer]

The motor is a 9" advanced brushed DC motor.

We are running 120V. I've recorded a peak of about 500A and roughly 300A continuous. Oh and the controller is a cheap Kelly unit which has yet to die on us.

The location we race at is in Pitt Meadows, BC and its one of the largest places for AutoX in Canada, hence it being somewhat open. Plus the course design was less tight than usual. In May we were the second fastest car out there with a 51.813 and similar times in the videos above. We did a 48.9 on Sunday and on Saturday we were 10th out of 78 with our unmodified time. After car classification we end up somewhere in the middle usually.

I think the batteries are more of an issue than the gearing, they don't seem to keep up with the sustained high current draw. The pack is simply 10 12v odyssey AGM batteries in series and they can only do maybe 2 runs without heavy sagging. We keep up by charging after every run. Good guess on the gearing though, the car was used for road courses before we got it. We just leave it in second and it works well enough. No clutch and I can't find part of the shift linkage so no power shifting either.

 

[AutoXracer]

Oh I forgot to mention we are building a lipo pack to replace the lead. Probably similar voltage and better capacity

 

[oatnet]

The motor is a 9" advanced brushed DC motor.

We are running 120V. I've recorded a peak of about 500A and roughly 300A continuous. Oh and the controller is a cheap Kelly unit which has yet to die on us.

Boy that looks like FUN.

I'm running a 9" ADC and 500a Kelly too... I've seen rare spikes of 500a battery side when the combo was in a VW bus, but usually it hovered around 250a, so I am curious which model you have.

Do you know how much the whole car weighs, with or without the lead acid batteries?

-JD