Newly formed manufacturer Spark Racing
Technology has developed the first electric race car for the FIA Formula E
Championship, which hopes to attract an entirely fresh demographic of fans.
Technical director Théophile Gouzin talks E&Hthrough the testing for the
racer’s e-powertrain
Renault
will make the transition from internal combustion to electric racing with its
announcement that it will join the Formula E Championship as a technical
partner.
Motorsport has long served as a proving
ground for developing and improving vehicle technology. And in this respect,
the FIA Formula E Championship will be the world’s first fully electric racing
series, which will provide an ideal R&D platform for pushing the boundaries
of mainstream electric vehicle technology.
The announcement that the FIA was to
license the series was made back in August 2012, and since then, several teams
with backgrounds in the automotive industry or links to major OEMs have joined
the list of competitors – Mahindra & Mahindra, Super Aguri and Audi Sport
Abt to name a few.
In the medium term, an open championship
framework will provide the opportunity for car manufacturers, technology
companies and other constructors to showcase their electric energy innovations
in a racing environment by designing their own race cars and powertrains.
However, all teams will run the same car for at least the first season to prove
the concept, develop stable sporting regulations and encourage interested
parties to bring their own cars to the championship in the future.
The company responsible for the development
of the ‘spec’ Formula E race car, the 225km/h (140mph) Spark Renault SRT 01E,
which took 18 months to put together, was newly formed manufacturer Spark Racing
Technology (SRT).
The
new and electrifying FIA Formula-E is just around the corner, but we have yet
to see the exact form of the racer that is going to be zooming through the
streets circuits around the world
Each race will last approximately one hour,
during which time drivers make a mandatory pit stop in order to change cars.
SRT’s initial performance target was for the car to last 20 minutes at racing
speeds; its technical director, Théophile Gouzin, who oversaw the development
work for the vehicle, says, “At the beginning of the project we spent around
two months simulating the energy consumption of the battery and the energy
required to power the battery for 20 minutes.”
SRT partnered with McLaren (electric
drivetrain and electronics), Williams Advanced Engineering (battery pack) and
Renault (overall system integration) on the project. Both the motor and
inverter were derived from the McLaren P1, requiring some upgrades for the SRT
01E: “The P1 has a hybrid powertrain and [in that application] these components
are less stressed with regard to the power they have to provide,” notes Gouzin.
“It was also a challenge to fit such a big
battery into a single-seat race car,” he adds. “Williams first characterized
different cell types and then selected the one that met our specification. The
FIA restricts the weight of the battery pack to 200kg per car meaning we had a
restricted number of cells to give that power level. A lot of discussions went
back and forth to try to find the correct layout in the space we had originally
allocated to fit the battery.”
The
SRT_01E will be packing 270-horsepower or 200kW. Although the Formula-E will
not be like any other races we usually encounter due to its silent
characteristics, the instant torque these electric motors produce will pretty
much be a spectacle to behold.
France-based AOTech designed the SRT 01E’s
aero package, which is strictly governed by the FIA. “This restricts where
people can invest money within the aerodynamics so that they focus on the
electric powertrain instead,” adds Gouzin. SRT used CD-adapco’s Star CCM+
software for CFD analysis, before final development was done in the rolling
road wind tunnel at GIE S2A’s facility in Montigny-le-Bretonneux, France.
Gouzin and team principal Frédéric Vasseur,
who is better known for his role in leading the ART Grand Prix race team,
pooled their experience to devise the SRT 01E’s test program. That began in
August 2013 at Spark’s facility in Burgundy, France. The first stage, which was
carried out at Williams’ facility, consisted of basic dyno testing for a month
to characterize the performance of the battery and ensure this matched initial
targets. Then, functional safety tests including a short-circuit test, fuse
testing and voltage tests were carried out for around six to eight weeks. “From
April until September 2013 we ran the complete motor, inverter and gearbox on
the dyno at the University of South Wales to check gearshift ability and to
characterize the thermal model of the motor. We ran the battery for 600km (373
miles) and the gearbox for 3,000km (1,865 miles),” explains Gouzin.
