An electric race car patched Daytona for the first time

The annual 24-hour race at Daytona International Speedway in Florida kicks off Saturday afternoon. And this year’s race has been pretty good so far – although there are still almost seven hours left to run as I write this. This year is the 59th run of a race that has at least unofficially become the start of the year’s racing season. But on Friday, the 5.6km (5.6km) road track tried something new when an electric race car was on the track for a few demonstration laps – the first time a racing EV did so. With any luck, this could be an announcement of future things, as the organizers of the sport will be exploring the potential for an American series in the next few years.

It was not a single seat with open wheels like the cars racing in Formula E. Instead, it was designed for a new category called ETCR, for electric touring vehicles: think highly adapted cars, but with electric drives. In this case, the car was a Hyundai Veloster N. Hyundai disputed the (non-electric) TCR category with the Veloster N, but all have 2.0-liter internal combustion engines that drive the front wheels.

The ETCR rulebook is much less restrictive, and consequently the Veloster N ETCR is a much more exotic thing, with not just one, but four electric motors, so each rear wheel is powered by a few motors. Peak power is an impressive 670 hp (500kW) – just as much as the new hybrid prototypes that will be racing at Le Mans this year – that draws energy from a 68kWh battery pack from Williams Advanced Engineering (which also supplies Formula E with batteries for it. series’ third generation car).

This makes it a challenging car to drive fast, according to Augusto Farfus, a professional racer who works with Hyundai to develop the Veloster N ETCR car and who drove the demo laps at Daytona on Friday.

“The biggest difference, of course, is the noise; we drive a car that is completely silent. You can only hear the tires. And for me the biggest difference, apart from the weight of the car – you get used to it pretty quickly. – is the “two rear wheels that do not connect anything, so we have four cars, two left rear and two rear, but there is no rear differential like in a normal race car,” Farfus told Ars.

“This is a new challenge for the driver, because every variation you have on brake application, on the balance of the car on the brakes, becomes a big problem. You do not have the brake of the car, which some of these “problems are overcome in a normal internal combustion engine. So that’s the biggest difference for me. You approach the turns extremely fast, because 500 kilowatts accelerates the car fairly quickly, so that you finally approach in a quiet silence and super fast,” Farfus said.

ETCR races also promise to be action-packed, with short (10km) sprints planned for the Pure ETCR series set to launch in Europe later this year. “You have to drive the car pretty hard. There is no energy management at the moment – there is no lift or coast or energy saving as we see in different electrical formulas. This puts extra pressure on the drivers and the engineers, because we have to develop a real race car with a real sprint spirit to attack every lap, ‘Farfus told me.

When Pure ETCR launches this year, the Veloster N ETCR will be alongside EV racers from three other makes: Seat, Alfa Romeo and MG. IMSA, the organization that sanctions the Rolex 24 at Daytona (and sports cars at the highest level in the US), is not quite ready to announce a North American ETCR series yet, but John Doonan, president of the IMSA , sounded optimistic when asked about the prospects of such a thing happening.

“We want to be the platform. We want to be the opportunity in markets that make the most sense for the manufacturing partners, so that the work that Marcelo [Lotti, president of World Sporting Consulting and the driving force behind both TCR and ETCR] and his team did to make it happen is step one. It is now our responsibility to work with our existing manufacturers to see what they want to do to seize the opportunity, ‘said Doonan.

“We are excited and delighted that this is the first time that a fully electric race car will take part in a demonstration round – certainly not in competition, but we are delighted to be a part of it today. As a car manufacturer one of us platforms to tell a story from a marketing point of view or from a new technological point of view, this is in line with our overall corporate strategy, ‘Doonan told Ars.

List image by LAT Images