A few weeks ago, together with many automotive specialists from industry and academia, I found myself in the excellent surroundings of Coventry Museum of Transport .
The occasion was the ARTS TPN’s inaugural seminar on ‘Electrification in Motorsports’, where a range of excellent speakers gave an overview on the topic and covered various aspects of electrification across the motorsport sector, from electric motorcycles, drag bikes through to Formula E and FI cars.
Our first speaker was Angus Lyon, Director at Rockfort Engineering who set the scene with an ‘Overview of Electrification in Motorsports’. Angus’ talk covered the history of electrification in motorsports from the late 19th century electric land speed racing through to the latest racing series, including a mention of the first electric car to compete in the Dakar Rally. He then went onto outline technologies such as energy storage, motors, transmissions, software etc., ending his talk with what developments could come up in the future.
Our Keynote Speaker was Mark Preston, Team Principal, Techeetah Formula E Team who covered the ‘Business Aspects of Electrification in Motorsports’. He gave an overview of the Formula E race series which uses fully electric cars and is a zero emissions motorsport. He highlighted technologies used on the cars, including some of the challenges for the drivers. It was noted that Uruguay, one of the race venues had achieved close to 95% renewable energy.
Jason King, Chief Engineer, Integral Powertrain ‘Design of High Performance Electric Motors for Motorsports’. Jason gave an introduction into the motors that Integral Power train design, which achieve world leading levels of power density and performance as well as giving an insight into the technology and techniques being used to produce these leading edge motors.
Ben Sheard and Ben White, Students, University of Nottingham ‘Designing an Electric Motorcycle for MotoE Racing Series’ gave a presentation which covered the history of the team, their development, what they’d achieved and what their plans were for 2017. Considering their limited resources including manpower and funding, they had achieved a great deal, including a 3rd in the 2016 TTZero championship, where they had been the fastest university team. They had also won the rider’s and manufacturer’s championship in MotoE Racing European Series in 2016.
Pete James, Director/Technical Specialist, Lyra Electronics Ltd ‘The Development of an Electric Drag Racing Bike’. Pete started his presentation with an outline of the drag racing series and showed a video of a bike in action. He highlighted that several of the technologies used in drag racing could be used across other forms of transport such as trains and trucks.
Douglas Campling, Chief Engineer – Motorsport, Williams Advance Engineering, ‘Design of the Battery Packs for Formula E Cars’. In this presentation we heard about the project timeline, including the safety design and impact testing procedures used for the F1 environment. The battery fire suppression and battery fire safety concepts were also outlined.
Our penultimate speaker was David Lapworth, R&D Director, Prodrive, whose presentation was on the subject of ‘Is Electrification in Motorsports and opportunity or a threat’. This was rather thought provoking, asking which technologies/solutions are needed and how they should be integrated in motorsports.
Our final speaker was Roger Targett, CEO of Electroflight. Roger’s presentation was all about the ‘Development of High Performance and Efficient Electric Aircraft’. The aircraft industry is now waking up to the idea of electric propulsion and Roger’s company are developing an electric aircraft with two contra rotating propellers for the Red Bull Air Racing series. They are aiming for a top speed of 300mph, but the aircraft will be detuned down to 200mph for the race series.
Comment from Angus Lyon Lead ARTS Volunteer on this event:
“Electrification in Motorsports was our first running of this event and one which provided an interesting and thought provoking range of talks. With a very high quality of speakers from students to Technical Directors and Formula E Team Principals the subject matter was broad and extremely well informed, resulting in an extremely good round up of the industry and a lot of animated networking discussions during the breaks. The event was a great success and one that we hope to build on in future years”.
If you’d like to learn more about All Electric Aircraft then click here to access the presentations from our Aerospace TPN seminar last year.
During the event, the ARTS TPN Chairman, Matthew Clarke also presented the TPN MotoE Racing 2016 prizes to the University of Nottingham and University of Bath Zero Teams.
Throughout the event we were collecting business cards for a prize draw. The prize by kind courtesy of Prodrive was a visit to their technical facilities at Banbury. This was won by Ben Sheard from University of Nottingham. We will post up a blog/images of the visit in due course, so keep an eye on the ARTS community area.
We also had some excellent exhibits at the event courtesy of the Saietta team who brought along one of their bikes, the University of Nottingham who displayed their prize winning 2016 bike and last but certainly not least the University of Surrey Student Formula team who showcased their electric car.
The ARTS TPN would like to thank all speakers, delegates and the teams who displayed their bikes/car for contributing to an excellent event.