Speed Ventures is a company that hosts track days for weekend warriors of all skill levels. A few years ago, one of the founders became fascinated by electric cars. That’s where the idea of REFUEL was born. The event is an electric vehicle only track day Laguna Seca. This year’s even takes place on Saturday, July 1st and will be the third time it’s been run. Check out the promotional video and EV lap record from last year’s REFUEL.
The “green” race cars participating in this year’s Le Mans got together for a good old fashioned photo-op. Moving from left to right we start with the Nissan Deltawing. It’s half the weight and aerodynamic drag of a normal race car so it only needs half the power and fuel. The blue and white car is the Toyota TS030 which ended up not competing in Le Mans due to a heavy crash in testing. It’s powered by a gasoline V8 on the rear axle and electric motors on the front. The silver and red car behind the Toyota is the Audi E-tron Quattro. It’s rear axle is powered by a diesel V8 with electric motors powering the front axle. The interesting aspect of the Audi is that it uses the electromagnetic flywheel energy storage system that’s been campaigned on the Porsche 911 GT3 RS Hybrid. The black and orange car on the end is the hydrogen powered GreenGT H2.
Asphalt and Rubber was able to get a good look at the Mugen Shinden at the Isle of Man TT. Mugen is the Honda factory tuning company that was founded by Soichiro Honda’s son. It’s thought the racing program for the Honda electric motorcycle was put under the Mugen brand so that it wouldn’t tarnish Honda’s reputation if it were to be a failure. A&R is reporting that most of the bike is carbon fiber and the battery pack makes up over half of its weight which is good evidence that it won’t be a failure. Head over to Asphalt and Rubber to see the rest of the pictures.
Car and Driver teamed up with Tire Rack to see if they could get a Nissan Leaf to pull a full 1.00 G on the skid pad. They work their way up from the stock Bridgestone Ecopia tires to full racing slicks. It seems kind of overkill, but a lot of people run racing slicks on stock cars for autocrossing. Normally I would say coilovers and anti-sway bars would be a key component to this process, but nobody makes them for the Leaf. The final result may surprise you. The cool part is they say that electric sports cars might be pretty fun.
The concept behind the Monotracer-E is pretty clever. You start with the fact that motorcycles achieve great gas mileage because they’re light and basically the absolute minimum of what you need as a mode of transportation. From there, you start to address some of the motorcycles shortcomings. Lets start with exposure to the weather, safety and aerodynamics. What could you do to fix those things? Well, add an outer shell to the bike. That’s exactly what they tried on Mythbusters: