I love Motorsport, I haven’t managed to attend much live racing in recent years due to family commitments, but the noise and smell of racing cars is one that you never forget. Formula One is especially good to see live, the sound of a full grid of cars starting is just awesome – your whole body feels it! So I am not completely sure that the FIA’s latest formula announced this last week will have quite the same following.
The new formula ‘E’ is for electric cars is due to start in 2014 – it sounds boring on first look, but may actually have some potential;
In the world of motor racing the internal combustion engine has always been king, however electric cars have amazing torque (ask anyone with a Tesla) so electric cars are actually quite well suited to racing, especially on the tight city centre tracks that are proposed for the formula.
This year’s Le Mans 24 hours was won by a diesel-electric hybrid, while Formula One cars have been using energy recovery systems for the past two years. Technically, that makes them hybrids too.
Various electric racing cars have been developed, including the electric Lola-Drayson B12/69EV (above) which can do 0-60 mph in three seconds.
The aim of the formula is to attract a new generation of fans – kids who are currently in their teens and are likely to be electric car buyers in their life times. Electric cars are far from ‘sexy’ at the moment so this is an attempt to improve their image. Motorsport is also a great place for research and development of new technologies, so it could help develop electric cars far quicker than the manufacturers would on their own. So this will be a very trendy, very modern, futuristic form of racing, aimed at the video games generation.
So although circuits around the world regularly echo to the earsplitting howl of racing V10s and V12s at full throttle, perhaps not for much longer!
