A New Kind of Motorsport

by Matt Bryan

Formula One is rather glamorous isn’t it? The very name itself conjures images of the style icons of yesteryear and the high-tech of today. As sports go, it’s one enjoyed by a high profile audience, and this is never more apparent than at the Monaco Grand Prix. Super-yachts and millionaires line the Riviera to catch a glimpse of space-age cars hurtling around some of the world’s most expensive postcodes, where a parking space can exceed the average price of a UK home. But what really makes the atmosphere of high-class, high-octane racing its own unique experience is the screaming of highly-strung combustion engines - the angry cries of a 1.6 litre V6 at nearly 15,000 rpm has been the soundtrack to F1 races for the last few years, and a lineage of its predecessors before that. However, with fuel prices rising, reserves running low and governments keen to ban crude-oil based vehicles in the next few decades, there is a new genre of racing on the horizon - what can only be described as motor-sport.

2019 marks the fifth year of Formula-E, an F1-style racing series in which teams and their drivers use solely electric powered cars. These machines look much like their petrol-engined counterparts but can accelerate from 0-100 kmh^-1 in three seconds, accompanied by the vacuum cleaner-esque whir of an electric motor spinning up. But don’t be fooled - they aren’t just Scalextric cars for big kids. Much like F1, each Formula-E team can design their own running gear within the allocated rules, including the motor itself, its inverter, gearbox and cooling system. The current generation of cars can produce up to 335bhp, the same as F1 cars from its ‘1970s Golden Age’, allowing a featherweight 900kg chassis to reach speeds of up to 174mph. Whilst their statistics on paper are somewhat shadowed by the awe-inspiring top speeds of F1 cars, electric single-seaters have some more unique characteristics when it comes to performance.

An electric motor reacts far quicker to input than an old-fashioned petrol lump; whilst a combustion engine has to get up to speed before providing its maximum power, an electric motor can do so from the get go. The power it provides is in the form of torque at lower rotational speeds and it remains constant, rather than the loss of any real ‘oomph’ that petrol engines have beyond halfway to the redline. An engine’s torque represents how much the car ‘pulls’, more scientifically, the amount of force it applies to the wheels per turn of the crankshaft, whereas horsepower takes account of how fast the crankshaft turns, and is more akin to top speed. All that means that electric motors give ridiculous acceleration when the pedal hits the metal. In addition, this performance is much more ‘on tap’, as the flow of charges from the battery to the motor’s magnets is much faster than the rate of flow of petrol and air to a set of fuel injectors. Overall, this gives Formula-E cars (and their road-going relations) a much better and more usable power band than their petrol counterparts, meaning that seemingly lesser power engines can easily compete with gas guzzlers.  

But the all important part of a Formula-E car is its battery, which at 385kg can account for over a third of its weight. Rather than just being a source of fuel as a petrol tank is in a traditional car, the battery is essential in dictating the overall performance of the vehicle: the faster it can transfer energy from its chemical stores to a usable current, the more energy available to the motor per unit time, leading to a greater power to the wheels and therefore better performance. In the case of hi-tech motorsport however, a few double-As found down the back of the sofa will unfortunately not suffice. Currently, F-E’s batteries are made by McLaren and have a capacity of 54 kWh and by doing some quick maths to put that in more everyday terms, that’s about enough energy to make 3000 cups of tea, the same energy that a kilogram has travelling at 44,000 mph, or just less than one fifth of the 1.21GW needed to send the DeLorean ‘back to the future’. But a battery cannot simply dump all of its energy instantaneously, nor is it 100% efficient, and these problems amongst many others are perhaps why the mass market adoption of electric cars and e-motorsport is still a way off.

The lithium-ion batteries used in most electric cars and indeed most of our electrical products are the major sticking point; they are high capacity and relatively efficient but not perfect. All batteries have a tendency to degrade over time, most holding less than 80% of their original capacity after around one-thousand charges, and when these batteries constitute over half the cost of the car, constant use has the potential to wear them out irreparably. Companies like Tesla have pioneered longer-lasting technologies, but are still unlikely to exceed the hundreds of thousands of miles that a well-kept petrol or diesel is good for. With so much energy transferred, high-performance motors can get really hot, which can mean that batteries perform worse and sometimes discharge themselves. In Formula-E cars, cooling systems have been developed in order to reduce the harmful effects of  temperature, but in more consumer-orientated cars, there isn’t much evidence of the impact on battery health in long term ownership, which may discourage potential buyers. Although electric cars and Formula-E itself are billed as more environmentally friendly alternatives, they still require a vast amount of energy, which in most countries is still developed by fossil fuels. Pit teams actually charge their race cars using glycerol generators, an alcohol left over from biodiesel production, but the larger population is unlikely to have access to anything other than their domestic sockets, thus increasing energy demand. Many electrical components used also need rare earth metals which must be shipped thousands of miles from a select few sources worldwide, as opposed to the common or garden steels used in standard cars.

But the introduction of electric motors to well-established sports has caused some issues too. Formula-E is treated by many die-hard F1 purists as the herald of the apocalypse, and that the death of their sport at the hands of climate activists is imminent. But who really asked for these ‘eco-friendly’ alternatives? I think it's less of a case of environmental consciousness, as motorsport itself represents a tiny portion of global carbon emissions when compared to heavy industries, but that it acts more as a showpiece for the genius engineers of the world. Bringing people closer to cutting edge technology can only be a good thing, and science for good doesn’t have to be boring if it is represented as a futuristic car hurtling round a track - far more interesting than a lecture on the niches of synthesising battery electrodes (my next article).

When it comes to other sports, the rapid improvements in motor technology have posed a threat. 2016 saw the first confirmed instance of ‘motor doping’ in the world of cycling, confirming a previously held suspicion against certain riders having some sort of ‘superhuman’ burst of energy towards the end of six-hour races: Femke Van den Driessche was found to have a hidden motor in the frame tube of her race bike at the UCI Cyclocross World Championships, and was promptly given a six year ban. A hidden motor can provide somewhere near 250 watts, an extra 60% on top of what the best riders can muster, causing a full re-evaluation of the rules of the sport. Whilst motors are certainly illegal in a normal bike race, more conspicuous E-Bike races are gaining traction as an alternative for older riders, or those just looking to add an extra bit of speed. Some of mountain-biking’s biggest names have come out in support of pedal-assist bikes, but their added power begs the question as to whether it is still ‘cycling’, in the purest sense of the word. The UCI (the FIFA of the two-wheeled world) has clashed recently with the International Motorcycling Federation over who is allowed to hold E-Bike races, or whether E-Bikes are in fact motorbikes. Regardless, the UCI will be holding the first E-Bike World Championships in August this year.