Slashdot Mirror
At the Track With Formula E, the First e-Racing Series
An anonymous reader writes Ars is running a story about the new all-electric racing car series and its first visit to the U.S.. "The pit lane we're standing in is unusual, and not only because it's a temporary setup placed in the shadow of American Airlines Arena (home of the NBA's Miami Heat). Garages are set up on both sides rather than being limited to one. A few things also appear to be missing. To start, a familiar smell from the usual mix of burning hydrocarbons is absent. And it's remarkably quiet. The occasional impact wrench bursts out in a mechanical staccato, generators drone here and there, but there are no V8s burbling, no V6s screaming....Welcome to Formula E, the world's first fully electric racing series. Miami is playing host to the first of two US rounds—the next being held in Long Beach, CA, on April 4—and it's the fifth race in this ePrix's inaugural season. Given we've got a bit of a thing about racing at Cars Technica, as well as an obvious interest in electric vehicles, we had to be on the ground in Miami to experience this for ourselves."
> Formula 1 jumped the shark when they disallowed ground effects.
Ground effects whilst technologically interesting suffer from safety problems.
As soon as a car deviates from the optimum ride height for the undertray effects to work the downforce varies significantly. This is a problem when apex speeds are significantly higher due to the extra downforce created by ground effects.
Hit a bump the wrong way and lose downforce == shoot off the corner at much higher speeds into the barrier.
Because the power output of an electric motor is torque * rotation speed. The electric motor can produce max torque across the speed range (roughly for most types anyway), but the power output still increase with the RPM. So if you want to get max power at any wheel speed you want to keep the motor revs up.
Hence the gearbox.