A few weeks ago, I experienced a case of deja vu at the Coventry Museum of Transport when I came across their pre-war collection of cars. Preferring vintage cars (a Bugatti T35 over a Veyron any day for me!) I always seem to gravitate as if on remote control to these vehicles. I realised of course that I’d been there the previous year when the ARTS TPN held their first ever seminar on ‘Electrification in Motorsports’.
With the 2017 event such a success, it was never in any doubt that they should organise a follow-on seminar in 2018. Angus Lyon our lead volunteer, linked up with the Motorsports Industry Association (MIA) and together they came up with a great line-up of speakers.
Angus started the seminar with a presentation on ‘Inside Electric Motorsports’.
Steve Sapsford from Ricardo was the keynote speaker this year and gave an excellent presentation on ‘Racing in an Electrified World’. This outlined that the automotive industry is having to adopt new concepts and technologies due to disruption and major changes in this decade. It’s a shocking fact that there are 400,000 premature deaths in Europe every year due to air pollution.
Professor David Greenwood from Warwick Manufacturing Group presented on ‘Electrification: the design and manufacturing of cells for high performance batteries’. The group are doing some excellent and innovative research in this area and it was great to hear that in early 2020 they are opening the UK Battery Industrialism Centre to develop and prove manufacturing processes.
Jason King from Integral Power train gave us an outline of the work they are doing on ‘Applying High Performance Motors to Next Generation Electric Race and Road Cars’. I noted that they are opening a flexible manufacturing facility in 2018 at Milton Keynes.
Neil Cheeseman from Continental Engineering Services was on next giving a presentation on The company’s contribution to ‘Electrifying Motorsports’. Neil covered the evolution of hybridisation versus electrification form 1996-2008 and there were some interesting sub-topics include Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS), technology transfer from race to road car and other areas.
Iain Wight, Williams Advanced Engineering presented on ‘Next Generation EV Platforms’ and how the F1 technology is developing and can be transferred to other commercial applications. I noted that in 10 years’ time, half of the automotive manufacturers will be producing full or hybrid cards.
Angus came back again to cover ‘Formula E – Pushing Batteries to the Limits’ based on his experiences of supporting the Formula E series. Interesting fact that was mentioned, by the end of the season, the three batteries used by each car during the series will have undertaken the equivalent mileage of three times around the world.
Simon Holloway from RML covered the ‘Challenges of breaking EV records’, which rounded off the seminar presentations.
Mid-way through the event, we presented the IET ARTS TPN Prize for Technical Excellence at MotoE Racing to the University of Bath Zero Emissions Motorcycle team.
We were able to secure some of the presentation slides and these can be viewed here.
If you missed the 2017 event and want to see what we covered there, the presentations were filmed and you can view these by clicking here.
The TPN would like to record their thanks to all the presenters and the MIA for supporting the event. They are especially grateful to the students at the University of Bath Zero Emissions team and Team Bath for bringing their electric motorcycle ‘Apollo’ and the Formula student 2017 electric car to the seminar to showcase the work they’ve put into electric motorsports so far.
Mentioning vintage as I did earlier in my blog, what’s your preference vintage or modern i.e. a Bugatti T35 or Veyron or for the motorcycle enthusiasts a Rudge Ulster or a Honda Fire blade? I’d love to hear back from you.
