24-hour car race helps automakers design your next hybrid vehicle

JimboPalmer · Oct 24, 2013

But since the fuel crisis of the 1970s, the Automobile Club de l'Ouest (ACO), which organizes the race, has written the rules to encourage ever-greater improvements in fuel efficiency. Today, that means hybrids. The race rules let hybrid cars recover 500 kJ of energy at a number of designated braking zones on the track. The cars only have 164' (50 m) to capture that energy (which takes around three seconds), and it has to be expended before the next zone.
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24-hour car race helps automakers design your next hybrid vehicle | Ars Technica

Reasonably technical article, even the comments (so far) tend to be technical.

R-P · Oct 25, 2013

The supercapacitor system can recover 60 times more energy under braking compared to a Prius. This combination setup would provide real-world benefits in town, on the freeways, and at the track.
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Makes for nice reading!

And this... wow... (for those not wanting to read the whole article, other cars always had engines of about double that capacity or more...)

About the only details to emerge so far have been that the car will have a small capacity (sub 2-liter) gasoline engine and that one of its two energy recovery systems will convert waste heat from the engine and turbo into electricity.
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GBC_Texas_Prius · Oct 27, 2013

Good reading. I remember when racing was all about pushing technology. Now they literally throttle it back and have a bunch of rules in place. Nice to read about racing that gets back to the roots of racing.

JimboPalmer · Oct 27, 2013

one of the reasons the deltawing race first at LeMans is that the rules allowed it to.
deltawing - Home

Air_Boss · Dec 8, 2013

ACO's efficiency focus isn't a recent innovation. Going back to the 1920s, in addition to the overall race winner, the Le Mans 24 Hours always crowned Index of Performance and Index of Thermal Efficiency winners, which tended to (but not always) favor the smaller engine classes.

24-hour car race helps automakers design your next hybrid vehicle

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24-hour car race helps automakers design your next hybrid vehicle

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