REFUEL 2010 at Laguna Seca Pt. 2- Everyone Else

Since I already posted about my experience at Refuel 2010 now it’s time to look at who all else was there.

I was excited to see Palatov Motorsport’s cars. I visited the Palatov shop last July in Portland but at the time the dp1 was out of the shop and the dp4 hadn’t been built yet. They brought the dp1e electric racer and the dp4 hayabusa-powered mini-racer. The dp1 is powered by a Remy PMAC motor and impressively compact Rinehart Motion Systems inverter, coupled with a healthy Thunder Sky battery pack. While solidly in the prototype phase, the car is coming along quite impressively and makes quite an impression in person. From looking around the Remy website I suspect the motor they’re using is from Remy’s “off the shelf” series of motors designed for hybrid drive systems. It uses an interesting construction technique they call “HVH- High Voltage Hairpin”. Basically, the windings are made of rectangular wire slotted very neatly into the stator laminations, for measurable improvements in power density and efficiency. It’s really a very sexy looking motor.

(Taken from the white paper available at http://www.remyinc.com/hybrid.asp)

Palatov says he’s planning on selling a EV drive system based on the Remy motor and RMS inverter. It’ll be very interesting to see what the price point for that sort of a system will be.

The dp1e looked great on the track, they took a close third in the time trial after the Kleenspeed WX10 racecar and the Wrightspeed X1. Given that both of those are AC-150 powered, with approximately double the peak power of the dp1e it’s not a surprise, but impressive how close it came.

See the rest:

I didn’t get a good look at the Kleenspeed racecar with the hood up, but I saw the AC-150- a good starting point for a real fast machine. I’ve got to say, I’m more interested in cars that push the boundaries a bit with more experimental motor systems, especially in this day of booming growth and diversity in brushless motors.

I’d seen the Wrightspeed X1 before, and while the specs and performance is way up there, the big lithium brick/ariel atom/AC-150 formula isn’t all that new and exciting these days. Of course it works well!

Also representing the AC Propulsion AC-150 was the EBox and original T-Zero. The T-Zero still holds up well as a very unique and well constructed car.

eeVee motors brought one of their Honda Civic based conversions. It’s a pretty tidy package. Azure AC-24 and ThunderSky pack. Good combo. Funny sounding power steering pump.

The borderline nuts Capstone CMT-380 Diesel turbine series hybrid supercar showed up as I had seen before at the Maker faire. They didn’t do much driving in it, not sure if it was having issues or if they’re just precious about it. It’s quite an impressive car in a totally crazy in the head sort of way.

Speaking of being precious about a car, EV4U custom conversion’s Beetle was there, with fresh paint and a caretaker extremely apprehensive about getting it messed up. Other than that, floodeds and a Curtis. Move on, nothing to see here. If he had driven it on-track my car wouldn’t have earned the distinction of being slowest. (… wow, that’s some snarky attitude)

Optamotive brought their X-prize contender “E-Rex”– despite looking a bit rough around the edges (work in progress) it seemed to run alright. It’s definitely got potential.

Finally, Jeff McCabe brought his 928 conversion, complete with a very nice looking pack of Taiwanese cylindrical LiFePO4 cells. If I had the cash this is definitely a direction I’d like to go with the MX-5. His motor and controller are similar to mine, but the performance of the Lithium pack really sets his car on another performance level.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to check out all the bikes and other three-wheelers. It was an interesting spread of EVers represented here- looked like everyone enjoyed themselves. I had a great time, enjoyed seeing the spread and meeting new people. Looking forward to next year! I’ve been inspired by a ride in the stupid-fast Tesla Roadster to build something electric, lithium powered and really fast. Probably the Kart. We’ll see.

See Part one for my personal experience at the event.

Thanks very much to Miles K. for photographs.