From the two times we bought brushless, 'one of a kind,' or 'out of the norm' motors we had trouble and wasted money. Neither of them worked as advertised and they said it was our problem. The first on, like you we found a motor with great specs and then went through 3 or 4 controllers trying to get it to work at anything near what they said it would. The second one a company sold us both the motor and controller as a unit and then told us the controller we bought was being used on the wrong motor and wanted us to buy a second much more expensive one. Since I am a teacher in Oregon which has limited eduction $$$ the district supplies us with only $3800 a year for our total program and we build as many as 21 cars for our 75 to 120 students each year from the ground up with last year's cars 'store bought' items. So we can not afford to toss money away. As it is, we do a whole lot of begging and writing grants for $$$ and discounts/donations. Since these two bad experiences we have stuck with lead acid batteries, original eTek motors, and Alltrax controllers. We make our own potentiometers out of $12 - 25 K pots, along with our emergency switch/on-off and fuse combo out of a $15 - 70 amp circuit breaker. For metering we use 'free' Harbor freight multi-meters for amps and volt and learn to do well with those. For us it was not worth the chance of wasting the $$ needed to build a couple of cars and not let that many students build a car from the ground up and learn so much from the experience. With this we are one of, if not the top team in the NW where we have had as many as 80 car from up to 20 teams come to one race and have about 15-18 days of racing a year. We would love to see how our tight track cars compete with the ones from around the country but I feel that our basic systems, cars, and drivers would be able to beat most, if not all, of the cars around the USA. We at times have had student cars beat the top Dave Cloud car and my very basic Wolverine car is usually right behind them and occasionally beat them in the adult short track races. For those in the Florida area you know how well and fast those cars are and they bought an older one that is not as good as his later ones.

I do agree that there needs to be experimentation like that done by ProEV but for at least our school we will not be doing it anymore as the slight benefits of a better/more efficient system was not enough to counter building less cars and educating less students. Years ago we are the team that first found and used the eTek pancake motors so we have experimented until we found something that made us as competitive and anyone else. Once we found these we let everyone know what we had at a very affordable price and nearly everyone went to them. We went through Scott 1 hp, Scott star 1.5 hp, Pentad motors and controllers, and several others that were not measurably better just more expensive until we stumbled onto the eTek and have been a believer since. With this motor we started beating the competition by several laps and soon nearly everyone that we competed against was using the eTek. So we bought 25 eTeks over the next three years and still have 23 of them that are in great shape and totally functional. If I found a large grant I would probably switch to some of the Lynch or other pancake brushed motors out there now but they are only about 1% or so better that the eTeks that I paid less than $300 for years ago.

So if your team has the money to possibly toss away then go for something others have not tried but I don't feel that you will gain much over the top line basics our there now. If it turns out to be better please let everyone else know so that they too can have better cars and feel that much more reward for going that much farther in the hour.

Good luck with your experimentation and I hope that you discover a great new system that everyone wants to use in the future like the eTek motors that changed the sport for the better ~15 years ago.
Mike

The motor we found is called "Original Briggs and Stratton OEM NOS Etek Permanent Magnet Brushless Motor" I'm assuming that this is not the eTek that you use. What is the eTek motor you use? And do you have any of them for sale with the controller?

Alright, thanks for all the help.

Ryan,
Ron is right about Dave Cloud having motors last year and I think he still has some and the price was the best I have seen in several years. He also sells controllers. You can contact his and see what he still has and what he would recommend. He is the car to beat in the NW and anywhere else his cars race. You can contact him at his business cloudvolt@hotmail.com. He and his daughter Shannon have several post on the EA site as well.---Good luck and keep me posted.