There were enough experimental battery vehicles to run as a class at Electrathon of Tampa Bay's race at the USF Engineering Expo February 14. The Electrocutioners dominated with #90 winning the first race with 79 laps and then going on to set a new record of 80 laps in the second race. Electrocutioner #8 finished second with 78 laps both races. I was remarkable consistent at :cough:13:cough: laps both races but I did get to lead some. Here is the video of the opening couple of laps in race 2: http://proev.com/PEVvids/2015/usf2015_2.htm
I am guessing the track is about 1/4 to 1/3 mile long. How close am I? It looks like a fun track with lots of turns. Surprised there are not tires/hay bales/ etc. for barriers in a couple of places that cars are going in opposite directions going into and out of corners. Did you have mechanical problems, batteries, or ???
From what I was told by the race steward it is .45 miles. I was driving in that race and started 40 minutes late (I'm no electrician) so I had full batteries and I was flooring it and those cars all were still passing me, it was so cool. It seemed the batteries never ran low. Hopefully if my team gets our second car we'll get lead acid and a lithium ion battery to race high schools and the advanced batteries.
GPS has the lap driven distance as around 1390 feet or just over a 1/4 mile. It is a very fun track with sharp changes of direction. I was pulling 1.7 Gs In some turns.
The biggest problem this weekend was that we were not getting the most out of our new controller yet. We had no problems in practice but then had a loose connector at the start of the first race. Then the motor got hot with just a few laps.
The Adaptto controller has an auto learning method for deciding on settings for the motor. This was good enough to get the motor running but not for getting the motor to run efficiently. So the energy became heat which was bad for the motor and not so good for range.
We can manually adjust the settings but it will take some testing to get right.
That race was a ton of fun. it was my first race with the new lithium batteries. our other car, #8 has been running lithium for a year or two, but this car was designed around yellow tops. I bought some new ones last year and they were terrible. I was disappointed so off to lithium I went.
This pack is made up of rc car batteries from hobby city and they were inexpensive and worked well.