High performance hybrids is not an oxymoron, and budding automotive engineers from 30 universities gathered at New Hampshire Motor Speedway to prove it.
The teams competed in the third annual Formula Hybrid International Competition last weekend and tore up the track in cars they'd spent months building for a race that places as much value on fuel efficiency as it does on speed. The event, sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers, challenges students to design, build and race open-wheeled plug-in hybrid race cars that emphasize drivetrain innovation and performance.
The cars look like they'd be a blast to drive.
The Formula Hybrid Competition stresses maximize performance in three different areas: acceleration, autocross and endurance. The endurance event is the most challenging. All cars begin with fully charged accumulators (batteries or capacitors) on the grid, as is the norm for a plug-in hybrid vehicle. Students have two options when designing such systems. The can maximize accumulator capacity, like Chevrolet does with the Volt, or run a smaller (and lighter) system like the Toyota uses in their Prius. These are complex decisions, requiring extensive engineering analysis, but hey, that's what these kids are paid to do - or will be paid to do when they leave academia and start designing the cars we'll drive in the future.
For that reason, the event is sponsored by the likes of General Motors and Chrysler - which probably had to look under the couch cushions in the execs' offices to raise money - and Toyota, the IEEE, the California Air Resources Board and Plug In America. Shoot, it's even got support from Argonne National Labs, and those guys work on stuff like nuclear fusion, so there is pretty heavy interest from the industrial sector in what's been happening at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
The bottom line in racing is who won, and Texas A&M University took the checkered flag. Colorado State University was second with Drexel University rounding out the podium. Competitors were judged in such categories as design, presentation, acceleration using only electric drive, unrestricted drive acceleration, autocross times and endurance. Other notable finishers were the teams from McGill University, the University of California – Irvine and California Polytechnic State University – SLO.
Now all these kids got to do is start building road legal two-seaters.
For those of you that are stats geeks, here's the top five scores (out of a possible 1000):
Texas A & M 980.9
Colorado State University 757.7
Drexel University 689.4
McGill University 656.7
University of California – Irvine 639.0
The category winners were:
Design (possible 200 points) - Texas A & M 200.0
Presentation (possible 200 points) - Texas A & M 100.0
Acceleration- Electric (possible 75 points) - Colorado State University 75
Acceleration- Unrestricted (possible 75 points) - Colorado State University 75
Autocross (possible 150 points) - Texas A & M 150.0
Endurance (possible 400 points) - Texas A & M 400.0
Full results here.
Photos: Flicker / Dartmouth University.
