SEAT

The sports electric that works with dry ice

For Seat, developing the basis for a competition model is not exactly a novelty, as it was his Leon (from the previous generation) who first animated the monomarque trophy, which would end after serving as the basis for the World Cup Car Championship. Tourism. Now the story repeats itself, with World Sporting Consulting announcing the first edition of the new ETCR championship for electric vehicles to 2020, with Seat again developing the prototype that everyone will use as a base.Starting as a base for a Leon TCR Cup Racer, animated by a gasoline engine with 350 hp, Seat Sport technicians, led by the well-known Jaime Puig, removed engine, box and tank, mounting in its place two electric motors in the rear axle, totaling 680 hp and a battery with the capacity of 65 kWh and 450 kg of weight. The result is impressive, for the test driver of the house, Jordi Gené, "because the car has more 330 hp than the petrol version and despite weighing over 400 kg, due to the presence of the battery pack, it is much more fast, announcing 3.2 seconds from 0-100 km / h ". As we can see, the e-Racer (now shows the Cupra brand) can actually reach peaks of 680 hp, with the engines reaching 12,000 rpm, but in continuous it has to be limited to 408 hp, to avoid excessive heating of the accumulator.
The Spanish manufacturer continues to carry out tests with a view to optimizing the systems, especially those related to the battery, which, as in all vehicles using this technology, tends to become very hot whenever it is recharged in a high power station (for that the operation is faster), or when driving at a very fast pace and the engine - provided by Rimac, the Croatians who produce the Concept_One and Two, as well as the Kers to the Aston Martin Valkyrie - extracts from the accumulator a large amount of energy per second.The engineers concluded that although the Cupra e-Racer is equipped with an efficient system of cooling the batteries, sometimes it is not enough in limit situations, which causes the warning light of excessive temperature on the battery to light up. The solution is to go to the booth and blow air through dry ice, which despite its name is actually carbon dioxide solidified at a temperature of minus 78 °. It reports to the manufacturer that they consume about 200 kg of dry ice a day, which is marketed at about € 3 per kilogram and which, in addition to being used for refrigeration, is also common in musical shows and theater, to create that effect. cloud close to the ground.Obviously, Seat technicians will have to find a way for the battery to withstand stress without the need for dry ice, as not only is it not practical to stop mid-race to lower the temperature (which otherwise can cause it to catch fire , which would not be very good for the ETCR), as if releasing a significant amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, which is exactly what electric vehicles want to avoid.

Autonews