Occasional PHer and passionate
electric racing advocate
Lord Drayson and his team at Drayson Racing are celebrating having set an
electric land speed record
(subject to final confirmation) of 204.185mph yesterday at Elvington airfield near York.
Drayson car previously ran a Judd V10
Utilising wireless charging technology from technology partner QualcommHalo - hoped to feature in the forthcoming
Formula E race series
- Drayson completed two runs within one hour in his B12 69/EV, beating the existing record by 29.2mph. That had stood for nearly 40 years, Drayson saying, "It is not the outright speed that is most impressive about this record, but the engineering challenge of accelerating a 1,000kg electric vehicle on a short runway over a measured mile."
The Lola-derived car previously ran a biofuel configured Judd V10 and has been used as a rolling test bed for technology Drayson Racing hopes to use in Formula E. Already signed up as team for the electric single-seater series, Drayson will run Spark-Renault SRT10E cars for the first season in 2014 but from 2015 will be able to use its own powertrain technology.
Lord Drayson celebrates a successful run
The original plan had been for the entire field to use the same car for 2014 but yesterday another famous name from the history of land speed records joined the race to go electric with plans for its own Formula E car. The British developed Bluebird Formula E is an entirely separate project from the Spark-Renault SRT10E and will, subject to FIA approval, be run by the Bluebird team in the championship. Bluebird also says it could build up to 16 additional cars, enough to supply a further four teams.
This in addition to Bluebird's stated aim of building on a 100-year family tradition of record breaking and over 30 speed records on land and water by building "the fastest ever Bluebird" for 2015.
Bluebird hopes to supply its own Formula E car
"We've always said Formula E is an open championship," a spokesman told us, before explaining that so long as the Bluebird car meets the FIA technical standards at the World Motor Sport Council meeting in September it'll be welcome on the grid for the first race in 2014. Partnership with Silverstone based GP3 and WTCC firm Bamboo Engineering and sponsorship by Unipart underline the British money and talent underpinning the project and Formula E in general, the London round of the series a chance for us to get a taste of electric racing up close and discover for real whether it really can sit alongside noisier, more traditionally PH-worthy forms of motorsport.