LiFeBATT Go Drag Racing !!!

In the last week of February 2009, we took the decision to enter a motorbike into the Alternative Energy Drag Race 2009 (the aim is record the quickest time over a ¼ mile sprint). This took place at Santa Pod – the European home of International drag racing. There are 2 classes, alternative fuels (such as Biodiesel, Ethanol, etc) and Zero Emissions (such as Electric, Hydrogen, pneumatic, etc). Paul Brandon, Director of Motorsport at Kingston University, helped put our team together and initially thought of using the TTXGP bike, but decided it would need too many changes to be competitive in this ¼ mile sprint. Our goal was to record a sub 15s time.

Although the students doing the TTXGP project at Kingston University wanted to get involved in this, we decided they already had enough to do with the TTXGP bike. Instead we approached the 1st year students to see if anyone would be interested. As luck would have it one of the 1st year students (Andy Irvine) had been drag racing since he was 9 and was really up for this. So we sat down with Andy 6 weeks before the event and we designed a bespoke chassis and powertrain solution that would be suitable for the event. Andy then single handily took on the task of making the whole bike from scratch in only 6 weeks – a phenomenal challenge. Our enginner team provided a bespoke light weight 144V 16Ah battery pack (Built from prototype 25C peak X1P Cells). With time running out, the race was only 5 days away, Grant Fraser (another 1st year student) and Barry Wade (Auto Lab Technician at Kingston University) both offered some help and we managed to get the bike running in the Roe Vale car park by Thursday at 8pm. We packed it all up in the van Thursday evening and set off at 06:30 am Friday, heading for Santa Pod. We had some final setup issues to sort out Friday am before the racing started from 13:00 to 17:00.

Our first run at 13:16 was a very respectable 18.6 seconds – outstanding really given we had only started building this bike 6 weeks previouisly. After various changes to the controller (LogiSystem 156V 1000A), and the pair of LMC200 D127 motors, we had managed to reduce our time down to 15.021s, just outside our goal of sub 15s. One final adjustment and we were sitting on the start line for our last run of the day at 16:54. Expectations were high and we were confident we could achieve a sub 15s time. Andy was on the start line, we were all looking at the lights, the green light came on and Andy took off, we then focused on the timing board and all held our breath. He crossed the ¼ mile timing mark and up popped his time 14.998s – we had done it. Ideally we would have liked to walk away with the record or 14.417s , but I had called the gearing incorrectly and due to insufficient chain, we could not change this at the track. However, we did win the fastest zero emission vehicle of the day.

Our plans for 2010 is to get the bike into the 13’s for the ¼ mile and possibly an attempt on the UK Electric Bike speed record!!!