Here are a few photos from the Electrathon competition at Road America May 13/14 2013.
We weren't competing in a class, but we did have the unofficial fastest slalom time, fastest lap time, and fastest top speed at just under 60 mph on the GPS. Last year a team from Canada had the fastest speed at 50 mph using Li-Po batteries.
We knew we wouldn't be competitive in the endurance part of the competition, but did complete 3 full laps - about what our testing predicted. The winning team in the open class with Li-Po batteries did 7. Plenty of vehicles did 6. Coasting was nowhere near as good as some of the enclosed 3-wheelers with bicycle tires, but our cornering speeds were way up. When he was running with the lead pack at the beginning of the event he consistently had to add power to keep up while they were still coasting.
We learned quite a bit about batteries. Some of the top teams are getting 18V from their 12V batteries by deep cycling them. That's a big part of it that we didn't know about or do before the competition.
He was happy after the last heat of the day where he just wanted to open it up without concerns about efficiency. We went with our tallest gearing. He figured he would get one good hot-lap and that's it, but was able to do 2 at full speed. He lapped some of the cars before coming in. We did get a fair amount of compliments on our set-up and fabrication, and the kart was the probably one of the safest and easiest to drive vehicles there.
