JAGUAR IS RACING TOWARD ELECTRIFICATION — LITERALLY
British brand is leading the tech charge of luxury names harvesting EV know-how
Win on Sunday, sell on Monday. It’s a motoring mantra nearly as old as the internal combustion engine.
But now, the Formula E series is at the forefront of developing powertrains that quite possibly will replace that combustion engine technology from passenger cars in the not-too-distant future.
This past weekend’s season finale races on a 2.75-kilometre circuit through the streets of Montreal’s east end marked the third successful campaign of the FIA-sanctioned series. And with recent announcements of Porsche, BMW and Mercedes-Benz joining the likes of Renault and Jaguar as major manufacturers participating in the all-electric race series, that success is poised to continue and grow.
Last October, Jaguar returned to racing after a dozens years on the sidelines — dating back to its five-year Formula One stint under then-parent company Ford — becoming the first premium manufacturer to join the all-electric FIA Formula E street racing series.
What appeals to Jaguar, and other automakers, about the series is that it encourages manufacturers to design their own powertrain systems, which includes the motor, transmission, inverter and rear suspension. To keep costs down, common components across all teams include the carbon fibre chassis and battery.
That laser-like focus on developing electric vehicle powertrains isn’t about winning races; it’s about vehicles like the Jaguar I-Pace Concept, expected in Canadian showrooms later next year. That luxury performance SUV, Jaguar’s first all-electric vehicle, is said to deliver 516 lbs.-ft of instant torque, 400 horsepower and to sprint from zero to 100 km/h in around four seconds.
And much of that performance will come thanks to the two race cars the Panasonic Jaguar team campaigned in Montreal.
“The reason for entering this championship was bringing electrification innovation to road cars,” said Panasonic Jaguar Racing Team Director James Barclay on the eve of the first of the two Montreal ePrix races. “And the I-Pace is the first of many such products in our future.”
Barclay explained that the race team has a direct line of communication straight into Jaguar engineering department, with embedded engineers in the racing team reporting back to the road car division.
“That feedback is essentially taking what we learn on the racetrack and applying it to the road,” he said.
“And it’s in all sorts of interesting areas. Thermal management of the battery. Software controls. Efficiencies. Lightweighting. Brake regen. It just goes on and on.” And it’s a two-way street. “We’ve got nine-and-a-half thousand engineers in the U.K. who are focusing on electrification, and when we have a challenge with the race car, we can ask them if they have ever come across something similar that could solve this.”
That’s a legacy in Jaguar that goes back to its earliest days in racing.
“There’s a long history of racing innovation making it into passenger vehicles with Jaguar,” noted Jaguar Land Rover Canada product planning manager Alain Leynaert, citing as just one example the revolutionary aerodynamics and disc brakes of the Le Mans winning C-Type that made their way into the XKSS passenger car, “arguably the world’s first super car.
“The I-Pace is sharing the same electric motor technology as the race cars,” he continued, noting the EV SUV will use permanent magnet AC motors. “We’ve been asked why aren’t we using the same motor as Tesla. From our perspective, what we’ve seen is there are packaging and thermal benefits to the permanent magnet motor so we’ve decided to go that route.”
“Thermal” is a word key to the future of efficient EV powertrains, and this race series provides engineers with more than enough data on the subject.
“The heat cycles you put the batteries through and how you push the boundaries of the batteries is the stuff that has never been done before,” Barclay noted.
Added Leynaert: “This racing is really the most extreme testing you can ask for. What we see happening in the road car is just a snapshot of the extremes that the race car goes through.”
The race series also provided Jaguar with a much-needed boost to its electric vehicle R&D.
“One of the reasons for entering Formula E is that since I-Pace is our first electric vehicle, we don’t have a lot of that real-world EV data yet. So we saw this as a great opportunity to start collecting that for the I-Pace.”
Leynaert considers electrification to be the first real shift in the automobile in a hundred years.
“You’re seeing that even in the top-tier supercars, they’ve gone to hybrid technologies for the very reason that there is not really that much left that you can get out of the internal combustion engine.”
Just six-tenths of a second separated pole to the slowest runner in the New York City qualifying a couple of weeks ago, and for Barclay that says everything about the series and it’s eventual impact on the cars we drive.
“You’re fighting for every thousandth of a second and when you are doing that you are pushing the boundaries. It’s a real world test bed.”