Pikes Peak team looking to the skies
Volkswagen has revealed its fully-electric ‘‘super sports’’ competition car, the I.D. R Pikes Peak. With 500kW, 650Nm of torque and weighing less than 1100kg, the car will take on the iconic Pikes Peak hill climb in Colorado Springs, United States, on June 24.
The goal is to beat the existing record of 8:57.118 minutes for electric cars at the so-called ‘‘Race to the Clouds’’.
VW claims the I.D. R Pikes Peak can sprint from 0-100kmh in
2.25 seconds, faster than Formula
1 and Formula E cars.
The car was unveiled in Ales, France, before taking to the racetrack for the first time at its roll-out.
‘‘Volkswagen’s goal is to reach the pinnacle of electromobility with the I.D. family,’’ says VW’s member of the Board of Management with responsibility for development, Frank Welsch.
‘‘As such, Volkswagen’s involvement on Pikes Peak not only sets the trend for our future in motorsport, but is also of great symbolic significance in the truest sense.
‘‘Customers have always benefited from the findings made in motorsport, and we expect to take these findings and use them as a valuable impetus for the development of future I.D. models.
‘‘The hill climb on Pikes Peak will definitely be a real acid test for the electric drive.’’
Jurgen Stackmann, member of the Board of Management for sales, marketing and after-sales, says the car looks fantastic, ‘‘and has already been attracting a lot of interest from the media and on social media channels for a few weeks.’’
‘‘This project shows once again that VW is on the right track with its major E-mobility strategy and the introduction of the I.D. family.
‘‘The I.D. R Pikes Peak and the start at the most iconic hill climb in the world offers VW the magnificent opportunity to charge the topic of E-mobility, both emotionally and from a sporting perspective.’’
The top goal when developing the I.D. R Pikes Peak was to find the ideal balance between energy capacity and weight.
The focus was not, as is usually the case with racing cars, on maximum performance.
That’s the company’s rationale for combining two divisions in its name: the ‘‘R’’ is synonymous with performance cars, while ‘‘I.D.’’ is the symbol of VW’s electric technology.
‘‘As with the Volkswagen brand’s production vehicles, fully electric racing cars will also play an increasingly important role for us in the future,’’ says Sven Smeets, VW motorsport director.
‘‘The co-operation within the group really helped us, particularly given the tight schedule.
‘‘For example, we received support from the VW battery plant in Braunschweig and worked together with the technical development department in Wolfsburg.’’
As with the twin-engine Golf that took on the Pikes Peak challenge in 1985, 1986 and 1987, the engineers have opted for a solution with two power units.
The I.D. R Pikes Peak features two electric engines, generating a system capacity of 500kW.
As in production vehicles with electric drive, lithium-ion batteries are used as the energy storage system.
There is great demand on the battery cells: their power density is the crucial factor for the system when producing high voltage.
Unlike in the manufacturing of production vehicles, the goal of the motorsport engineers was not maximum range, but the highest possible power output on the way to the Pikes Peak summit.
Roughly 20 per cent of the electric energy required is generated during the 20km drive.
The key is energy recovery: when braking, the electric engines, which in this case operate as generators, convert some of the braking energy into electricity and feed it into the battery.
Testing on the 19.99km route of the hill climb in Colorado Springs is very limited, and possible only on certain sections.
For this reason, the bulk of the testing is not done on the actual route, but at racetracks.
Defending Pikes Peak champion Romain Dumas (overall winner in the Norma M20 RD for
2016 and 2017), will be at the wheel of the Volkswagen I.D. R Pikes Peak for the record attempt.
Dumas has also won the 24 Hours of Le Mans twice. He names motorsport legend Jacky Ickx as his idol.
The Race to the Clouds starts at
2862 metres above sea level. It involves a climb of 1440 vertical metres, 156 corners, is on
100 per cent asphalt and teams get just one attempt.
Weather will also be a factor for the EV-racer.
It’s not unheard of for the
4302-metre summit of Pikes Peak, which also represents the finish, to experience temperatures below freezing point at the end of June.