- Hybrid energy got here to IMSA’s top-class GTP prototype division this 12 months, which modified the racing on the 2023 Rolex 24 at Daytona race dramatically.
- 4 main vehicle producers selected to construct and again hybrid GTPs, an enterprise that required massive engineering staffs, big quantities of computing energy, and rigorous testing.
- The brand new guidelines that ushered within the hybrid period are as difficult because the vehicles themselves, combining each actual and digital vitality utilization. The modifications challenged the groups from Cadillac, BMW, Porsche, and Acura to type out myriad situations in defining their race methods.
This 12 months’s Rolex 24 at Daytona noticed the debut of hybrid race vehicles in IMSA’s prime GTP Prototype class. Whereas a whole bunch of 1000’s of hybrid passenger vehicles have been buzzing alongside our roads for greater than 20 years, the brand new GTPs’ programs are as completely different from these on avenue vehicles as a hard-boiled egg is from an omelet.
We frolicked on the race with Cadillac, one of many 4 main car producers—together with BMW, Porsche, and Acura—that introduced hybrid GTP machines. We quizzed their engineers mercilessly in an try to learn the way the complicated powertrain programs work and the way they’re used within the race. We admire that they spoke slowly and tried to make use of easy English when explaining their wild-looking vehicles to us.
Shared Hybrid Know-how
Per the laws arrange by IMSA, the sequence’ sanctioning physique, the producers in GTP have been mandated to make use of an similar hybrid system. Bosch provided the motor-generator unit (MGU), which nestles between the engine and the seven-speed Xtrac rear transaxle. The MGU produced a peak of 40 horsepower at Daytona and might be enabled to ship barely extra at longer tracks reminiscent of Le Mans.
The MGU feeds a tiny 1.35-kWh battery; the system operates at as much as 800 volts. A GTP automotive’s complete system output—fuel engine plus electrical motor—can’t exceed 500 kW (671 horsepower) on the rear wheels at any time in these rear-drive race vehicles. Torque sensors on the rear axles be certain that the groups preserve to that energy output. IMSA displays the rear-wheel energy through the identical telemetry the groups use within the pits. The vehicles have an adjustable regen system that works on the rear axle to recharge the battery.
The design of the gasoline engines powering every GTP automotive is as much as the producer. Cadillac developed a 5.5-liter naturally aspirated 32-valve V-8; BMW used a 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8; Porsche went with a twin-turbo 4.6-liter V-8; and Acura caught a twin-turbo 2.4-liter V-6 within the tail of its two vehicles. 9 of the electro-monsters have been on the grid, three from Cadillac and two every from the opposite producers.
Form-Shifting Hybrid Energy
That is the place issues get weird-science freaky. When no electrical energy is getting used, the fuel engine can provide the complete 671 horses. When the MGU is feeding energy via the transmission, it can’t add to that complete. If the electrical motor is on full blast, including its 40 horses, then the fuel engine is mechanically dialed down by that quantity. This could theoretically allow the driving force to save lots of gas and stretch a driving stint. A number of the regen is completed whereas braking, but it surely may also be finished on the straightaways; at Daytona the tiny battery may be depleted in a lap of the three.56-mile highway course and nearly recharged in a lap.
If regen is getting used whereas happening the straightaway and places the equal of 40 horsepower of drag into the rear axle, the workforce can flip up the fuel engine by 40 horsepower to offset that. Which implies that the fuel engines within the GTP vehicles could make greater than 671 horsepower when wanted.
Passenger-car producers generally use hybrid programs to fatten up the low-rpm torque curve of their vehicles for higher efficiency. We have been instructed {that a} GTP’s electrical motor has nearly no impact on the efficiency of the automotive, however we’re not so positive. Race groups don’t love to present away any technical benefits that they may have found throughout improvement.
Life within the Digital Lane
As if this is not difficult sufficient, there’s an essential digital facet to the brand new GTP class. IMSA has decreed that the GTP vehicles are allowed to make use of no extra vitality per driving stint than 920 megajoules, or 255.6 kWh. The calculation is made using the torque sensors on the rear axle. IMSA displays the entire vitality (the mixture of gas-engine energy and hybrid electrical energy) to make sure the groups do not exceed the utmost quantity throughout a stint. In the event that they do, a time penalty is assessed, placing them that a lot additional behind. The preliminary penalty is 100 seconds. No workforce desires to endure that.
IMSA describes the GTP vehicles as having a “digital gas tank” that must be “nearly refilled” when the vitality restrict is reached. When the 920 megajoules of complete vitality are about depleted, the workforce brings the automotive in even when there’s gasoline remaining within the tank. When the gasoline fueling hose is hooked up to the automotive, the clock begins and the megajoule allotment is replenished on the fee of 23 megajoules per second for so long as the hose is within the automotive. The fuel tank may refill in 15 seconds, however a full megajoule fill-up takes 40 seconds, so the automotive may be sitting nonetheless even with a full fuel tank if the workforce deems it essential to prime up the megajoules. In conditions the place vehicles pit early throughout a warning interval or for a flat tire, a shorter digital fill-up will do. Typically, the pit cease schedule will revolve round vitality utilization quite than purely gasoline consumption because the vehicles will generally have sufficient fuel to maintain circulating past when the megajoule restrict is reached. Woof!
Strategic Overload
All this created so many technique potentialities—for the way and when the hybrid electrical energy was deployed and the way to play the megajoule recreation—that the automotive firms’ computer systems have been smoking from overwork. And what would a few of these methods be? The Cadillac engineers weren’t speaking, nor did different GTP groups go public with their pondering earlier than the occasion. That is racing, and any benefit a workforce thinks it has it protects with a wall of silence. The Caddy folks did admit that the brand new vehicles are a lot extra complicated now, and that the doable race situations are so nice in quantity, they needed to quadruple the variety of software program engineers on the workforce in comparison with once they ran IMSA’s prime DPi prototype class final 12 months.
Cadillac driver Alex Sims mentioned the drivers management solely the regen degree immediately from the cockpit. Their job is to drive flat out and never crash. How and when the hybrid’s juice is deployed is a workforce secret; it is switched on mechanically relying upon which powertrain setting is chosen by the driving force on the course of the workforce’s engineers.
We predict we have all of that proper. However we all know that the groups did, as a result of the highest 4 GTP finishers have been on the identical lap and inside a handful of seconds of each other after 24 hours. The successful Acura ARX-06’s quickest race lap was about three-tenths of a second faster than its second-place sister automotive’s. And that automotive’s finest lap was solely one-thousandth of a second faster than the third-place Caddy V-LMDh’s.
It was an incredible race proper to the very finish. And better of all, you did not have to know something about megajoules to take pleasure in it.