California’s Lucid Motors on Wednesday confirmed that it’s supplying the usual entrance drive unit for “the world’s main single-seater electrical racing collection.”
Sure, that’s Formulation E for the remainder of us. And it’s an thrilling tie-in to a manufacturing EV, as particulars proceed to trickle out on sourcing of parts for Gen 3 Formulation E vehicles—even with one race, Mexico Metropolis, within the rearview mirror.
The unit Lucid is supplying accomplishes a surprising 14.7 hp/kg and combines motor, inverter, differential, and transmission, altogether weighing simply 70.5 kilos and producing 469 hp, with a most rotor velocity of 19,500 rpm.
Every staff can select its personal rear motor unit however might be utilizing the Lucid unit up entrance, mounted within the race automobile’s nostril and there primarily to assist the entrance wheels get better as much as 250 kw of regenerative power. With the utmost regeneration functionality greater than doubled within the Gen 3 automobile, to 600 kw, and the automobile itself lighter and extra agile, it’s certain to assist make the races extra thrilling to look at this season.
Lucid drive unit for Formulation E
The technical specs for the power density and general lightness of Lucid’s race motor are simply as spectacular as they’re for the one utilized in its manufacturing automobile. That’s as a result of it’s in some respects the identical motor. The unit, termed the “micromotor” internally inside Lucid, is a few half-scale model of its present motor unit within the Air, and it incorporates among the identical design traits, such because the microjet cooling technique and the identical continuous-wave winding underscored in a video all about Lucid’s motors from CEO/CTO Peter Rawlinson and Powertrain VP Emad Dlala.
Lucid’s Rawlinson and Dlala presenting drive unit
This isn’t Lucid’s first time supplying a key element to Formulation E. For 4 seasons within the Gen 2 automobile, it utilized experience from its battery and motorsports unit Atieva to provide the 54-kwh battery packs that reworked the race collection, permitting a single cost for every race, quite than two separate vehicles.
Rawlinson, as he’s revealed in earlier conversations with Inexperienced Automotive Studies, tends to be skeptical about how broadly racing expertise jumps from pit lane into manufacturing autos. Right here, Lucid is exhibiting fairly the alternative, bringing what’s primarily a scaled-down model of the drive motor from the manufacturing Air sedan to a quite totally different use case.
Lucid Air Sapphire
Though with its ultra-high-performance, tri-motor Lucid Air Sapphire arriving for deliveries later this yr and prone to make some high-speed runs and observe data of its personal, it’s fairly potential that there might be some race findings that do make their approach again.