Business tycoon and sports car maven Don Panoz has set another lofty goal for his DeltaWing Racing team, and if he's successful, the car could be submitted as a future Garage 56 entry at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Panoz, who introduced hybrid-assisted power to the legendary French endurance race in 1998 with the Reynard-built Q9 chassis (LEFT), wants to revisit the topic using his upcoming DeltaWing GT chassis and all-electric propulsion. Through a partnership with Georgia Institute of Technology, Panoz's Braselton, Georgia-based company is six months into a development program that would marry compact direct-drive electric motors to the DeltaWing GT chassis with the stated goal of competing at Le Mans without an internal combustion engine.
Panoz's vision, which would break another barrier if it can be achieved, calls for quick-change battery units that would allow the DeltaWing EV to complete stints equal to the leading GTE cars by swapping battery units in the same time it would take to complete a normal refueling pit stop.
"The prototype motor weighs 21 pounds, and can do different power outputs based on the size of the magnet, and runs cool with internal capillary cooling. Compared to this motor, the same thing would weigh 75 pounds to what's available now," Panoz told RACER.
Driving the rear axle is the primary consideration for the car, but the use of a second, smaller motor for the DeltaWing's small front tires is also an option. Scaling the size of the electric motor(s) and the batteries to set competitive GTE lap times and stint lengths is also being formulated, according to the American Le Mans Series founder.
"The benefits of this EV system is weight and space, and this has brought us to a new Holy Grail," he continued. "What we'll be working on with the new Holy Grail, which no one has done yet, is building a new GT car that can compete with the Porsches and Ferraris that can run as long as them on a fuel stop. Do 50 minutes at Le Mans, and then change the batteries as quick as you can fuel a car. That's the Holy Grail."
The DeltaWing road car that was announced in March would serve as the basis for the Le Mans EV project where all of the available space after of the cockpit would be used for battery storage and propulsion. Designing an interchangeable battery module that contains enough energy to last 50 minutes while fitting within the car's basic dart-like shape is where Panoz hopes to make a significant breakthrough.
"On the Le Mans car, we have a lot of space on either side of the car where radiators and all of those systems normally go, and we're researching the best way to use that space to change the batteries rapidly – have two pins coming up that fit into a groove where you can drop the battery unit into place," he explained. "We're at about 82 percent right now of what we figure it will take battery-wise to do the stints we want to do, and getting the rest is a matter of space and weight. My engineers are confident we'll get to 100 percent."
Panoz also offered insights into the weight targets for the car. "We're looking at the basic car to be somewhere around 1500 to 1600 pounds; that's light," he said. "The other GT cars are well over 2200, so we're looking at 500 or 600 pounds or more of batteries to match their weight."
A concrete timeline continues to be established by Panoz, and he expects the project to take off once he's finished renovating one of the Elan Technologies buildings to specifically handle EV-related programs.
"We started this program in December of last year with the people at Georgia Tech, and we're updating one of our buildings now so we can move [EV] motor production into a 14,000 square foot facility to make these motors, and that's going on first as a full-fledged thing," he noted. "We believe these motors will also have a lot of other applications, and we want to get to a point where we can make 3000 motors per month. Right now, we'd like to be able to work on this so it can race in GT, and [Georgia Tech] are building us four motors right now as a prelude, and we're supposed to have those motors by the end of July."
The ACO outlined its next Garage 56 entrants through 2017 last week, leaving Panoz with plenty of time to develop the DeltaWing EV and determine whether his Holy Grail is attainable.
"Once we get the first motors, that will give us enough to experiment with the Le Mans car," he said. "By December or January, we'd feel comfortable by where this could go."
