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VW’s Buzzworthy Pikes Peak Racer Shares Little with Its I.D. Namesakes

Photo credit: Car and Driver
Photo credit: Car and Driver

From Car and Driver

Later this month, Volkswagen will take on one of the world’s most famous hill-climb races in the 671-hp I.D. R Pikes Peak, a car that’s described as a forerunner for a new generation of electric vehicles, which arrive starting in 2020.

Don’t take this connection too literally. The team behind the I.D. R Pikes Peak, and the driver, multiple Le Mans winner (and three-time Pikes Peak winner) Romain Dumas, are very much in it to win the short and technically challenging race, whereas VW’s other upcoming vehicles to bear the I.D. badge, like the much anticipated reincarnation of the Microbus in all-electric form, will have other priorities.

Photo credit: The Manufacturer - Car and Driver
Photo credit: The Manufacturer - Car and Driver


Volkswagen, which hasn’t been involved in Pikes Peak since 1987-when it entered what seems like even more of an outlier than this electric racer, a twin-engined Golf-is aiming to break the current 8:57.118 record for the Electric Prototype class. And yet, perhaps like that car, it’s the product of a daunting level of flexibility. The race’s Unlimited division requires safety compliance (it conforms to Formula E and Le Mans LMP1 standards) but is wide open on basics including car size, electric motor performance, aerodynamics, and energy storage.

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Because of the tight seven-month development timeline (quite different than the I.D. vehicles’ five-year horizon), the inherited layout, and the singular goal, the I.D. R team didn’t glean much from the I.D. platform development team in Wolfsburg, Germany. “We asked our Wolfsburg colleagues to give us some direction, but it’s difficult to give examples on this car,” François-Xavier Demaison, the technical director for Volkswagen Motorsport, told us.

Photo credit: The Manufacturer - Car and Driver
Photo credit: The Manufacturer - Car and Driver


Demaison and Volkswagen guided us through the basics. Here’s a brief look at some of them and how they might stand next to the building blocks for VW’s mass-market EVs.

Layout: There are few if any hints of what might come in mass production in the layout of the racer. That’s not surprising, considering that it started with the car Dumas drove at Pikes Peak last year, the Norma MXX RD Limited, with the goal to adapt it for the fitment of the electric powertrain. But the team reengineered much of it and ended up with a custom-built car that is only about 10 percent carryover. The suspension and safety structure are almost entirely steel and aluminum, while the chassis and aerodynamic components are made of a carbon-fiber and Kevlar composite, and the cockpit has a carbon-fiber monocoque construction. The driver squeezes in between two battery packs-vastly different than the “skateboard” layout employed by the I.D. project, with the batteries packaged under the passenger floor. The front fascia of the car stands as one of the few direct connections to the concept cars.

Battery: The I.D. R has two separate battery packs, mounted on the left and right side of the cockpit and adding up to about 45 kWh-a total that VW says it arrived at after doing a lot of modeling and simulations to find the right compromise between battery capacity (weight) and maximum power output. They’re off-the-shelf cells from supplier A123-not any of the chemistries VW might use in a production car, because the needs are so different. Specifically, according to Demaison, they were looking not to achieve the maximum range possible but instead to get the highest power output figures possible over nearly the entire 12.4-mile climb. The packs are air cooled-as opposed to liquid cooled in the first I.D. production products-so getting airflow to the tightly packaged cells was a challenge. With longevity relatively low on the priority list, VW just needs to make sure the battery packs can deliver when it counts.

Motors: There are two electric motors in the I.D. R, one for the front wheels and one for the rears. But these aren’t exactly the electric motors you’d find in a production vehicle, or in the I.D. vehicles under development. VW looked to Formula E for this, using the all-electric race series’ latest to-spec permanent-magnet 1000-volt motor for its 250-kW output and light weight, which Demaison said represents a lot of development expertise, since the tight time frame of the project kept the team from developing its own.

Photo credit: The Manufacturer - Car and Driver
Photo credit: The Manufacturer - Car and Driver


Regenerative Braking: “It’s not a negligible factor,” said Demaison-even though it’s an uphill race. Demaison says that depending on the speed, 15 to 25 percent of the deceleration comes from brake regen. This could be one of the closest parallels to a production car.

Charging: It’s a spectacle. With the car in the pit, the team ducts forced cooling air from large hoses through the battery packs, while attaching thick, high-current cables from two DC fast-charging cabinets. The cooling air and charging cabinets are powered, as in Formula E, by a glycerol-fueled generator. At present, it’s limited by what those units can provide: a peak combined 90 kW. Expect better from the production cars; Volkswagen has suggested that its I.D. EVs will be able to take advantage of 150-kW CCS fast-charging technology, aided by fluid-cooled batteries and cables.

Aero: The wing! It’s magnificent, and it’s part of the reason an electric car presents a strong advantage here, in a race that aims for the 14,110-foot summit. The air itself is an average of 35 percent thinner than at sea level-a difference that even forced induction has trouble keeping up with. That’s also why the wing is so large. Even up on Pikes Peak, it produces more than its own weight in downforce. That’s something that would never be targeted in a mass-market EV, but it’s essential for a dose of much-needed stability here. The 12.4-mile high-speed course is neither laid out nor maintained to be a racecourse, with a surprising number of crests and heaves, different pavement sections, oddly banked corners, and rocks and grit.

Photo credit: Bengt Halvorson - Car and Driver
Photo credit: Bengt Halvorson - Car and Driver


Speed: The I.D. R is currently limited to 149 mph. Dumas has already pushed up against that speed in practice runs, so Demaison hinted that it might change-but he considers the ratio of the single-speed reduction gearing part of the secret that engineers have chosen after a lot of testing and modeling. The Formula E motor can spin up to about 20,000 rpm-nearly double the peak revs allowed in some production EVs.

And the team is still learning, with practice runs of two different car setups this month, including one that we witnessed in the predawn hours (as tourist season is already into full swing). Dumas said that he’s still getting used to the instantaneous electric-motor power delivery. “It’s very difficult, because you have to open your steering quicker as you’re going on power,” said Dumas when asked about what he’s learning about the car, marveling that “this year we are thinking about working with traction control, and last year we were worried about lag.” That should leave more bandwidth to process some of the unique challenges of this race. For instance, tire adhesion can change dramatically on runs that can start at 70 degrees but finish at 40.

We’ll see the results on June 24. Dumas is confident that electric powertrains are the future for Pikes Peak. The car might not bear so much in common with VW’s I.D. product plans, but if it could kick off the brand with the bragging rights of a Pikes Peak championship, the new record for an electric car up the hill, or even a very competitive run, that would be a positive I.D.

Photo credit: Bengt Halvorson - Car and Driver
Photo credit: Bengt Halvorson - Car and Driver


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