LeMons Style Hybrid

On the 24 Hours of LeMons Forums Hoonatic Racing posted a thread of his new Mystery Build. He isn't telling much about the build except that he got the OK to build it from LeMons HQ. This got a lot of people, myself included, thinking about what type of power train he could be looking at using. Having to ask for the OK pretty much eliminates most of the normal engine options, so had people theorizing all kinds of other ways to power a car such as electric, steam, hamsters.

As ones that seem easiest to get past LeMons HQ would be Electric. By going Electric you would be removing several flammable liquids from your car which would make it actually less like for you to die by bursting in flames. I guess you do increase the odds of you electrocuting yourself though. Of course the main disadvantage is that you would need a lot of batteries to run an endurance race, far more than you could carry in the car, and changing the batteries would be difficult.

So why not go with a Hybrid. It will be a while until even the first gen Insights or Priuses will be LeMons Price. Of course why should anyone let that stop them. So I came up with this system.



So the basic idea is that you hook up the electric motor or motors, cause more is always better to a battery that is constantly charged by a car battery charger that is plugged to a generator.

I'd first like to say I know absolutely nothing about any of this and is all unfounded theory based on the idea that you could just plug everything in and it magically work.

Anyway I was figuring Ideally you'd want a mid or rear engine car like a Fiero. You can stuff all of the running components in the engine compartment, and if you use on electric motor you could try mounting it to the cars original transmission. You plug the Electric drive train into a battery or two, this should help buffer the draw variance some and allow the car to get back to the pits if the generator runs out of gas or stops working, I would then think to hook the battery up to a battery charger set at jump so that it will be doing the maximum output. Ideally this would give you enough power to run the electric motor. This charger would be plugged into a generator. If you want to be green I guess you could run a diesel generator running biodiesel. The generator will probably allow you to run an entire days racing on between 5-10 gallons of gas, which would make it cheap to run and quicker driver changes since you will only have to fuel maybe once if you use a 5 gallon tank. I was thinking to make sure the generator is working you can simply wire an kind of plugin light and have that in the cockpit so the driver knows if the light goes out the generator isn't working and to pit.

You will lose some things people are used to like power steering(although with nothing in the front of the car you probably won't need power steering) and , defrosters and you would have to figure out a way to power things like the windshield wiper and possibly headlight and a million other things I'm sure I'm not thinking about but I'll leave that for the engineers to figure out.

Anyone know where I can find a bunch of really smart engineers for free? Maybe I'll check craigslist.