It would be easy to believe that this long interview concerning electric vehicle competitions saw the light of day following the fire that destroyed all MotoE facilities in Jerez...
But no: it had been planned for quite a while and aimed to explore this area, innovative for motorcycles, in depth.
Attention ! It's very, very long! But if you want to get a good idea of the ins and outs of these different electric vehicle championships, take the time to read the interesting comments from Clement Ailloud, electronics engineer who took care of engine management in World Superbike having worked at Cosworth before winning the title of Formula E with the D.S. Techeetah de Jean-Eric Vergne Last year. You will also find something there that sounds a bit like a warning…
Clément, why did you move from the world of competitive motorcycles to that of competitive electric cars?
“I switched to driving for several reasons. One is the precariousness of work in motorcycles: every year, we wonder how we are going to be paid, or if we should change structure. This is an element that contributed to my decision. The 2nd point is that a technological challenge loomed with this new category of electric cars. On paper, it seemed to be both a real springboard, a good opportunity to switch to the car, and to be more of a challenge of engineers' races rather than drivers' races. “It’s a category where engineers have more influence on the results than elsewhere.”
So “yes” for the car world with more resources than the motorcycle world, but the jump was made in an emerging championship with a very young team. Wasn't it a bit random then, even if you are now based at Peugeot Sport?
" No. When I talk about job stability, I mean that there are many more people like me who get paid to do their job than on motorcycles. I'm at the moment where I could have made the switch to MotoGP, and of the guys who had my profile, there were maybe 15 in the world. Whereas in the car, I know that if I want to continue racing, I have work until the end of my life. On a motorbike, there was nothing at all that guaranteed it to me.”
You arrive at the start of the electric car championship…
“Yes, at the start of the 2nd season.”
Where ?
“It was called the Aguri team, which carried the Japanese flag but which was historically British and, when I arrived, it was bought by Monegasques”.
Let's start talking technical. On a motorcycle, you were an electronic engineer, therefore used to doing engine management and mapping, and you arrive in an electric car where, for the general public, there is not much to adjust...
“Actually, there is a great similarity. Today, when you ride a competitive motorcycle, a large part of the work consists of determining the power that you are going to give to the rider when he asks for it. That is to say, when the rider turns the handle, depending on the angle of the motorcycle, its slippage, its wheeling, we must determine what we give him so that he goes the fastest. possible while remaining on the motorcycle. There, in an electric car, when the driver asks me for power to go fast, my job consists of determining the quantity of power that we are going to give him to be efficient, that is to say to go fast without consuming too much. So it's still a similar approach. The levers are not the same, the problems or things to get around are not the same, but there are still things that I have been able to carry from my motorcycle experience to the car, in the strategies that we installed in the boxes.
In fact, what is being done today in racing are intelligent systems called racing structures. That is to say that, in the end, all the strategies that are embedded in the motorcycle produce a torque demand. When the driver turns his handle and asks for, for example, We add everything up, we come up with a result, and we look at how the engine can provide this result. With motorcycles that are super powerful today, we are not often at maximum torque, so we will, for example, delay ignition a little, not open the throttle as wide as the rider. turned the handle, or things like that. And this approach, in a car or in an electric motorcycle, is very easy, because once you have calculated a torque demand, an electric motor is very, very well torque controlled. It's much easier than putting in a little less fuel, delaying the ignition, or closing the throttle.
So in fact, the way people work with racing bikes is going to be very similar, depending on the intelligence that is in the software available to the teams.”
You say it's easier with electric, but you entrusted us to work 23 hours a day throughout the year for races that last 24 minutes... why?
“Because it’s a particularly competitive championship where we fight against many other manufacturers. Today, there are as many manufacturers involved as in MotoGP. In fact, it started like MotoE, with an identical car for all the teams in the first year. So the people who came simply badged the car as, for example, Marc VDS could do in MotoGP. They just put their sponsors on the car, and the races started like that. And a bit like the field of MotoE drivers today, that of electric cars was very heterogeneous the first year, with a few old glories, a few young people who haven't really broken through and a bit of everything.
What really moved things forward was the involvement of manufacturers who saw an excellent marketing showcase to promote their own products and convey their own image. The electric car was a very good product for that, and the regulations gradually opened up to certain components such as electric motors, gearboxes, inverters, while keeping a common battery, a common chassis, common wheels and brakes and common aerodynamics.”
So today you have your own engine and your own electronics?
" Yes quite ! We have our own intelligence in the car, but of course we run with the same tires, the same brakes, the same rims and the same chassis as our opponents.
The involvement of the manufacturers means that, to beat the others, there is a lot of work to do, and for example, don't think that the technicians from KTM or Aprilia in MotoGP work less hard than those from Yamaha or Honda. On the contrary. The competitiveness in our hands means that we work a lot.
The other factor is that we still have a lot to clear and, during the first years, a good idea saves money. It's not about money. So we’re working on it.”
MotoE still has everything to clear. Can they learn from you?
“The difference will be that the motorcycles will not do races on energy: they will do sprint races, while we purposely have races that are too long for the battery. Thanks to that, we gained a lot of experience and, today, the guys who are last would very easily win all the races in the first year. The know-how evolves at an enormous speed and there was no history. There, MotoE is a bit the same: they will discover everything and find the good ideas, and ultimately everyone will point in the same direction whereas at the beginning, the funnel is very, very wide.”
You are talking about marketing desire for manufacturers. But, I imagine, technological too?
“(Silence) yes and no. And rather no, because some use solutions that are on the shelves of component manufacturers. There are people who put on their badge but who simply selected an engine from McLaren or Magneti Marelli who already had electric motors for the hybridization of competition cars, light and managed in cooling compared to machine engines. This is actually what many car manufacturers do for production cars today. Motorcycles do it a little less because it's a small industry, but they still buy their electronics from Bosch, their brakes from Nissin, their injection from Keihin or their shock absorbers from Öhlins.
I think that if our championship works well, it is more marketing than technological.”
Today, everything is changing very quickly. What progress has been made in the field of batteries?
“The battery has cycled for 4 years, and today we have a new model. The first battery weighed 300 kg and could provide 28 kWh. For comparison, the MotoE battery is announced for around twenty kWh. This year, we moved to a battery that weighs 330 kg and has doubled capacity, or 56 kWh. We are allowed to use 52, or roughly double, for a 10% increase in mass.
You should know that in the past, in about 50% of races, we were not limited by autonomy but by the temperature of the batteries at the end of the race, if we did anything. The battery is like your phone: if you use it a lot, it gets hot! When it gets too hot, it stops delivering power and goes into safety. With the first generations of batteries, we reached this thermal limit, which is no longer the case today. Batteries have therefore progressed enormously. On motor-inverter assemblies, we are between 97 and 98% efficiency, so we will not make a technological leap on that. On the other hand, there is still a lot to be gained from the battery, its weight and the amount of energy it carries.”
After the first tests of the MotoE, heating of the batteries is indeed a problem they faced…
“At the start of our championship, everything revolved around the battery, that is to say using the energy we had to go faster than the others, while going to the end of the race without being too hot” .
Are these Lithium-Ion batteries?
" Quite ".
They are said to be almost impossible to extinguish in the event of a fire...
“So, indeed, the danger is what we call thermal runaway. In fact, what we call an electric car battery is an assembly of many cells. These look a lot like a Pom'potes, a small aluminum pocket with 2 electrodes. They are arranged next to each other and the manufacturer tries to ensure that they all operate at the same temperature as much as possible. This is so as not to limit the performance of the assembly to the temperature of the hottest cell. It is actually quite a complicated exercise. When a cell heats up, at first it does not catch fire, but the heat spreads to its friends around it. Our cars are therefore equipped with a Stäubli connection which the firefighters can connect to to circulate water and flood the battery in order to evacuate the temperature until this cell is dead. They do not put out fires, they limit thermal runaway by continuously drowning them.”
Unfortunately, the MotoE news is quite sad. Do you have a comment to make?
“Yes, it's ugly, but it's the beginning of a new technology. The teams need to learn because most of the time they have recruited mechanics who came from racing motorcycles. But it's still a new world. Let's remember: at the beginning, thermal cars caught fire because we drove with crazy fuels in hand-made tanks. Today, the danger exists but is not greater: it is just different. In fact, it's very much a question of pedagogy and putting the safeguards in the right places. For example, in endurance, you are not allowed to pressurize your fueling system, otherwise it will vaporize the gasoline and it could explode. There are rules to govern this. With electric, people don't yet know where to put the safety cursor, and people aren't necessarily educated. Today, you no longer see anyone filling up with gas with a cigarette in their mouth. Well with electric, you will have to learn the same way, and not forget that a battery has a voltage and energy that can kill you and reduce you to a pile of ashes.”
What is the voltage of your batteries?
“We are at 600 Volts”.
Photo credits: D.S. Techeetah
