Having skipped out on the Goodwood Test this year (for a few reasons really – we hadn’t finished making anything yet, and Goodwood is a less important circuit to get right these days due to the relocation of the final), 2016 opened for weChook Racing with the season opener at Rockingham.

For those that don’t know, the Season Opener has traditionally consisted of an extended test session in the morning (over three hours this year) followed by two F24 format races in the afternoon. This means an 80 minute race with 2 mandatory driver changes – a slight problem for us!

We’d been pretty lazy in the off season – 2galoo had been put in storage after the 2015 International Final, and had barely been touched since. We did a few quick checks on Tuesday evening (we pumped up the tyres!) before tossing it on the roof and strapping it down.

We drove to Rockingham on Wednesday morning, and after bumping into everyone’s favourite commentator on the road, we arrived just in time to join the start of the scruiteneering queue. 2galoo flew through the checks – including the new impact foam regulations that had caught out a number of teams at the Goodwood test –  and received its MOT sticker, giving us plenty of time to get out on circuit.

We had two major objectives for the test – the first was to try out the eChook Nano (read about it here), the bluetooth data logging and telemetry system that we have co-developed with Driven. Our second objective was to extend our understanding on how to use our gearing to maximise race efficiency.

We hit the circuit early in the session and completed 12 laps. Ian drove the first few laps in ‘constant current’ control mode, using the gearing to keep the current as close as possible to 25 Amps. Afterwards, we switched the strategy to run consecutive laps in each gear. The eChook worked admirably, until the phone used to log the collected data fell off the dash into the depths of the car and dropped its connection.

After completing the first planned stint, Ian bought the car back in for a few checks – we were particularly interested in the motor temperature after running a few laps in high gears with high current consumption. Thankfully, the temperature weren’t too high, although this doesn’t mean it wouldn’t start cooking if we ran a whole race at those speeds!

Having realised we weren’t collecting any data from the first stint, we decided to send the car back out in the last 30 minutes of the session. A quick battery change later, and 2galoo was back out on circuit, fitting in another 10 laps. I’ll be writing a separate blog post on the data we collected later on.

 After a quick break, it was time for the first of the season opening races. As alluded – we had didn’t have enough drivers to actually compete in an F24 format event, so we used the race as another test session. We followed a similar pattern as we did in the morning, a few constant current laps followed by a lap in each of the gears. This consumed far more current than we would normally do during a race, so Ian retired the car after about 50 minutes and 16 laps when the voltage got a bit low, in order to protect our best set of batteries. We matched the fastest lap that we achieved during the international final weekend and had got up up to 2nd place at one point.

After the first race we’d done all of the testing we needed to do, and collected a lot of good data, so we elected not to run in the second race. We had a great day overall, the weather was great and 2galoo ran smoothly and reliably – a fitting sign off after what is likely to be the car’s final event.

This feels like a return to normality after the end of the 2015 season – Congratulations to Dave (and the newly extended Cullimore Racing team) for a pair of victories – Jet II really is the real deal and the design work that has gone into it is the inspiration behind what we’re doing with 3galoo.

The newly arrived Bluebird looked highly impressive – I’m sure it will be a threat in whichever class it ends up entering! The rebranded Minion/ Scooby Too looked very impressive, and completed a whole lot of laps in practice. Probation IV showed up with a new and dapper set of orange bodywork, that looked just a bit like a boat.

Thanks to the GP staff for another cracking event! We’re looking forward to the next race, and to joining them at STEMtech in June.

Now we just need to finish 3galoo before the Goodwood heat!

Day 2 started with a nice lie in. The car was pretty much ready .to roll, and with all the running on day 1, we had no real need to go out in practice, giving us plenty of time until 1 o’clock when the F24+ International Final & Corporate Challenge would start.

With the transponder fitted and the batteries nicely charged, we had a good look around the car for last minute improvements to be made – we ended up settling on redoing the tracking (again) and making wheel covers out of duct tape. On of the hardest things in Greenpower is quantifying improvements, but we think the wheel covers must have made a difference – despite being a longer race, our average speed in the F24+ Final was greater than it was in the lap race, and our fastest lap was 2 seconds quicker, despite using a lower amount of power per lap.

We used the ample spare time available to us to watch the F24 race – a particular highlight was Viper dashing of the line and overtaking the pace car before the exit of the first corner – I suspect that driver wasn’t really listening at the driver briefing. A cleverer strategy would have been to hang and get up to race speed over the last quarter of the formation lap, ensuring the race proper was started at top speed.

Seeing as we’re planning a new version of 2galoo’s bodywork before the 2016 season we  decided to give the current edition a bit of a send off, by giving it some additional decoration… with help from my sister who was visiting, and from some of the JLR guys as well. We’d like to hope that Gav appreciated our support!

After another precarious trip up the banking, and a failed attempt to goad Dave Senior into a pushing race to the grid, we lined up in 6th place, behind Jet, Reprobation, F-eV, Bullet and Rotary Racer – all big names! After rather rudely snubbing Nash in our on grid interview (sorry again about that!), the grid was lined up and ready to go.

2galoo shot off the line when the flag dropped, just about reaching 2nd place before the first corner. When the car next came into view from the pit lane, it had been overtaken by Jet 1 and 2, along with Reprobation, and was in close formation with Rotary Racer. We managed to hold them off for the first 3rd of the race, but their lap times held strong when we hit the same mid race dip that we experienced in the Lap Race on day 1.

Probation and REC-349 had both dropped back a fair distance at the start of the race, but began to drag us back in in the last 15 minutes. With time for only 3 laps remaining, both of them caught and overtook Ian up the hill (we really need to look into some lightweighting for the driver) and began to pull away.

We crossed the line with only 4 seconds to spare before the flag dropped, which pushed us into the longest race that 2galoo had completed. It appears that Probation had pushed just a bit too hard to get ahead of us before the end, as its speed dropped significantly as the hour mark passed, and we retook the position – unfortunately REC-349 was just a bit too fast for us.

We finished the race in 11th place overall, and 9th of the cars competing in F24+ rather than the corporate challenge. It was a bit disappointing to finish outside of the points, but we were very happy with 2galoo’s performance, and had a lot of ideas on how to improve our performance for 2016 – both in the car and in race strategy. We also made some good contacts over the weekend, with whom we’re hoping to push on to greater success next season.

The F24+ championship concluded with Reprobation 2 points ahead of Jet, an almighty effort from the Renishaw team to beat a car that still looked untouchable at the start of this season. Driven bettered their previous best ever season performance by finishing the championship in 3rd place, just ahead of the two Bullet cars from Silesian.

Electric 2galoo finished the season in 8th place overall, just behind Minion and ahead of Project E. It was the 3rd highest place new car, and weCHOOK Racing was the highest place all new team. Thanks to building a new car mid season, we also managed to finish 25th with Electric Boogaloo!

Next stop: I’m not sure really…. Goodwood maybe?

The end of our first season came up quickly. It was less than a month since Electric 2galoo had been finished, and we’d already taken part in 4 races and finished on the podium twice, leaving us sitting in equal 5th in the F24+ championship, with Rotary Racer.

We arrived at the circuit in good time, and were directed to our garage. We had  great location, in between the Portuguese University, Silesian University and the two teams that had travelled over from America – the now established Team USA with ARES, and the new team from the University of Alabama with Shock.

It didn’t take long for us to get through scruiteneering – we got there just before the queue got too mad! With our final sticker off the season on the car, we were ready for a few laps in practice. After our numerous calamities and failures at previous races, we were keen to put as few miles on the car as possible, so we only completed 6 laps in practice to make sure everything was running smoothly.

We ran the stint as planned, and had minimal drop off, but were not overly happy with the pace of the car, being no faster than Electric Boogaloo had been the last time we had visited Rockingham. In between practice and the race we did some serious fettling – specifically retruing the wheels. Just pushing the car along the ground, it was possible to feel an improvement in how the car was running.

Once we’d worked on the wheels, we downloaded the onboard logs from the practice laps, to check our current consumption was in a good range. Everything looked good – once the number of laps was announced we did a few quick sums, and realised we could up our power consumption by a couple of amps for the race.

After all that, we still had plenty of time to go for a wander and and chat to the other teams in attendance. The story of Shock, from the University of Alabama, rang true for us – the two guys had built their car in the shed in two months. They’d also got it shipped across to the UK from America, so they were just slightly outdoing us there! The car looked very well made, if not a little large (just like our first car… but Boogaloo wasn’t really well made). We had a good chat about how they’d designed their car, and how to make sure they get to the end of the race.

It got to 30 minutes before the race, so we strapped in the race batteries (not quite our best pair – we were saving them for the International Final on Day 2) and taped on the bodywork. Ian strapped himself in and we wheeled ourselves out to the circuit. Our ridiculously huge turning circle meant we took a bit of an awkward route out to the grid, but we made it eventually.

2galoo was lined up near the back of the grid for the lap race – only the corporate entries were behind us, but we made a good start and overtook a good number of cars from the flag dropping to the first corner.

The first 20 minutes went smoothly, we were 15s a lap faster than in practice, and we had a very gradual drop in lap time. Half an hour in, we experienced a sudden (and still unexplained) lap time drop of 10 seconds, then spent the rest of the race back at our gradual drop off of about a second per lap. This phenomenon would return to haunt us on day 2, in the F24+ final proper. Regardless, we were reasonably happy with our performance, finishing ahead of cars from Renishaw, JLR and Lockheed Martin, and overtaking Minion on the final lap, as their batteries just gave up before the end. Jet 2, driven this time by Dave, beat Reprobation to the line, but only just, having run very low on remaining power at the end of the race!

PSEM had a difficult time – they spent their last lap going at less than walking pace, eventually making it into the pits after being lapped a number of times. It turned out they’d hit the batteries way too hard, and in doing so had overheated the motor – it was at 80 degrees when i got to it with a laser thermometer, and it had been off for a good while by that point! We had a good discussion about race strategy and using gearing to manage current, before they set off on a marathon upgrade session – they were still in the garage long into the evening when we had cracked on with the beers!

With the end of the F24+ Lap Race, day 1 of the International final was pretty much done for us, so we prepped what we could on the car (That car has been tracked so many times now that we’ve got it down to a fine art) and made sure day 2’s batteries were on charge, before retiring to the campsite, for some beers, food and sleep!

Shockingly, Rockingham did not begin with the customary camping trip. Being just over an hour’s drive away from weCHOOK Racing HQ, and a midweek event, we took the hit and left off early at 6:30, to try and miss some of the traffic on the M1. We weren’t all that successful.

We arrived to find plenty of teams already in attendance. A lot of the big players were there for the heat – Jet, 2 cars from Renishaw, 2 cars from Silesian, 2 cars from Reel Racing (from the top of Scotland), 2 cars from Driven, 2 cars (but no Dylan) from Sandbach, and Rotary Racer. It wouldn’t surprise me if Rockingham will have been the most competitive F24+ heat of the year! There were also plenty of brand new or nearly new cars there, including us, Stealth, Perkins and Bournville College.

We ended were sharing a pit box with Reel Racing (who put us to shame when we were complaining about the distance we’d have to drive to get to Croft) and Bournville College, who were attending their first race, and had plenty of questions about Electric Boogaloo! One of the best things about these events is how open to talking about their cars (almost) everyone is, and its great to be able to talk about engineering on an equal footing with many of the kids involved. I’ll always consider it to be an educational engineering event first and a racing event second, so if I can learn something or help someone else to understand something I’ll count it as win, even if the car’s last out on circuit!

The Greenpower staff looked more stressed out than ever – with the massive number of teams in attendance, we experienced our first ever ‘dual scruiteneering’ thanks to Stewart. We got through quickly and with no rectifications to be made, leaving Ian and I plenty of time to talk strategy!

Rockingham was the first event to which we’d bought our full sensor set up. After spending Tuesday evening sorting out data typing issues, we had Motor Current, Motor RPM, and a very noisy Battery Voltage signal being transmitted wirelessly to the pitlane, displayed on screen to the driver, and (probably most importantly) logged to an SD card. There’s a few more sensors to be added (wheel RPM and motor temperature are the first two that come to mind), but the core of an idea that we had at the start of 2014 is now in place: All the necessary data collection (and tools to analyse it) to do 5 laps in practice, then come in and decide exactly how to use our gearing in the race.

The new sensor setup had a second purpose. We were still lacking in a really effective motor cooling solution – we had some PC fans blowing air over the motor case, but only a few small heat sinks attached to the shaft. Merryfield had seen the motor casing hit over 100 degrees, and we were keen to avoid doing this again, as it could well have ended the race. Seeing as we couldn’t get heat out of the motor very quickly, we had to manage the amount of heat that we were putting into it. Using the readout of current in the cockpit, Ian could use the gearing to control the current, attempting to maintain an average consumption of ~24 Amps, and not allowing peaks of over 30 Amps.

The visible effect of this strategy was seeing the car blasting down the hill at near the speed of the top competitors, and then slowing right down on the way back up again. I’m tempted to break into pontification about ‘Constant Speed’ vs ‘Constant Current’ control, but I think I shall dedicate an entire post to that at a later date.

Having invested in a third pair of batteries after Merryfield, we had a bit of leeway for our testing in practice. We ended up running two stints, totally 16 laps. The first was to allow Ian to get used to using the gearing with the current sensors, and to get baseline on our power consumption. The car was behaving well, setting the highest speed lap that the car had achieved up until that point. Using the data collected in the first stint, we selected some areas of the circuit to deploy more power, and areas to conserve power. In this way, in the second stint we managed to increase speed by another 2 mph, without increasing total power consumption.

Having nailed down our strategy in practice, we did some final setup and waited for our race. We used to break to poke around some of the competitor’s cars, in particular investigating the maximum steering angle of Reprobation and Silesian’s Bullet cars. It became apparent from this just where we were losing out – both of them had a tiny frontal area compared to Electric Boogaloo. We also had an entertaining interview with Gav!

We lined up about halfway down the grid for the race, and got away relatively quickly. By the end of the first lap, we’d dropped down the field by a few positions, but we were keeping power consumption under control. As the race wore on, we began climbing back up the field, aided by both Stealth and Silesian’s Bullet II running out of power. in closing stages. We ended up just outside the points, but with the quality and quantity of the competition, this was a more impressive result than the 7th place finish at Merryfield.

We left the event with good confidence in the potential of the powertrain, but knowing that we’d never be truly competitive with car in its current form, due to its size. So, Rockingham turned out to Electric Boogaloo’s final race, and I should probably get back to finishing off the new car!