Porsche 919 Hybrid Gets Its First Win!
By Mike Garcia
If F1 can’t find the arms race, the WEC or World Endurance Championship can. With seemingly less regulations compared to the F1 sport, new teams can get a piece of the pie and find success.
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Best of all, it’s an endurance race. Anything can happen.
First win for the Porsche 919 Hybrid: driving the innovative Le Mans prototype, works drivers Romain Dumas (France), Neel Jani (Switzerland) and Marc Lieb (Germany) won the São Paulo six-hour race on Sunday. It was the eighth and final round of the FIA 2014 World Endurance Championship (WEC). After being away for 16 years, it was only at the start of this season that Porsche returned to the top category of endurance racing.
– Developed in record time with race victory in debut year
– Breakthrough for pioneering hybrid drive system
– 3,592 kilowatt hours of electric power generated over 23,232 kilometres
Hybrid technology gets raised to a new level.
Everything on the Porsche 919 Hybrid is dedicated to the dictat of extreme efficiency with maximum performance. This includes both the aerodynamics and the selection of materials for the lightweight construction. The most spectacular aspect, however, is the powertrain concept with its extremely compact two-litre, four-cylinder turbo engine and two energy recovery systems. The drive systems of LMP1 vehicles entered by car manufacturers must as of this year be hybrid in design. The rules, however, do not specify ‘how’ this is to be achieved. Number of cylinders, cubic capacity, diesel or petrol – are all left up to the teams. The limiting factor is the amount of power available per lap. That applies both to the amount of fuel and to the electrical power that can be drawn from the storage systems. On the 919 Hybrid these consist of liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery cells, which are fed from two systems: during braking, kinetic energy gets converted at the front axle into electric current, while at the back usable electric power is gained from exhaust energy. This recuperation of thermodynamic exhaust energy is unique in the starting field for the sports car world championship. In this approach an additional turbine generator set practically replaces the wastegate. Porsche makes use of this excess exhaust gas: it drives a second turbine and thus also a generator that produces electric power. Previously lost energy is put to good use. Thanks to the exhaust gas energy recovery system the Porsche 919 Hybrid is the only car in the field that regenerates energy not only when braking, but when accelerating as well.
With such sophisticated hybrid technology, it’s just a matter of time before it ends up on a daily driving cars. We don’t need lag, we need speed and efficiency.
Congratulations Porsche.