Newsfeed: Cleantechnica.com

Electric Dragsters Are Making Big Progress

A few weeks ago, Holley’s MotorLife blog covered an electric vehicle doing something we typically associate with combustion: dragsters.

What Fans Love About Top Fuel Dragsters: While most normal drag racing cars start their life as a factory car of some kind and then duke it out against the competition for quarters and eighths of miles, the most wild drag racing machines are custom built. Some add a normal car body on top to look like a car, while the most extreme machines make no pretenses of being anything but a custom rig that prioritizes acceleration above everything...

Enter The Electric Dragster

If you’re a fan of EVs, you’ve probably been thinking to yourself, “Hey, this is an ideal job for EVs! They have lots of torque!” And, you’re definitely right. That’s why racing gear companies have been working behind the scenes with racing teams to get electric vehicle technology onto the track.

In 2016, veteran racer Steve Huff saw an interview on TV with earlier legend Don Garlits, who was the first racer to hit 200 MPH in a Top Fuel car back in the 1960s (today’s Top Fuel dragsters are going over 300). The topic? The race to do the same in an electric dragster. “I’m not really an electric car guy — I love internal combustion engines — but ICE tech has fundamentally stayed the same for more than a century.” Huff told MotorLife. “I was inspired by that interview with Don, but what really stuck out to me was that he said he didn’t think 200 mph was possible with the technology that was currently available at that time. That’s when I decided to design and build a car to break that barrier, and we named it Current Technology.”

When he first heard that other racers were trying to break the 200 MPH barrier on electric power, he looked into what they were doing. Unlike Tesla and other modern EVs, these pioneers were still messing around with DC motors instead of an inverter and AC power (which still has to come from DC batteries). To give them a run for their money, he had to spend a lot of his own: Read The Whole Story HERE