Fortunately we have engineering facilities at our base in Lancashire and we were able to make the exhaust system in-house but the key modification is a programme for the hybrid system, which had already been part developed in the States. It effectively does the job of a programmable engine management system, but you alter the settings of the hybrid system, so we can re-programme the strategies that control the regenerative braking and the assist to the engine to make it effective for motorsport. That has given us a great benefit and if we had had to develop it ourselves, it would probably have taken two or three years and a lot of money, but as someone had already done the background work, we could take their product and adapt it for our application.
Q:
The hybrid car has the electric motor and the conventional fuel motor. When you are out on the stages, how does that work, what is the synergy between the two?
Paul Andrews:
That is another interesting question and a lot of people has misconceptions about this. The Insight is different to a Toyota Prius. The Prius is able to run on an electric motor only, but the Honda system is something I liken to an electric supercharger so it runs on its petrol engine all the time but when strategies dictate, the electric motor comes in to assist and gives the car extra performance and helps the petrol motor. By doing that, the petrol motor can be optimised to give very low emissions out of a very efficient drive cycle, so it almost a back up to the petrol engine. As soon as you come off load and start braking, the electric motor turns into a generator and recycles wasted energy back into the battery pack in the rear of the car.
What we are able to do now with the programmer is to make the assist, or supercharge effect of the electric motor, much more effective and then make the recapturing of the energy more effective as we don’t have to bother about driving through town as low speed and all the vague strategies that a road car needs – we can get rid of all that and just optimise the system for a motorsport application. The big effects of the regeneration is that it adds on to the braking performance of the car as when the energy is being put back into the battery, the motor turns into a generator and is linked to the drive system so it becomes part of the braking system of the car. By altering it, we can get more effective braking without having to put big discs and callipers on because the generator is becoming part of the brake system.
Q:
During the season you also decided to run the car on bio-ethanol fuel, so arguably there isn’t a greener car in British motorsport than the Insight you use…
Paul Andrews:
No, our engineers at EEMS believe that this is the cleanest, greenest and in some ways, the most advanced competition car anywhere in the world because it uses bio-fuel, it uses a hybrid system, had fantastic aerodynamics – which is Honda’s work and not ours – and is a lightweight aluminium construction. It does all the things that optimise the use of energy and we’ve taken Honda’s package and taken it in a different direction and used it for motorsport. It is a really effective car on many levels.
Q:
You won your class in the championship which you said came as a pleasant surprise. Going into 2006 with the car, what had been your actual expectations?
Paul Andrews:
Well we hoped to be competitive. We knew the car would be quick in a straight line, but we knew we had handling issues. The cars in the championship are all highly developed, the Nissan Micra is the most competitive car in Formula 1000 and that has been developed over a number of years as an effective rally car, so the cars we are competing against have highly developed chassis’ and components that can be bought off the shelf to make the car perform well whereas we have has to start from scratch. We have suffered a bit with handling set-up and have suffered on rough terrain so we hadn’t expected, even with straight-line speed, to get the overall results. Once again, it is credit to Honda that the car is so well engineered and so reliable, that we ended up doing a lot of rough events that broke a lot of cars and the Insight, despite its technology, was very reliable and we had no problems and came through every event with a result.
