“We have been very pleased with the performance of the car which is still at a very early stage of development. We already have the straight line speed to match the highly developed lightweight class B Formula 1000 cars. We have great optimism that we can seriously ruffle some feathers when we try the new developments to the hybrid system in 2007.”
The team have achieved success in 2006 without altering the low emission outputs of the standard Insight, which project engineer Andrews explained would have made the project less impressive.
“This project would have less significance if we cheated with the emissions and vehicle efficiency,” he said. “It would be very easy to get more horsepower from the lightweight three cylinder Insight engine by running richer mixtures at higher revs and removing the catalytic converters, but this would destroy the CO2 emissions record of the car which are currently the lowest recorded by a UK market production car at 85g/km.
“We believe our car to be even below this figure when using the bioethanol fuel blend and we will be doing tests to prove this soon.”
