TRACK TEST
being a really bad idea), this might be the quietest race since Spencer Penrose widened Bates’ old carriage road and concocted a Race to the Clouds to pull in tourists. Its inaugural 1916 running (making it America’s second oldest race) was won by Rea Lentz in 20 minutes, 55.66 seconds driving the Romano Demon Special (and what a great car name, eh?). Better-known drivers followed—the Unsers, the Millens, Andretti, Buffum, Mouton, “Monster” Tajima. And then two years ago, Sebastian Loeb’s staggering record of 8 minutes, 13.878 seconds helped by the now fully paved upper portion. Postcard racks for hundreds of miles would soon be filled with snapshots of crazy-winged cars
cornering as much backward as forward as they surfed lethal drop-offs with tire-spewed pebble-clouds frozen in the air. The climb to the clouds is genuinely steep. Imagine that while driving five laps of the 2.5-mile Indianapolis Motor Speedway oval you also climb almost a mile in elevation— with 156 corners thrown in. By the top, the air thins enough to leave naturally aspirated engines panting at about 70 percent of their starting line horsepower. That’s a decisive advantage for turbocharged cars—and why some have chosen not to breathe at all. There might even be a teensy benefit: fewer of those pesky air molecules to knock out of the way. The anchor-like downside is battery heft—a sizable chunk of the car’s 3,226-pound curb weight being its next-gen lithium-ion cells—which, unlike gas tanks, lighten exactly zip as they empty. Worse yet, while you could conceivably crest the peak on your very last flaming hydrocarbon, you can’t on your last electron (well, you could, but you’d be moving very, very slowly if you did); the entire battery needs to be oversized by about a third to guarantee continuous power. Hence its 50 kW-hrs capacity is exactly the size it needs to be, and not a kW-hr more. Before a run, the center of the battery is spot-cooled with an air conditioner; nine minutes of continuous energy depletion creates a huge thermal problem. The battery dominates the architecture of the car in a way that should remind us of Archimedes of Syracuse. Remember Archimedes? Dropping to the bottom of his filled bathtub, he realized that the water’s rise meant that he himself was denser (then he ran through the streets shouting “Eureka!”). The same logic sculpts the car’s peculiar appearance, but in reverse: Its battery (though air-cooled) is denser than the driver and his cockpit environment, so while odd-looking, the lowest overall center-of-gravity solution is achieved by perching the pilot up top. Keeping with our references to old, dead Greeks, the MiEV Evo III is also rather Euclidian in its geometric order. Attached to the battery’s front and rear ends are identical propulsion units, two motors in front, two in back, each wheel twirled by its own 151-hp, production-based MiEV motor via identical-length half shafts. Tires? Dunlop 330/680 R18 slicks all around. Weight distribution? 50/50. (OK, I’m exaggerating; it’s 50.09/49.91.)
151-hp, stock-based motors? Some big-time liberties have been taken with these 66-hp units—modified parts, the generous safety factor tossed out, the voltage raised from 320 to 420. There’s 604 total horsepower. As the name Evolution III implies, Mitsubishi’s mountaineering program has been a three-year campaign of ever-escalating assaults. Evo I held a single 107-hp motor up front and two in back. Evolution II and III are basically the same fourmotor cars, though the latter has elevated horsepower, a lightened tube frame, extra downforce, and fatter rubber. Team manager Roger Yaksukawa: “We spent more time in the wind tunnel to add front downforce to reduce understeer. There’s also a large rear wing mainplane and rear wickerbill. Last year’s car was basically right. It just needed some detail improvements.” His point proved, of course, by Greg Tracy’s and teammate/technical director Hiroshi Masuoka’s one-two finish in the Electric category. “Unfortunately, we got hit by rain last year, so we didn’t have the opportunity to showcase what the car’s true potential was. We’d have liked to have gone under 9 minutes…”
7 a.m. Streets of Willow Springs. To explore Yaksukawa’s claim further, we’re 780 miles west of explorer Zebulon Pike’s pink-granite peak in California’s Mojave Desert. Might as well be a million. The Streets is 1.55 miles, not 12.42; its elevation change is 64 feet, not 4,700. The psychological gulf between approaching a corner apron that’s flat desert gravel versus a blue-nothingness drop is … thousands of feet. Why are we here? Like sending a rare species of mountain gorilla to the Smithsonian for study, Mitsubishi offered us the unusual chance to bring its MiEV Pikes Peak racer out of its natural mountain habitat and into our hometown laboratories for analysis. In a few minutes, our chief driving scientist, Randy Pobst, would snap on his latex—er—driving gloves to begin his examination. In the pale-green cinder-block garage, the car sits like a dozing WWE wrestler before a match, a brightly colored, muscly shape festooned in costume-like wings. Conversations echo off the painted brick walls. A portable air conditioner blows cool air into the battery. Tools clink against the table. Coffee is sipped. Yaksukawa is talking
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