White Zombie Drops Into The 10′s
You might remember John Wayland’s electric powered Datsun from our previous post where the little white 1200 was laying down consistent 12 second quarter mile times. Well the bar for quick electric powered cars has now been raised (lowered?) considerably.
Last Friday night at the Portland International Raceway in Oregon ‘White Zombie’ ran the quarter mile in 10.40 seconds at 117.23 mph!
The night was far from all plain sailing though, from the reports at EV World and Wired.com it seems that the team had little hope of running a 10 after electrical problems plagued the car from before it had even left the garage.
After a panicked at-home fix of the series-parallel contactor setup the car was driven to the track (yes, it is a street-legal 10 second car!) and peeled off a couple of low 11 second quarter’s. Then the forward/reverse switch on the dash shorted which shut off all power. An hour in the pits and all was good again, and the team boosted the power to 1,800 amps and increased the motor current to 2,000 amps.
Fittingly, for the next race the little Datsun came up against one of the quickest petrol-driven production cars of our time, a 485 horsepower Nissan GT-R. As you can see from the video above, the torque produced straight off the line from the Siamese 9 electric motor is incredible and the GT-R had little chance of reeling the Datsun in.
Check out the PlasmaBoy EV Racing website for more info on the White Zombie.
Read the whole plasmaboy blog, cant believe an electric car is pulling low 10 second passes! Crazy stuff.
That truly unseen and amazing one, can’t believe this.