Battery Beach Burnout - Electric Car Drag Racing
Sunday, January 27. 2008
Friday night the boys and I spent some hours immersed in a weird mix of high-octane drag racing and electrical engineering geekery—the Florida Electric Auto Association took over a "run-what-you-brung" drag racing event as part of their Battery Beach Burnout weekend. The venue was one Countyline Dragway, an 1/8 mile strip of pavement in the middle of the woods in northwest Dade county. One of the competitors brought this homebrew 240 volt electric bike, with 20 batteries driving a shifter kart tire hard enough for a smoky burnout - in the picture I'm holding the brake down to keep the bike from moving as he tensions his drive chain, which unfortunately broke on his first run of the night.
The following picture is of a Porche 912 with an improbable modification: two DC motors inline and hanging out of the back like a rocket engine. This car set the Countyline Dragway electric record at 67 miles per hour at the 1/8 mile.
There were a number of non-competing electric vehicles there as well, including a Scion xB running on 500 or so laptop computer Lithium-Ion batteries. And then there's the Milwaukee car, formerly featured on Monster Garage—a 68 Chevy powered by 100 Milwaukee cordless drill batteries:
It was an interesting and eccentric event for both the gearheads and the geeks, to be sure.
