I must say we have had pretty good results with our Hybrid so far! We have had performances that have put to shame very fast vehicles. Today, our speed caused a problem…we caught traffic.
At the One Lap of America vehicles are started 15 seconds after the car in front in a group of 3-6 cars to minimize the chance of one car catching another car. The problem arrises when a car is catching the car in front as this slows the times down for both cars to allow a pass. If the car in front is faster in the straights and slower in the corners (which is always the case with our Hybrid due to it’s amazing handling and less than rocket based straightline performance), this causes an even bigger problem. A lower hp car must either be let by or dare to make a pass in a corner by carrying higher entry speed and racing past the slower car. This is what happened in our session #2. We caught a car that was very fast in the straights, but did not have the handling of our HRH (hot rod hybrid). We caught this slower car at the last turn after the first lap (for those doing the math we made up 15 seconds on the car in 1 lap). Since the driver had the faster car on the front straight a pass was not granted and we ended up being “stuck” behing the slower car and loosing about 5 seconds of overall performance on our times.
Even with this “hold up” we still put in an excellent time on our third lap and set what will become the Hybrid Vehicle Record for Beaverun with a time of 1:10. If you want some comparisons, that is about the same time as a stock BMW E36 M3 Would lap the track.
While I was a bit disappointed in the overall time, our very quick lap in the slick damp condition once again show the abilities of our suspension, tires, wheels and the chassis of the car to perform above expectation!
