What broke a class record at Lime Rock Park? Not any ordinary 350Z, but one with hybrid power. Wait, what?
During a Gridlife event at the storied Connecticut track, Sasha Anis laid down a sub-52-second lap in his gas-electric Nissan, beating a heavily modded C6 Corvette by 2.7 seconds.
Hybrid Power: The Why
The car is known as KERS Kels–its name paying homage to the hybrid system used in Formula 1 plus a shortening of car’s real name, Kelsey–and started out as a conventional, gas-powered race car in what is now called the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge. Sasha purchased it in 2007.
“I wanted to keep the 350Z in my business but keep it relevant,” explains Sasha, who operates Mountain Pass Performance, a firm with a solid reputation of squeezing speed out of Teslas. “I also had done an EV swap on a Lotus Evora.
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“The next step was to try to combine what I had learned on that project with this race car, which was quite a fast car, but we needed more power to be competitive in any time attack kind of environment,” he continues. “The engine had about 500 horsepower, which was about half of what some other cars have.”
Sasha could have supercharged, turbocharged or LS-swapped the 350Z. Instead, he went with a hybrid system.
What was once a street-stock endurance racer has become one of Gridlife’s fastest entries. Photograph Courtesy Chris Sullivan/Mountain Pass Performance
“The hybrid system is not best for performance,” Sasha admits. “From a business and education perspective and also from just curiosity, it was a science experiment I wanted to try.”
Sasha set a goal for the project: He wanted to run with a GT3 car at his home track, Canadian Tire Motorsport Park.
Hybrid Power: The How
The Nissan’s hybrid system starts with a custom-designed, axial-flux Phi-Power motor. The original battery came out of a BMW i8, but Mountain Pass Performance has since developed its own, upping the voltage from 400 volts to 500. The Cascadia Motion CM200 inverter converts the DC power into AC. Mountain Pass Performance wrote all of the control software in-house for the hybrid system, which runs on a Motec M150 using Motec’s M1 Build development…
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