I have been observing the debate about Lipo’s for some time not only hear but on a number of other forums I have concluded that the future of electrics in general is very bright in deed and will never go back to the old ways.
Any way enough rambling, the reason for this post is to describe my experience with Lipo’s and developing a rigger for electric power. Firstly designing and building a rigger for electric was not as difficult as I first thought as it was originally designed for 18 NiMH cells the rigger is a little larger than a 21 Nitro rigger and a little smaller than a 45 rigger this gave a good balance for handling speed.
The first test with 18 cells proved to be quiet promising with very good cornering and reasonable speed around 90 kph less than the average 21 rigger speed. Then came a suggestion from Andrew why not try it on a 6s Lipo witch is about the same voltage as the 18 cells so I received a pack of Thunder Power Extremes 5ah 22/30 6s 1p to try in the rigger but before I used the pack I did a lot of research on how to handle them I wont go into details on how to use Lipo’s as there is plenty of information out there you just have to look.
Armed with plenty of good information I proceeded to try the pack in the rigger, on the first test with the Lipo pack it was very apparent that the future of electric circuit racing has come of age! The first pass with the rigger it was just touching on 121 kph on the radar and this was with the mildest setting and cornered with very little loss of speed. More testing and tweaking resulted in something unexpected the current rigger proved to not be big enough for the available power and speed of a 6s setup so back to the designing board for something bigger.
A few statistics the rigger is 32” long weighs 2.5 kg has a conservative top speed of 130 kph , has an average current draw of 110 amps and uses 2,6 ah for 6 laps on our long circuit.
So my observation of the above exercise is the future of electric racing is very bright in deed !!
