Rally...Honda Insight?

[JC]

Pretty cool if you ask me.

Hybrid car wins title at first attempt.

The EEMS-supported Oaktec Honda Insight Hybrid Rally Car has won class A of the fiercely contested 2006 Formula 1000 Rally Championship at the first attempt.

The Insight was built, developed and crewed by Oaktec partners Paul Andrews and Bill Meeson and won the class on three of the four rallies contested this year – being in such a strong position that the final two rounds of the season could be missed to focus on preparing for the 2007 season.

Despite missing two rounds, the Oaktec team finished ninth overall out of 25 registered crews in the F1000 championship and won Class A for production cars of under 1000cc. Oaktec ran in the Smartmole Weeton Stages in Lancashire, the Camsport Ranges Stages in Snowdonia, and the The MACCA Motorsport Centenary Stages at Twyford Woods in Lincolnshire, where the team ran with E85 bio-ethanol fuel for the first time.

The Oaktec Insight has three factors that make it unique in the world of special stage rallying. Firstly it uses an electrical hybrid system to capture energy that would be wasted during braking and retardation, and re-uses it to help accelerate the car by providing current to an electric assist motor. Secondly it has been developed to use renewable E85 bio-ethanol fuel in place of conventional unleaded petrol. This fuel gives strong power combined with ultra low emissions. The third factor that makes this car highly unusual in motorsport is that its hybrid power system drives through a continually variable automatic transmission, which gives the car better performance and driveability

"Our Insight feels very strange on initial acquaintance," Meeson said. "When compared to the harsh environment of a manual rally car, the navigator here experiences a continual surge of smooth seamless power, which certainly helps when reading the pace notes.

"We have been very pleased with the performance of the car which is still at a very early stage of development. We already have the straight line speed to match the highly developed lightweight class B Formula 1000 cars. We have great optimism that we can seriously ruffle some feathers when we try the new developments to the hybrid system in 2007."

The team have achieved success in 2006 without altering the low emission outputs of the standard Insight, which project engineer Andrews explained would have made the project less impressive.

"This project would have less significance if we cheated with the emissions and vehicle efficiency," he said. "It would be very easy to get more horsepower from the lightweight three cylinder Insight engine by running richer mixtures at higher revs and removing the catalytic converters, but this would destroy the CO2 emissions record of the car which are currently the lowest recorded by a UK market production car at 85g/km.

"We believe our car to be even below this figure when using the bioethanol fuel blend and we will be doing tests to prove this soon."

http://www.crash.net/news_view~cid~1...0011~pid~0.htm

Pictures:
http://www.eemsonline.co.uk/pictures..._rallying_2006

[Kevin M]

That's pretty sweet.

[Nick Koan]

Not too shabby.

Toyota did that a few years back with the Prius. It was a raid style (not stage style) rally, but it was the first Hybrid to complete an FIA sanctioned event.