David Ragan knew he was in a different kind of race car from the minute he pulled out of the garage.
“I learned how to drive a manual at probably the age of 6 or 7 years old on my grandfather’s tractor and this EV car, you put it in reverse, it’s a paddle shifter, but there’s no gears,” Ragan said. “There is a forward and a reverse and you click it in reverse, and it goes. You don’t have a clutch. You don’t have that sensation of choking the car down, getting it up to RPM or leaving the garage stall. It just goes.”
Ragan has been the test driver of NASCAR’s battery electric vehicle, which was officially unveiled on Saturday in Chicago. In a partnership with ABB, the vehicle’s official name is the ABB NASCAR EV Prototype. It is shorter than the Next Gen car (193.4” to 185.5”) but weighs slightly more (3,485 lbs to 4,000 lbs).
The vehicle’s characteristics and energy saving make it ideal for short tracks and road courses. Martinsville Speedway, a half-mile, was one of the places Regan spent the most time behind the wheel.
“Martinsville is a track where you do a lot off feel and sound on the engine,” Ragan said. “Getting into the corner, you can often tell how fast you’re rolling based off engine deceleration. Leaving the corner, when you blend up to the wall, you don’t always look to the right to see how close you are (because) you can almost hear it. The closer you get to the wall that engine tune changes because of our exhaust coming out of the side of the car bouncing off the wall.
“I didn’t have any of that. So, I had to be a lot more conscious down the straightway looking and making sure I was using the whole racetrack.”
Ragan started driving stock cars in the NASCAR national series in 2004. He has nearly 600 starts between the Xfinity Series and Cup Series – all in a vehicle with an internal combustion engine.
The vehicle Ragan has driven in testing is all-wheel drive with three STARD UHP 6-Phase motors (one in the front; two in the rear) supplying power directly to the tires. The tunable powertrain can produce 1,000 kW at peak power and is anchored by a 78-kWh liquid-cooled battery.
“I can’t emphasize enough the regeneration capabilities … when you apply the brakes, it is sending some of that energy through the braking system back through a charger to the battery,” Ragan said. “So that helps the car slow down. We could tune that regen to very, very aggressive where I hardly had to touch the brakes, and that car would stop on a dime.
