Race tracks across the country aren’t yet geared up for EVs due to their typically rural location
We had a change of 2024’s edition of our annual Britain’s Best Driver’s Car shoot-out.
Lincolnshire’s fastest and most beautiful topographical cleft, Cadwell Park, was ours for two wonderful days, and Motorsport Vision chief Jonathan Palmer was our gracious host.
Cadwell was perfect for ‘Handling Day’ in all ways save one – which, since it’s a common problem for circuit operators, I know Palmer won’t mind me mentioning.
The man himself was interviewed recently on Autocar’s My Week In Cars podcast and talked openly about the challenges that motorsport venues like Cadwell are facing in gearing up for electrification.
Circuits are, after all, typically found in spacious rural environments, so most don’t have the electrical supply ‘head room’ necessary for a bank of, say, 10 300kW DC rapid chargers for use by track-day regulars turning up in EVs.
Palmer’s solution is to build a new circuit from scratch with enough of its own on-site solar power generation capacity (it’s going to be about 30 minutes north of Reims in north-eastern France).
Ours, in stark contrast – for a 2024 BBDC starting grid that, at one stage, looked like it could contain as many as four EVs – was a lot simpler. A month or so ahead of the test, I set out to hire some temporary chargers.
Some internet research turned up a company called Zapme, which offers mobile EV charging solutions: either vans or lorries loaded to their permissible gross weight with ‘rapid transfer’ batteries, which effectively shuttle so much power from the nearest rapid charger right to wherever you need it.
The snag: to cover several cars over a couple of days, they would have set us back the price of a decent second-hand EV all by themselves.
I next came across a company called Speedy Hire, whose business development director Mark Chamberlain explained that it could offer any number of solutions to our little problem, from storage batteries to hydrogen fuel cells, but that the cheapest by far would be a portable 250kVA diesel generator, big enough to fill a parking space, running on hydrotreated vegetable oil.
Speedy could supply the equipment and the fuel and handle the transport, and it would add about 30% to what BBDC typically costs us to produce every year (it isn’t cheap content; if you like it, please buy a second copy of the mag!).
So we said ‘yes, please’. And then, as the event loomed closer, came the complications.
First, the generator we originally asked for wasn’t available. “Don’t worry, have the next one up. It’s still pretty cheap.”
Then, with only a few days to go: “Could you send us your company’s hired-in plant insurance certificate, please? We can’t send out the kit until we see it.”
Reader, we couldn’t produce such a certificate, because Haymarket – the media company that brings you this magazine every week – doesn’t normally hire much heavy plant machinery, funnily enough.
A hurried exchange with our insurers did actually put short-term cover in place but not quickly enough to allow the generator to get to Cadwell in time for the first of our track days.
So I cancelled the plan, saved the expense and, in the event, we managed with the two EVs that eventually turned up via public rapid chargers (thank heaven for the McDonald’s in Louth).
This year I’ll know better and have whatever we may need to charge any EVs competing in BBDC in place sooner.
But I had to laugh when, 10 days after we had packed up and left Lincolnshire, the phone rang and a man from Speedy asked if the generator that I’d hired at Cadwell Park was ready for collection.
The caretaker’s electric leaf blower must have had a pretty busy week.
