It’s motivated by four 1 megawatt electric motors made in Australia.
Dragsters are all about burning methanol and shooting off the line, but as the automotive industry changes and shifts towards EVs, drag racing will have to adapt and change as well. This company in Australia, HyperPower Technologies, has come up with an electric motor that’s powerful enough to be used in drag racing, and it’s been designed so that several can be hooked up to obtain several times the output.
And since the output of a single HyperPower QFM-360-X motor is 1,000 kW or 1,341 horsepower, using more of them at once seems a bit mad. But in order to match the power level of the most powerful current dragsters, you do need more than one, and that’s what the folks at HyperPower have done.
They have slotted four of their new megawatt motors into a dragster chassis for a grand total of 4,000 kW or 5,364 horsepower. They estimate that it should be enough oomph to push it from naught to 200 km/h (120 mph) in 0.8 seconds and to 530 km/h (330 mph) in 3.7 seconds and they also want to beat the world record which currently stands at 612 km/h (380 mph).
The motor itself wasn’t specifically designed for use in dragsters necessarily, and it could also be used to power light rail vehicles as well. Its makers call it the world’s first “extreme duty” electric motor.
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