What broke a class record at Lime Rock Park? Not any ordinary 350Z, but one with hybrid power. Wait, what?
During a Gridlife event at the storied Connecticut track, Sasha Anis laid down a sub-52-second lap in his gas-electric Nissan, beating a heavily modded C6 Corvette by 2.7 seconds.
Hybrid Power: The Why
The car is known as KERS Kels–its name paying homage to the hybrid system used in Formula 1 plus a shortening of car’s real name, Kelsey–and started out as a conventional, gas-powered race car in what is now called the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge. Sasha purchased it in 2007.
“I wanted to keep the 350Z in my business but keep it relevant,” explains Sasha, who operates Mountain Pass Performance, a firm with a solid reputation of squeezing speed out of Teslas. “I also had done an EV swap on a Lotus Evora.
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“The next step was to try to combine what I had learned on that project with this race car, which was quite a fast car, but we needed more power to be competitive in any time attack kind of environment,” he continues. “The engine had about 500 horsepower, which was about half of what some other cars have.”
Sasha could have supercharged, turbocharged or LS-swapped the 350Z. Instead, he went with a hybrid system.
What was once a street-stock endurance racer has become one of Gridlife’s fastest entries. Photograph Courtesy Chris Sullivan/Mountain Pass Performance
“The hybrid system is not best for performance,” Sasha admits. “From a business and education perspective and also from just curiosity, it was a science experiment I wanted to try.”
Sasha set a goal for the project: He wanted to run with a GT3 car at his home track, Canadian Tire Motorsport Park.
Hybrid Power: The How
The Nissan’s hybrid system starts with a custom-designed, axial-flux Phi-Power motor. The original battery came out of a BMW i8, but Mountain Pass Performance has since developed its own, upping the voltage from 400 volts to 500. The Cascadia Motion CM200 inverter converts the DC power into AC. Mountain Pass Performance wrote all of the control software in-house for the hybrid system, which runs on a Motec M150 using Motec’s M1 Build development environment.
The Phi-Power electric motor takes the place of the clutch and flywheel within the bellhousing and adds about 200 horsepower to the 500-horsepower V6. Photograph Courtesy Mountain Pass Performance
If all those electronics sound like a lot of weight, you’re right. Sasha says they add up to about 300 pounds. To help offset that mass, he eliminated the alternator, starter, clutch and flywheel.
Gas power now comes from a 4.2-liter version of Nissan’s popular VQ35HR engine. To get things moving, the electric motor must overcome the car’s weight and the engine’s insanely high 15:1 compression engine. Sasha still has to shift gears, though, as the power now goes through a six-speed sequential transmission.
Photograph Courtesy Mountain Pass Performance
“This way I have 60 to 70 pounds out of the front of the car that I can trade out with the battery and the motor,” Sasha notes of the powertrain deletions. “The car used to weigh 2660 and now we’re at 2860, but we’ve gone from a 55% front weight to 51% front weight.
“The majority of the weight went on the rear axle,” he continues. “The balance of the car is much better than it used to be. If we were to have added 200 horsepower before, it would be like a pickup truck spinning its tires everywhere.”
The car also has four-wheel steering–Sasha didn’t wish to reveal the OEM source of the hardware–and regenerative braking, both of which can be fine-tuned via controls mounted on the steering wheel.
Photograph Courtesy Mountain Pass Performance
“The whole car is like driving a video game,” Sasha says. “It’s got motorsport ABS, good traction control, paddle shifters. You can try stuff that you would never in a million years try if you didn’t have all those different systems helping you.”
Did Sasha meet his goal of matching a GT3’s performance? In 2008, just after he first got the car, he ran a 1:33 lap at his home track. In 2020, with the new hybrid system, he did a 1:16–just a second short of his goal, although that was before he updated the body and changed tire sizes.
Hybrid Power: The Future
With speed like that and the proliferation of hybrids in production cars, will we see more of them in motorsports? Not yet, Sasha believes.
“The problem is overheating, because you’re trying to make the system as small and light as you can,” he replies. “The battery and motor size is so small that the system overheats quickly at maximum power, so you get one or two good laps and then you have to back off.
“To give perspective, with our hybrid system, to make nearly 200 more horsepower, we added 300 pounds, and it scales from there. There’s certainly the potential for a hybrid system to be better or as good as a combustion engine on the race track.”
Photograph Courtesy Mountain Pass Performance
Furthermore, installing a hybrid system into a car is quite unlike the ubiquitous LS swap. No kits exist to do a hybrid install. There are no DIY videos on YouTube. Sasha’s hybrid setup required many pricy, custom-made hard components combined with custom programming.
Certainly, there’s some interest in hybrids at the club level, Sasha says, but its motorsports applications will depend on the aftermarket’s investment and, most importantly, customer demand.
