Becoming the first national championship to fully electrify is no small feat for the Scandinavian Touring Car Championship. The FIA’s ETCR championship that fell over after just two seasons had manufacturer support, whereas in this case there isn’t any input from manufacturers, so I’d say it is a bold leap to take. But as a fan of EVs, I was naturally curious about it, and when I was offered the opportunity to try out the STCC’s test mule at Mantorp Park I jumped at the chance.
The prototype PWR002 is a converted TCR racer, but features all of the same equipment that next year’s fleet of 12 410kW rear-wheel-drive cars will have. These will incorporate the original model’s chassis and be fitted with electric motors and other spec components by EPWR, which is part of the same group as the PWR Racing team that has won four of the last six TCR Scandinavia titles with Robert Dahlgren. The Cupra Born, Tesla Model 3, BMW i4 and VW ID.3 are in build, although the latter currently doesn’t have a team or drivers associated with it.
Having arrived at the track I was introduced to all the guys from STCC and EPWR, including Dahlgren and EPWR’s technical leader Janne Ljungberg. Dahlgren will race the Cupra next year and helped out with the initial PWR001 that came out in 2018. But once the 002 came along and had its first demonstration run at Mantorp with Joel Eriksson last year, EPWR wanted to keep it a bit more separate and distanced itself for fairness to the competitors, so it’s not like PWR has done all the development and will blitz everyone.
After watching some onboard video of the track to get an idea of how tight the corners were, and a run through of the controls from Janne, by 11am it was time to get out on track. I did two five- or six-lap runs – I apologise to Janne because I completely forgot to count what lap I was on in my first run! – which was enough to start getting a bit of a feel for the car.
The DTM Mercedes C-Class I drove in the 2008 McLaren Autosport BRDC Award evaluations was the only time I’d previously driven a touring car, but at the end of the day it’s a rear-wheel-drive racing car with a roof over the top, so not too dissimilar to a GT car or a Porsche Cup car that I have driven before.
My only prior experience with an electric racer that wasn’t clearly an ultra-refined Formula E single-seater, with 50 engineers working full-time on the project, was the four-wheel-drive RX2e electric junior rallycross car. I got to drive it at Calafat last year as a leaving gift from Mahindra, as they have a technical partnership with QEV who built the cars. That was where my mind was going before driving the PWR002 when I was thinking about it being a touring car that you’re going to smash the kerbs in and feel the body pitching under braking. And that pretty much matched up to where I ended with my impression.
Source: Autosport