Cupra: The electric future of motorsport

“Cupra is a brand born in the 21st century. We call ourselves unconventional challengers because we want to do things differently.”

If you think electric motorsport lacks emotion, prepare for an awakening. The passion pouring out of Cupra’s head of racing, coupled with the incredible sounds recorded in the driving seat of their championship racing car will show you why electric racing is earning its place in the mainstream.

Cupra Racing are pioneers in the field, developing the first ever electric touring racing car before there was even a race for them to compete in. But that’s all changed, and years later Cupra has won titles in multiple events, from Formula E, to Extreme E and the FIA eTouring World Cup. In this episode we head to the company’s factory in Barcelona where they produce, test and design their racing cars, and meet the man in charge of turning Cupra’s dreams into reality, Xavi Serra.

We also hear from Brian Thompson, who heads up PTC’s CAD division. He explains how Cupra uses PTC’s CAD software CREO to stay competitive on the track.

Find out more about Cupra here.

Find out more about CREO here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Ollie Guillou. Location recording by Alan Ruiz Terol. Music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle. In this episode, we’re thrust into the electric future of motorsport. I’m your host, Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology. 

Motorsport is being redefined. The future of racing is happening now. With the growing popularity of Formula E, the FIA eTouring Car World Cup and the arrival of off-track Extreme E, electric racing has hit the mainstream and is capturing the world’s attention. As true pioneers responsible for the first ever electric touring racing car, it’s no surprise Cupra Racing are reigning champions in many of these events. Not only is the Cupra E-Racer setting the standard for high performance, but the company is also reshaping the perception of electric racing. And if you think it can’t compete with combustion, think again. As you’ll hear in this episode, the passion, the speed, and the drive to achieve more – it’s all there. 

This is where our dreams become reality, our Cupra dreams. And here, in this first part of the building, we have some finalised cars ready to deliver to our customers. And this is where we transform our Cupra road cars coming directly from the factory, and we fit them with different rims, different pedals, spoilers. Cupra is a brand born in the 21st century. We call ourselves unconventional challengers because we want to do things differently. In 2018, we had a commitment and a vision to electrify our motorsport portfolio. We started out way earlier than society or the motorsport world did. We felt a bit special at the very beginning, where we had our first-ever touring electric car, and there was nowhere to race it. There was only combustion touring car races around the world. So it was like we were pioneering the thing too early. 

Here we see the final racing car ready to be delivered to our customer. This is a process that we do from zero to delivery. And now, what we see here is a car that looks like Cupra Lyon, but with a really big wing, stretched fenders, we have a row gauge inside, we have a racing bucket seat, we don’t have any seats for passengers, any belts, any fancy things. It’s pure performance. We’re looking for pure performance and not comfort at all. So we first will have a look to the E-Racer. Here we have both cars, the cars that have been racing in the FIA World Touring Car Cup, so the competition was finished a month and a half ago. And these are the two cars that competed there. Actually this is a champion car. We are just going through an assessment of how the car ended up at the end of the season. It is a complex car that we started to design three years ago. And these are based on a road car body shell from the Cupra Leon, where we fit an electric racing battery and an electric motor that features almost 700 horsepower, all in the rear axle: it is a rear wheel–driven car with no gears, a single gear. And we have an acceleration from zero to 100 kph in only 3.2 seconds, and the motors are producing almost 1,000 newton metre torque.

Electric technology is more efficient than combustion technology, and the electric motor has an efficiency of easily above 90% whereas a combustion engine is only around 40%. But still we are learning this technology, we do believe racing will be electric, and is electric already, but will be more electric in the future. And the proof is these cars, these Cupra E-Racers, produce an amazing performance. It’s a lot of fun for the drivers when you see all of them switching from the combustion to the electric. We always say, “Let’s see how these guys will react.” And all of them say the same: “Wow.”

So here I’m sitting in a higher position because I have the whole battery, the 65-kilowatt battery under my seat, and behind my back. So we have to place these big batteries all around. I do have my cockpit with very few buttons, again, a lot on the steering wheel and a lot of information on this little dashboard where I can see the state of the SOC, state of the battery, temperatures, electric isolation, everything. Numbers in different colours. But they are important, and they all mean a lot. And we need to monitor these at all times. So the headlights and the rear lights are blinking, which means that the high voltage is on. And this green light inside means that the car is safe to be driven. So the isolation is fine. So I push the ignition button. It sounds more like a spaceship, or a rocket. Some say they it sounds like a mosquito because it’s coming from far and increasing like a mosquito in your ear.

Basically, the sound is the wheel, the gear, the motors. You don’t hear anything else than this. And for the drivers, once you are in the car you hear the tyres much more, the dust, the gravel. So it’s completely different. But the performance is the same, or even more than a combustion engine. We don’t feel the lack of the combustion noise. People tend to say electric cars are silent, and then they are not emotional. But that’s not actually the case at all. 

The future of motorsport will be electric for sure. The perception of electric motorsport has changed a lot in the past five years, I would say, from very few people defending it and a lot of haters to not maybe half and half yet, but people are starting to see that performance and electrification are a perfect match. These two worlds are converging. Cupra’s vision and the motorsport world and ecosystem is combined to one single path that will be electric. I am proud of what we have achieved so far. We are the only brand to have won electric high-level competitions on track, winning the FIA eTouring Car World Cup twice, and winning off-track as well. So we are starting to be successful there. And on the other hand, we keep on supporting our customers around the world, winning national and regional championships.

Most people at PTC and in my personal life know that I’ve a very keen interest in motorsport. And I do know that to be competitive on the track requires countless hours of effort and dedication. But a lot of the work happens in the early stages of the design of the individual vehicle components. And that’s why Cupra uses PTC’s 3D computer-aided design software, Creo. Creo is a 3D design package, it’s PTC’s flagship 3D design tool that is really present in this part of the industry, we actually have a strong presence in motorsport and in automotive in general, and Cupra has actually been a customer of ours for a long, long time. And it’s only natural that a company that has to wring every last ounce out of the performance of their vehicles for the type of market that they are in, that they would use high-fidelity 3D CAD software that allows them to digitally represent every single part of their design, right down to the last 1,000th of an inch. They’re right there in 3D so they can make sure there are no mistakes, the full design is there, they can do all the validation work and all the development, and actually have a number of design engineers collaborating across the entire vehicle design, whether it’s the design engineers working on the seat for the driver, or the suspension, or the various versions of powertrain that this team might be working on, whether it’s electric, or traditional ICE powertrain, you have to have all those different folks collaborating together on a single 3D design that they can then be sure can be handed off to manufacturing efficiently. That’s what 3D design does. When you’re doing everything digitally, you can collaborate quickly, make mistakes, quickly correct those, and move on – because mistakes made in the digital world don’t cost you much, you just keep working and collaborating with the team. So it’s great to have Cupra working, and I feel like they’ve known this for many years, and that’s why they’ve been a customer of ours for many years. It’s exciting to see what they’ve been up to recently.

Time to market for any manufacturer is critical but for the race team, you’ve got a deadline, which is the race that’s happening the next weekend or the weekend after. And so that deadline simply doesn’t move. And a lot of what we do here is about helping them streamline their processes. For a company like Cupra, or for a division of a larger company like Cupra’s racing team, especially given the domain they work in where it’s all about performance, and it’s all about getting the power to the ground, and doing it with the lightest possible vehicle they can that’s still safe, that still meets all the rigidity requirements and safety requirements, what we find is there is a significant application of technology that we call simulation technology that’s used to validate the design will meet the requirements, the stress requirements, the pounding that these vehicles have to take. You could spend weeks testing one out on a track, or you could spend a few days doing a series of simulations in the digital world to confirm that the design will meet its requirements – or, even more importantly, to realise, “Oh, wait a minute, my design is not going to meet the requirements, let me make some changes while the product is still in its digital form so I can ensure that it will, in fact, meet its design requirements.” These kinds of things can be huge double digit percent efficiency improvements for these teams. Not only are they able to minimise the amount of rework they have to do when they finally do get out and test the prototype, by doing simulation across all of the critical components in the design, but they save so much time because every time you have a broken part as part of a test, maybe for them it’s days because they can rapid prototype directly out of Creo. And it might be weeks if it’s a difficult to find material that they have to produce, or maybe they’re manufacturing some parts directly from inside Creo, even that can take one overnight day. Manufacturing complex parts can take a long time. So we really see, with teams like Cupra, a lot of application of simulation technology from PTC. And the way we’ve integrated it with Creo, it’s right there at the fingertips of the design engineer. They don’t have to go through some special process to utilise that technology. They just build the loads and boundary conditions right there inside the design and define the test exactly the way they would in the real world. But they’re doing it digitally, and they’re doing it right there on their production design, so it’s really a time saver for them. You’re talking 10%, 20%, 30% time savings in getting the design of the vehicle done, by virtue of the fact that we’ve integrated the simulation technology so deeply into the design process for customers like Cupra to use.

This goes beyond what we would say is the traditional sort of simulation work structural analysis. In the electric vehicle world, where we’ve got batteries with high-energy densities, and keeping them cool is essential, it’s also about simulating airflow and the actual way in which you can manage those thermal properties as well as the structural ones.

It’s interesting in that world where airflow around the outside of the car is not just about having enough downforce for the vehicle any more. It’s also about, “Are we getting enough air to the underside of the car where we have some fins that are there strictly for providing cooling to the battery pack?” I’m just using that as an example, I’m not sure if Cupra cools the battery in that way, they might use an active system. But the point is that this for systems like that there’s actually a lot more thermal management and certainly that type of simulation is also possible right there inside Creo as part of the design process, like other more obvious types of simulations that you might have that would be your normal part of motorsport for decades. Because there’s a new genre of simulations that design engineers have to do – thermal analysis, fluid flow analysis – they are all possible as part of the Creo suite of products. And so it’s great to see Cupra taking advantage of them.