Thunder pierces miles of bluebird midwestern air. The smell of burnt rubber coats 200,000 tongues. Exhaust fumes singe eyelashes. The Indy 500 race has been one of the largest single-day sporting events in the world for over a century, and a cornerstone of American culture. What does it mean for the sleekest, fastest cars in gas-guzzling America to go hybrid this year?
Motorsports have always driven innovation in road cars - standard commercial automotive features like the rearview mirror, seat belts, semi-automatic gearboxes, automatic transmissions, and direct injection were all first used on the racetrack. Historically, the rivalry between Honda and Chevrolet manufacturing has fueled ingenuity in IndyCar. But this year, Honda and Chevrolet came together to pioneer a new era for IndyCar: all of the cars are hybrid.
The new hybrid system used in this year’s IndyCars marks a technical leap forward, increasing the cars’ power by more than 800 horsepower. But the cars haven’t been any faster, since any would-be speed increase is offset by an extra 120 lbs of hybrid engine. Why, then, would IndyCar mandate a change that doesn't improve the overall performance of their cars?
The answer is that the hybrid transition represents IndyCar's desire to stay relevant: both with its audience and in the changing auto industry. As Charlie Kimball, a former IndyCar series driver for the team A.J. Foyt Enterprises, put it:, "in racing, the saying has always been win on Sunday, sell on Monday."
The Hybrid Revolution
Since the launch of the Toyota Prius in 1997, manufacturers have marketed hybrids as a dependable, family-friendly option for the somewhat eco-conscious. Meanwhile all-electric vehicles––like Teslas––have always been marketed as a leap toward a futuristic, Jetsons-like world powered by clean energy. Hybrids never captured the same slick, ultra-modern appeal.
Customers still want the sustainable, tech-forward option, but recently E.V. material and power demands have taxed drivers and manufacturers along the supply chain. The demand for hybrid cars in the U.S. skyrocketed in 2024, with market shares of hybrids (9.1%) surpassing E.Vs (6.8%) for the first time. At the same time, slowing demand for E.V.s is putting plans on the backburner. In October 2023, both G.M. and Honda scrapped plans to co-develop affordable sub-$30,000 electric vehicles after experiencing slower-than-expected market conditions.
Once a beacon of sustainability, fully electric vehicles are now experiencing severe logistical headwinds. Infrastructure for charging and battery construction pose serious barriers to surmount.
To achieve California’s goal of putting seven million E.V.s on its roads by 2030, it would need to construct 129,000 new stations annually over the next seven years—a rate more than seven times the current pace. But even if California could build charging stations, the purportedly "clean" energy that powers E.V.s is still unclean. The most common charging station power source is the electric grid: a network of power plants and lines that generate electricity from fossil fuel sources like petroleum, natural gas, and nuclear power. To power those millions of new charging stations, California would need to triple its energy generation capacity and deploy new alternative energy sources (like wind and solar) at nearly five times the pace of the last decade.
An Intermediary Step
IndyCar is pioneering what Kimball called an “intermediate step”. While there is no perfectly sustainable solution to commercial vehicle demand, hybrid technology does resolve some of the infrastructure and battery concerns of E.V.s. In a fully hybrid vehicle, an electric motor - combustion engine combo eliminates the need for charging. Hybrids emit up to 20% less carbon dioxide in a lifetime than gas-powered cars, while their batteries are ten times smaller than E.V. those in E.V.s.
In theory, E.V.s powered by renewable electricity would be the most sustainable option for personal vehicles. But in the short term, hybrids may be a necessary transition product for Americans while some of the kinks are worked out with E.V.s. Kimball said, “they’re a great halfway house to develop the tech…200 years of steam engines were the mechanical foundations for internal combustion engines, IndyCar can [similarly] develop the tech in a hybrid car that will then be transferable to an E.V. order.”
The New Models
While Americans test their hybrids out on the highway, IndyCar is testing a new kind of hybrid engine with a very specific use case: rapid acceleration and deceleration on high-speed racetracks.
Instead of lithium battery-powered hybrid engines, the IndyCars are using Skeleton Technologies supercapacitor––also called ultracapacitor––technology this year. As Kenny Krajnick, the lead hybrid engineer for the Arrow McLaren IndyCar team, said, "The lithium battery approach is going to be able to store way more energy in a given volume, but it's not going to be able to dissipate it [deploy energy] or accept it [regenerate energy] as quickly as the supercapacitor system." While electric motors deliver a sustained, steady power supply, the supercapacitors deliver quick bursts of high power, more like deploying a flash on a camera than running a flashlight. Perfect for race cars.
IndyCar’s ultimate hybrid goal is more than performance enhancing: it's also to pioneer sustainable automotive technology. When IndyCars accelerate and decelerate around the corners of a track, they lose thermal energy through the tailpipes. Kimball said “having a system like the hybrids that takes that kinetic energy and turns it into electrical energy to fill capacitors is huge.” In other words, supercapacitors in hybris are able to scavenge energy that would be lost otherwise. And while a Tesla battery has a lifespan of only 3,000 to 5,000 charge/discharge cycles, the Skeleton supercapacitors can last over one million cycles.
The supercapacitor system may not enhance performance this year in IndyCar while engineers are still working out the kinks. But IndyCar teams hope that with time, there will be an opportunity to integrate the extra weight of the hybrid system more seamlessly and truly enhance performance.
Coming to a Garage Near You?
It is unlikely that the same supercapacitor cell IndyCar uses will be used in the commercial auto industry in the near future, given the packaging constraints on a road car. While small supercapacitor cells can make a big power difference to a 1,800 lb IndyCar, enhancing a 5,000 lb road car would require a much larger unit. Krajnick said, "You still need to have a trunk; you still need to fit four passengers in your car. So because of the amount of energy we can store per unit volume with supercapacitors, you need way more room for the same energy storage size as a lithium battery."
In a recent episode of Fully Charged Show, Taavi Madiberk, the CEO & Co-Founder of Skeleton Technologies, said the most likely scenario for commercialization in the automotive industry would be the combination of batteries and supercapacitors together: a lithium battery pack for long-range driving and a supercapacitor pack for fast charging.
But supercapacitor technology is already having an impact in other sectors. “You’d be surprised,” said Krajnick, “there are a lot of applications outside of racing for supercapacitors.” Today, supercapacitors are already being used to stabilize power grids, and have potential applications in robotics, aerospace, consumer electronics, and public transportation. Krajnick used electric trains to illustrate public transportation as an ideal stop-and-go use case, where “every time the train stops to let people on or off, it connects to a supercapacitor bank that quickly charges the train so it can continue driving.” Delivery driving in cities is another, similar implementation.
It’s a long road forward, and at this stage IndyCar’s transition to hybrids is mostly symbolic. But as Kimball put it, "For the first time, consumers can say, 'Hey, the IndyCars are hybrid. Now, I've got a hybrid at home. I'm just like an IndyCar driver.' That's a really big leap, but it's a leap that wasn't possible before the hybrids came."
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Sophia is a senior and concurrent coterm in Earth Systems from the Santa Cruz mountains of Northern California. Her studies focus on ocean ecology, aquaculture and fisheries science. She is an avid traveler and a humble poet.
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