Autocross Event with my EV on race tires!

My Nissan Leaf Forum

Help Support My Nissan Leaf Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

VitaminJ

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 3, 2017
Messages
397
Location
Morrison, CO
Report from today's autocross with the Leaf. All in all was a lot of fun considering the intended purpose of the Nissan Leaf and the on-paper stats (107hp, 3400lbs). Running 225/45/17 BFG Rivals (the most competitive tire in the class) I was about 3 seconds off of a Mini Cooper S with decent tires and placed 13th out of 23. I was 4 seconds off the lead car.

The weight of the car and the open differential really hurt overall performance. Aftermarket suspension would help a lot, but only so much. Basically at low speeds the inside tire would spin like crazy unless you took care to feather the throttle. It is really odd not having engine noise as feedback, but on the other hand you can hear every little noise the tires make.

In the end removing the fuses for traction and stability control and ABS was key, the car will not let you throw it around like this with the systems enabled, and with them off I noticed no bad tendencies or problems except a bunch of warning lights on the dash. I have a Leaf Box but I unplugged it as not to introduce any unwanted tendencies not prepared for by the Nissan engineers.

We towed it 200 miles round trip otherwise it would not have been possible. We started at 100% charge and ended about 50% after about 10 minutes total of running! Nearest charger was L2 and 25 miles away.

6XykkgX.jpg


ef91MkB.jpg


N3r9G6R.jpg
 
Over the 10 runs we had the car averaged 1.5 mi/kwh and we covered 10 miles total including rolling back to the paddock and ended with 50% charge :mrgreen:

Check out some action shots!

AAjSVjq.jpg


rorFmpj.jpg


iCcvnoT.jpg


JcSfctC.jpg


OJDrCGf.jpg


YX9BoVd.jpg
 
No, one of the reasons I bought the Leaf is that I wouldn't have to spend any money on it for 10s of thousands of miles. I put together the wheels/tires used and have already listed them for sale. It was a fun experiment but that's about it. I have a Mazda Miata that I play with normally. It's not a horrible car for auto-x but will never be competitive without stripping out the interior and ruining it as a daily driver.
 
Haha there were quite a few hurt feelings :lol: I beat 10 people in my class but my class was the slowest of all and also highly competitive. I ended up beating about 40 other drivers for the whole day! Like I said the Leaf is not completely horrible, I've definitely driven worse cars. It's way too heavy in stock form, though. It needs a limited slip differential also, however at least they built the car with equal-length driveshafts so the tire spin is pretty much identical cornering left to right.

Here are some more photos posted today:

MLSYvXW.jpg


Y6B6WjL.jpg


lOeBDzx.jpg
 
If only we could find a way through software to tap into the extra power in the Leaf motor. From what I gather (there is a guy who swapped a Leaf motor into a CRX and designed his own controller) it's capable of 300+ HP.
 
VitaminJ said:
Haha there were quite a few hurt feelings :lol:
Feel free to dish any stories!

Where is that track? I know nothing about auto racing except what's on the For Formula One's Sake podcast, but I grew up in Littleton so any Colorado trivia is of interest.
 
pyromancy5 said:
If only we could find a way through software to tap into the extra power in the Leaf motor.
It would be awesome if there was an "overboost" button on the steering wheel that gave an extra , say, 50 or 70 foot-lbs of torque for one or two seconds followed by a short refractory period.
 
BuckMkII said:
pyromancy5 said:
If only we could find a way through software to tap into the extra power in the Leaf motor.
It would be awesome if there was an "overboost" button on the steering wheel that gave an extra , say, 50 or 70 foot-lbs of torque for one or two seconds followed by a short refractory period.


I have no idea how these things work, but I would love to see if a tuner could remap the throttle controller and exceed the programmed limits.
 
Awesome! I used to Autocross in Atlanta all the time. I still have one Saturn from those days. Would be hilarious to give my Leaf a go.

Nice job.
 
Awesome story! Great photos and from the action shots, I can tell you were having a blast of a time :)
Some questions if you don't mind:
What's the weight of your wheel?
What's the offset? did you use any spacers??
What brand of tires were you using?
 
Back
Top