I went for a deep dive into Czinger's onboards.
This is the 21C prototype they used to set 2:11:33 at COTA in 2021.
The interior is of the old type, with racing steering wheel and one big red button added to it. Strangely, this button never gets pressed on video, so I have no idea what it does.
However, the button right bellow it does get used a lot. It's labeled E-boost and driver uses it to manually deploy electric boost on straights. Here you can see him boosting his tits out:
Strange thing happened at the back straight, where instead of upshifting to another gear, the car just
sits at the limiter for full six seconds! Without overlay, it's hard to say for certain what gear he's in and what speed he's doing, but if you compare it with Venom F5 in
this split screen video (where the Hennessey is clearly traveling at a higher rate of speed), the 21C has to be doing way bellow 290 kph, or even as low as 280 kph, and possibly only using up to 5th gear (there's two upshifts and I assume that he starts with 3rd gear on the entry).
Why is this in any way relevant to current car, closer to production version?
Well, we never got to see the onboard video from when they revisited COTA in 2024, setting 2:10.7 lap time. I think they are hiding something from us. Was the car capped to a much lower top speed again? Or did it run out of battery? It's one thing to show to public strange behavior from prototype stage, but to display some of that in a pre-production car would obviously make them look bad.
Now let's talk Laguna Seca.
I downloaded their most recent onboard video in 4K, so that I could read the dashboard, and here's some unusual stuff that I saw:
- The ESC/TC off warning light comes on in turn 6 and stays on for the remainder of the lap.
- Gear indicator momentarily glitches out and gets stuck on "5" before turn 5, then resets itself in turn 10, only to miss the next gearshift, and finally get back on track until the finish line.
This is the state of charge:
The car starts the lap with 67% crossing the line, but it drops to 31% before the Corkscrew. From there, it never really recovers and he practically doesn't use any boost at all coming out of the last two corners. Why he doesn't want to dip bellow 30%, I have no idea.
So despite Czinger boasting about high C-rate battery type (lithium-titanium-oxide), the regen is not all that impressive.
You tell me if you think he run out of battery at COTA, which is 5.5 km vs 3.6 km of Laguna Seca. Do you see now why there isn't full onboard?
The difference between boost and no boost is significant:
(crossing the finish line)
start of the lap: 188 kph @ 67% Soc
end of the lap: 219 kph @ 31% SoC
BTW, if you think they used this red button to deploy boost, that's probably not the case, as there is a short clip from 2024 COTA run, where the button is on camera (not being pressed) as the SoC drops. The car has to have some sort of automatic e-boost deployment strategy.
Also, it's pretty wild how they use the car in some sort of developer mode with bunch of incomprehensible flags on screen:
For completion's sake, this is the screen they used for their Goodwood hillclimb run:
Much more user friendly.
