Over the past few years, Portland, Oregon-based Cascadia Motion has been quietly establishing itself as one of the industry leaders in high performance EV powertrain engineering. Originally founded by Larry Rinehart as Rinehart Motion Systems back in 2002, the company was initially focused on designing and supplying kinetic energy recovery systems for Formula One before moving into EV motor and inverter development for commercial high-performance applications. In 2019, the company was acquired by Borg Warner and renamed Cascadia Motion. Shortly thereafter, a project was set in motion that would showcase Cascadia Motion’s technologies on a global stage.

“The idea was to put together a full vehicle integration,” says Cascadia Motion senior applications and controls engineer Travis Gintz. “Kind of a test bed that would show off our inverters and control systems in a vehicle that was built for the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb.”

The team selected a Palatov D2 for the task, a two-seater sportscar that’s underpinned by a chromoly space frame chassis with a double wishbone suspension setup. Normally motivated by a 430hp, 6.2-liter LS3 V8 crate motor, the 1900-pound coupe was already a formidable machine in its standard specification, but Cascadia Motion sought to take its capability several steps further. “We gave Palatov our CAD models and they modified their existing D2 chassis to accommodate our motors, inverters, and battery pack,” Gintz explains. “And then from there we handled the electrical integration of the systems.”

The new powertrain consists of three Cascadia Motion inverters that are capable of handling in excess of 300 kW each, along with three motors – two for the rear differential and another one up front – that generate a total system output of about 1 megawatt. “That translates to about 1360 horsepower,” he says. “And we used a battery from a local company called EVDrive that was about 80 KWh.” To keep the hardware at optimal temperatures during runs, each component is liquid-cooled by an air-to-water heat exchanger.

The car made its debut at the 2019 Pikes Peak Hill Climb event, and with pro driver Greg Tracy at the helm, the team placed 2nd in the Unlimited class and ninth overall amongst a field of anything-goes, purpose-built race cars – EV-powered or otherwise.

The car made its debut at the 2019 Pikes Peak Hill Climb event, and with pro driver Greg Tracy at the helm, the team placed 2nd in the Unlimited class and ninth overall amongst a field of anything-goes, purpose-built race cars – EV-powered or otherwise.

Gintz notes that the Cascadia Motion Palatov D2 hadn’t seen much on-track action since the hill climb event, though, so when the opportunity came up to run it at Sonoma Raceway during Holley High Voltage 2022, the team decided to bring the car out to have some fun with it. “We asked Greg to come drive the car again – we really just wanted to see what it could do.”

The D2 ran 20-minute hot lap sessions much like its internal-combustion counterparts are accustomed to at a typical track day. Gintz says that the car’s ability to handle sustained track abuse is due in part to the teams’ deliberate effort to build significant headroom into powertrain’s design. “One of the reasons that we chose such a big battery pack for the car is because you not only have to have enough energy to complete a run, you also have to have enough voltage and current in the battery pack – the performance will suffer otherwise. During development we did some simulations and determined the number of cells in series and parallel that we had to put in there in order to get the power we needed, and that was the leading reason that we chose an 80 KWh battery pack. We didn’t need a pack that big to get up the hill – we needed it to reliably deliver the power.”

As impressive as the car was on Sonoma’s road course, the drag strip is where it really turned some heads. “We figured we’d just give it a try – we had no expectations going in because the car isn’t set up for the drag strip.” And with no traction control systems involved, the car put on a pretty spectacular smoke show during its first pass.

“Greg laid into it and waited for the tires to hook up, but the rear tires didn’t actually do that until about halfway down the track,” he recalls. “And the front tires were spinning for basically the entire run. We ran [email protected] MPH during that pass, which is the maximum speed that the car can do with its current gearing. But we were burning rubber the whole time.”

With a better feel for the amount of traction he had to work with, Tracy’s second run was a much cleaner operation. A [email protected] MPH pass down the quarter-mile is indisputably quick, but Gintz notes that the car is likely capable of much more. “The car was on street tires, and even on the second run, the fronts were spinning more than halfway down the track. And with the gearing that we have, we run out of RPM in the motors at about 150 mph. There was no reason that the car needed to go any faster at Pikes Peak; even on the fastest straights we’d only see around 130 or 140.”

He does note that the team has already done some work that would likely benefit any future trips down the quarter mile, though. “During development we took it out to Bonneville. We didn’t get an official time at the event due to the conditions that year – they were only allowing returning champions to do the four-mile run in order to defend their titles. But we had the car geared for top speed, and they allowed us to do a one-mile shakedown pass. After we completed the run, the officials came up to us because they thought their timing equipment was malfunctioning. They asked Greg what speed he had seen on the car’s display, and when he told them it was around 204 mph, they realized that their equipment was just fine.”