I have never seen a car do a better donut from standstill than this heavily modified, electrified Audi S3 with Formula E motors called the Schaeffler 4ePerformance Concept.
Schaeffler, a motorsports company known for engineering vehicles that can be raced backwards almost as quickly as they can drive forwards, has been showing off its latest monster, the 4ePerformance Concept, which is an electrified Audi S3 with four Formula E-sourced motors—they come from the ABT Schaeffler FE01 race car—powering the wheels.
Schaeffler claims the car has 880 kW of power, or over 1,180 horsepower, and two batteries couple for a total capacity of 64 kWh.
And it can do donuts like this, via Dan Prosser on Twitter:
Dan followed up with a brief explanation of how it works:
Uh, it is most certainly NOT pointless. It’s cool as hell.
As explained on the company’s website, each of the car’s electric motors is connected to its respective wheel with a “spur gear unit,” and each pair of motors on each axle share a gearbox. This effectively allows for selective torque vectoring of each wheel, which is how you can get the front-left wheel to spin forward while the rear-right wheel spins in reverse.
It all makes for as near a perfect donut as is imaginable, and it’s beautiful.