Racing and modifying cars is not a new trend, but can you see yourself in a lets say "turbo’d hybrid"? Lets face it, hybrid and electric cars are here to stay and becoming more and more popular. We will have to adapt from the smell of racing fuel and backfire out of the exhaust to a mere silent bullet. The hybrid electric car makes perfect sense to rising fuel costs and pollution problems, but what about us that need a car that doesn’t need to be quiet or economical on fuel and kicks us into the seat every time we go for a ride?  What exactly does the future of performance tuning look like? We take a look.

What makes a car perform better than factory stock settings? For the combustion engine there are endless tuning companies that can modify and make them extremely powerful machines. There are many ways to do this as you can go with an internally built engine for lots of compression and only naturally aspirated. It can be made with forced induction such as a turbo or supercharger as well as nitrous kits that can incredibly increase horsepower output. Plus there are countless simple bolt on parts that are available. Suspension parts such as coil over shocks, adjustable control and chassis stiffening. With the endless combination and use of different parts, these modifications can even make your moms grocery getter a drag racing or road course racing car. It’s still a bit hard to picture a hybrid into all this, but there are certain benefits to these new cars that our Nissan 240SX weekend autocross car does not.

Hybrid cars have two engines. One engine is a small capacity fuel powered combustion engine and the other is an electric engine. When stopped at a light the gasoline engine is off and the car is only powered by the batteries. As you accelerate the gasoline powered engine turns on and pushes the car foreword, then turns off so that the electric engine can do the rest of the work keeping the car going without wasting fuel. Once the batteries start going low the gasoline engine starts up and runs an “alternator like” generator to charge up the batteries that power the electric motor.

For all the tuning enthusiasts out there, there is some good news! You can make these green friendly put mobiles into fire breathing green machines!

A company called Turbo Technics makes turbo systems for hybrid cars. They use a turbo that is able to build boost under a small amount of load and RPM thus enabling the small combustion engine to make more power. With low amounts of turbo lag the combustion engine can make the hybrid car much faster and perform much better all the way around the race track.

The Porsche 911GT3 Hybrid race car is an amazing example of hybrid technology put into a performance racing machine. Its usual 4.0 liter engine works with the hybrid motor to make it as fast as possible. The rpm can reach as high as 40,000 at the flywheel making it around 30,000 times more than an average race car! The great advantage that this kind of race car has is that during a long distance race it can lessen the amount of pit stops for fuel making lots of saved time during a race such as the 24 hours of Lemans.

There are more and more races that include hybrid cars such as the Tokachi 24 hour race which a hybrid powered Toyota Supra has won in Japan. Toyota is pushing very hard to build their hybrid race car to race in the 24 hours of lemans as they are very anxious to finally hold their victory. Their plan is to use special capacitors and batteries to speed up the charging and power of the power plant.
Hybrid Toyota Supra
The popularity of performance hybrid cars is growing and the competition is getting tougher and tougher. There are not many tuning companies that offer aftermarket performance parts to the public, and the gates are wide open. Like any other sports, this one is growing fast and the public will want in on it. There many advantages that these cars have which will usher in a new age of racing and performance tuning. So if you’re afraid that things will never been the same. Going “green” is going to be very exciting!

THMotorsports is caring performance parts for hybrid cars! Just take a look at the 2011 Honda CR-Z!