Panoz wants 24 Hours of Le Mans win with pure-electric racer

Panoz has announced it wants to become the first race team in 94 years to enter a pure-electric race car in the Le Mans 24 Hour.

Revealing a concept for the car it hopes to campaign, the new Panoz GT-EV racer will also spin-off a wild road-going hypercar.

Created by Green4U Technology Group - a company the US race team owns - the advanced concept for the racer, Panoz hopes, will enter in the race featuring two electric motors, one driving the front axle, the other the rear.

Combined they produce more than 450kW and should provide a top speed of around 290km/h, the race team claims.

To rid the racer of race-losing charging downtime, the GT-EV comes with interchangeable battery packs that are claimed to provide almost 180km of range at race pace and should be able to be swapped in the same time it takes to fuel a conventional racer.

Helping extend the range further, all four wheels claw back a bit of energy through regenerative braking.

Built around a lightweight carbon-fibre back bone chassis, the futuristic Panoz race car features an offset closed cockpit that, itself, is made using carbon-fibre.

The weight of the advanced racer is reportedly less than 1300kg with the driver on board and batteries fitted.

Bring on the road car
Designed by Peter Stevens, the man most famous for the McLaren F1, it's not known how the road car will take shape, although because of the placement of the battery cells it's likely Panoz will be forced to place the passenger behind the driver.

Panoz has not announced when it plans to race the GT-EV but it's not the first time the car maker has brought pioneering new technology and ideas to motorsport.

Back in 1998 it developed one of the world's first hybrid race cars.

"Sparky" (the Panoz Q9 GTR-1 Hybrid) in the end was deemed too heavy and slow for the famous endurance event but helped pave the way for others, including Audi and Toyota, to introduce the fuel-saving benefits of a hybrid to racing.

In 2012 Panoz once again shocked the motorsport world when it teamed up with race car designer Ben Bowlby and built the DeltaWing. Again, success wasn't forthcoming and it ended up crashing out of Le Mans on lap 75 but not after proving its worth by lapping at LMP2 pace, despite being propelled by a low-power 224kW four-cylinder turbo engine.

It's thought Panoz will once again use the "Garage 56" rule to enter the pure-electric racer that allows experimental vehicles to compete.