Ineos 1:59 Challenge: Electric car will be used to control pace

INEOS 1:59 Challenge car [Courtesy]

Peter Vint, Performance Team Manager for the INEOS 1:59 Challenge, said an electric car was the best – and only – way to ensure Kipchoge ran at the same speed for the entire 26.2 miles.

“Anyone who has ever run a marathon will know just how hard it is to run the whole distance at the exact same pace,” he said. “And while elite athletes are very much better at it, a marathon distance run in just a few seconds under two hours requires exceptional accuracy.”

Peter said Kipchoge had a tendency to want to go faster or slower at certain times during a marathon.

INEOS 1:59 Challenge car [Courtesy]

“The problem is that any variation in pace can cause energetic demands that are more difficult to deal with than having a steady pace,” he said. “And it’s a well-understood edict of distance running that the fastest times are set when the pace is even.”

To ensure Kipchoge does run at the same pace, a car will travel in front of the runners at a constant speed.

Sounds straightforward, but it has been anything but that.

Early on Peter and his team, who were working with skilled engineers, discovered that cruise control systems on cars are not 100 per cent accurate.

“Very few cars have an accelerator resolution that can give you better than 0.1 kph,” he said. “If you extrapolate that over the course of a 42km race, that ends up being seconds of time that are left unaccounted for.”

In short, if the timing car ran 0.1kph too slow over two hours, it could be the difference between Kipchoge finishing the race in under or over two hours.

“That is a big enough error to derail the entire challenge,” Peter said.

So, Peter set his team a goal: to get Kipchoge over the line in a time accurate to within a second.

“We certainly didn’t want to be outside of a second on either side of our planned finish time,” he said. “If we had it slightly too fast, then ultimately what we would be doing is pulling more and more energy out of Kipchoge.”

The RML Group, a high-performance automotive engineering company, was hired to deliver that precision.

They began by choosing a fully-electric SUV with plenty of space onboard for all the equipment needed for the race.

“There will be no emissions out of the back to upset any of the runners,” said Chris Francis, who heads up the Powertrain division at RML’s HQ in Wellingborough in the UK. The team at RML have worked flat out to ensure Eliud’s journey to the finish line is a smooth one. []