In conversation | Jim Edwards 18 The demise of the e-booster project steered Edwards inevitably into pure battery electric projects, the first of which was providing race motors for an electric race series – although he still cannot disclose which one. Using an existing design, which had already gone through the design process, Edwards was tasked with managing the build and the delivery. With that complete, he then moved onto arguably one of his highest profile products: the Aston Martin Valkyrie. Designed by Adrian Newey, when he was still at Red Bull, the 1000 bhp V12engined hypercar was created to mimic the performance of an F1 car as closely as possible – but without Edwards, it quite literally would never have got started. “I did the motor that sits between the clutch and the gearbox and starts the engine,” he explains. “It also delivers push-to-pass capability; it’s a generator; it’s an alternator; it provides the reverse gear capability – because the main engine gearbox does not have a reverse gear – and because it’s a straight-cut gearbox, it provides gear speed matching on the gearshifts. It also allows the car to run at low speed – up to about 12 kph – on electric only. The motor was only 20 kg, but it was 120 kW and it sat on the end of a V12 quite happily for its whole life. For a hypercar, it was a great solution!” The automotive sector was a major part of Helix’s work at that point, but over time the client base has evolved from the original motorsport and F1 focus into a far wider remit, covering everything from defence to marine applications. Automotive, in fact, has dropped away since the Valkyrie project, with more and more OEMs bringing EV development in house, but Helix is still as busy as ever, applying that cuttingedge motorsport-driven mentality to many different industries. Edwards has risen to become chief engineer and is inspired by the acceleration of technology made possible by the company’s background. “Because we’re situated in the heart of the motorsport and F1 triangle, we’ve got access to all of these manufacturers with incredible machining capabilities and an ability to do the ‘what-ifs’ where nobody else would go,” he explains. “We also have a lot of people with a motorsport background in our business – there’s a tidal flow between us and the F1 teams – so our base DNA is in the high-performance arena and I think that is our key differentiator. “There has really been a drive to accelerate technology through motorsport, then filter it down into the more conventional motors. The first motor we did for the race series right back when I started, for example, was making about 100 kW continuous. But within two years, by integrating some of the motorsport technology, we had a motor that was doing 200 kW continuous in the same size. Now in that space, we have 400 kW continuous. So, that technology has moved massively in what many see as a static market.” Small and light Edwards’ core performance targets are exactly the same in every project: reduce the size and reduce the weight – the two focus factors that take highest priority in motorsport. “Our background is in space- and mass-critical projects, so that philosophy has been built into our motors,” he continues. “Moving to something like a train is only a matter of dropping the peak temperatures that you want to see, to give longer life on some of the insulation materials, and suddenly you have a motor that is a tenth or a twentieth of the size of a conventional train motor.” The truly ‘blue sky’ projects carried out at Helix are under the wing of its experimental ‘X Division’, the work of which Edwards describes as “the search July/August 2026 | E-Mobility Engineering Keeping the motor installation weight down is a key criterion for Edwards
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