Were very fortunate to have a great partnership with our Lipo manufacturer so I can ask them many questions and understand what makes a for a better Lipo.
So far I know that the materials used and the C rate will have an impact on cycle life. Our 24C packs use 60% Japanese matrials and 40% Chinese. This allows us to keep the price low on these packs. Our 25C , 28C and 40C+ packs use 80% Japanese and 20% Chinese materials. This makes the price higher but also means the packs will have maximum cycle life.
So when buying a Lipo for racing there should be 2 things to consider. One is performance and the other is cycle life.
Our manufacturer has done some cycle life testing for us and it consists of 100 consecutive cycles at 20C discharge and you then calculate the capacity drop in percentage.
Our new 40C+ cell stayed at 90% after 100 cycles. We tested a competitors cell and it was at 74%.
Here is what I would reccomend for a good test that would give the comsumers/racers the info they need to better help them choose a Lipo.
1 - C rate and capacity test to see if what the manufacturer claims is true.
2 - GFX cycle info to show the numbers and graph at 35 amps.
3 - Cycle life test to show how the packs hold up.
If a magazine wants to do these tests and need help I would gladly help them.
The cycle life test if very hard to do as our supplier does it consecutively using an expensive charger/discharger system.
C rate will have an impact on the cycle life but materials used and how they are used will have the biggest impact.
Below are screenshots of the cycle results on the cycle life test. The equipment encountered an issue and needed to be restarted after a 10 minute delay. So there was 40 cycles done in a row then 67 more cycles done after the the issue.
This is using a 40C+ as you can see cycle one the pack had 4840mAh and on cycle 66 which is actually cycle 106 the capacity is 4354 so this means it retained 89.9% of it's capacity after 106 consecutive cycles.