Powering a Custom Motor With Large Air Gap

Hello,

I am developing a custom motor and am trying to control it with VESC.

The motor works on a normal hobby BLDC controller, but drawn to VESC since I like that it has speed control and FOC built in.

The motor has a large air gap. The magnetic field is about 1/5th as strong as most typical motors. My theory is that the field is not strong enough for the FOC control algorithm to figure out the speed or position of the motor so it ends up just spazzing out.

Here are some videos of me trying to run the motor:

Running Motor AutoTune: https://youtu.be/9DKXjXEN8wg

Example 1 - Motor twitching but not able to spin: 

Example 2 - The motor commutation seemed random, but it was generating enough torque to keep spinning once i set it in motion with an initial push.
The speed detection was all wrong. It was spinning about 400 RPM (out of a commanded 1000), and the wheel size was set to 100mm as a direct drive.
It Should have been displaying
https://youtu.be/LuqvYuakjws

I am thinking about adding hall effect sensors to help it figure out the motor state. Could I set up the motor so it always uses hall effect sensors, even up to 10,000 or so RPM?

Thanks in advance,
Nathan