Zero/Agni wins at Infineon after battle royale with Lightning Motors

Zero/Agni (#22) and Lightning Motors (#80) battle royale, photo by David Herron

The racing industry knows how to do winners circles. A typical motorcycle racing weekend will see a half dozen or so races, each with their own winners circle. It's a ritualized performance, the bikes ride up, riders get on the podium, they shake a champagne bottle and spray everyone, and afterwards have a press conference talking about the race. Sometimes a winners circle will have vastly more significance than others. Todays inaugural race of the 2010 TTXGP electric motorcycle series was one of those races whose significance may be truly historic. But, as if to bring some reality to this writers thinking, on the way home a coffee stop in San Francisco demonstrates the big news was another race, Bay to Breakers, a uniquely San Francisco tradition.

While the TTXGP races may not have the earth shattering society shaping significance required to usher in a thousand years of nirvana, it is the strongest demonstration one could get that electric motorcycle racing is here, and that electric motorcycle races have just as much excitement as gasoline powered races. The winning bike, the Zero/Agni bike ridden by Shawn Higbee, turned in an average lap time of 1:56 minutes, which was faster than the slowest of the gas powered superbikes racing the same weekend on the same track. The second place bike, if it weren't for a temporary glitch, would have been right with that bike.

The race had multiple levels of drama and excitement from start to finish. The leading two bikes, Zero/Agni and Lightning Motors, had a battle royale for first place. The Zero/Agni bike was more agile, a critically important feature on the Infineon track, which is nothing but curves. The Lightning Motors bike, originally built to run on the Bonneville Salt Flats, isn't very maneuverable but is immensely powerful, due to the EV1 motor in its guts. On every corner the Zero/Agni bike would zip by and on every straight the Lightning bike would zoom past. It went this way for most of the race until in lap 9 the Lightning bike suddenly pulled over to the side in front of the grandstands. The stop lasted for 50 long seconds, and was due to a software glitch the team tried to worked around. The glitch required that the rider reboot the control software, a process which takes 45 seconds (or so). Once rebooted the bike zoomed off as if nothing had gone wrong, and you can see in the results that Michael Barnes regained most of the time lost to the on-track CTRL-ALT-DEL exercise. Both bikes proved themselves to be powerhouse formidable competitors that are the bikes to beat.

Sometimes it is the smallest things which can go wrong. Most of the bikes using AC motors (except for the Lightning Motors bike) use the same controller, and they all had the same problem with a sensor unit which failed at some point for every bike during the weekend. The failure was attributed to the tiny set screws in the sensor unit. Unfortunately for Team Electra theirs failed during the race. Their bike, ridden by Thad Wolff, was performing very powerfully and many watchers believed it would have been a contender for second place. That is until suddenly the bike pulled off to the side while on the uphill piece above turn 1, due to the failed sensor.

In third place was bike #13, ridden by Mike Hannas, of Electric Race Bikes. Their story proves it doesn't take a huge budget to construct a super electric race motorcycle. This bike was the brainchild of a one man design team with a budget of around $10,000. Their bike used twin Agni motors mounted face-to-face similarly to the Zero/Agni and Mavizen bikes, but of their own design. It ran very strong but did finish well behind the two leaders.

Close behind was bike #23, ridden by Jennifer Bromme of Werkstatt Racing, and riding a Mavizen TX02. She started last in the field and made it to the fourth position. Their team had an immense struggle just to get on the track, with equipment failure after failure. But once everything was squared away the bike performed admirably. Team Werkstatt is seriously looking for sponsors so they can take part in the rest of the race series.

As an interesting and totally coincidental side note, Chelsea Sexton (co-star of Who Killed the Electric Car) attended the race. She got to bond with the EV1 motor in the Lightning Motors bike, and had a walk-on role in the awards ceremony.

No matter where the riders finished, or not, their accomplishment today deserves high accolades. It was immensely difficult for all of them to prepare for the race, due to the cutting edge technology being use. Together and individually they proved that electric vehicles can be powerful racing machines capable of relatively long races. So far the experimental electric vehicle community has favored drag races and, while impressive, they are over very quickly and don't match regular driving as well as a road race does. It may be time for electric vehicle racing to graduate from drag racing to road racing. Modern lithium-ion battery packs clearly carry enough power to support longer racing formats.

This exciting race portends well for the rest of the TTXGP race series. The next race will be from June 3-6 at Elkhart Lake, Wisconson, coinciding with the Road America race.

Results:

1 #22 Shawn Higbee Zero/Agni 25:33?

2 #30 Michael Barnes Lightning Motors 25:51?

3 #13 Mike Hannas Electric Race Bikes 26:44?

4 #23 Jennifer Bromme Werkstatt Racing 26:57?

5 #14 Kenyon Kluge KSquared Racing 29:54

?6 #18 Zoe Rem Pril Motors 27:51?

7 #16 John Wild Square Wave 26:21?

8 #20 Jason Lauritzen Electric Motorsport 26:24

DNF

?#19 Spencer Smith Volt Motors 24:41

?#37 Thad Wolff Team Electra 9:51