Michael Barnes on Lightning Motors #80 bike, photo by David Herron
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The Lightning Motors bike today proved to be true to its name, handily winning the second round of the TTXGP 2010 today at the Road America track near Elkhart Lake, WI. This bike the result of a couple years development by Richard Hatfield and a crew of collaborators, is powered by a battery pack full of cells from A123 Systems, and a high power AC motor rescued from an EV1. Coming in second, reversing the order of the race 1 results, was the Agni Motors bike piloted by Zoe Rem. The Lightning Motors bike took off like a rocket from the start, and just kept on going. Coming in third place was the Team Electra bike ridden by Thad Wolff, with a very strong performance.
The track definitely favored the raw power of the Lightning Motors bike, on every lap it just whooshed by sounding like the power of the wind. The Road America is approximately four miles around with three long straightaways and very few curvy bits, where in race 1 the curvy track at Infineon favored the agility of the Agni Motors bike. The Lightning Motors bike gave consistent lap times in the 2:58 range, while the next placing bikes gave lap times in the 3:10-3:20 range. The Lightning Motors bike finished 57 seconds ahead of the Agni Motors bike, who in turn finished 53 seconds ahead of the Team Electra bike. The Team Electra bike was keeping up with the Agni Motors bike until lap 4 where heating issues forced Thad Wolff to back off on the throttle to let the system cool down a little.
In fourth place the Werkstatt Racing bike ridden by Jennifer Bromme performed very well with 3:20 lap times except for lap 2. Zoe Rem on the Agni Motors bike reported that Jennifer passed her at one time, but Zoe was quickly able to get in front of her and never saw Jennifer again.
Gas bike racing does not have such wide gaps in performance between the bikes. With a hundred years of history and gas bike racing has the maturity to have several racing classes. The 600cc bikes, the 250cc bikes, and so on, these well developed performance levels derive from that long history. This is just the second year that electric motorcycle road racing has existed. These are early days for electric motorcycle racing and it's expected they will develop multiple classes to have bikes with similar performance racing one another.
Heat is proving to be the key problem the teams are facing. The heat is both generated within the motor, controller and battery pack, as well as the ambient temperature. During the practice and qualifying rounds the ambient temperature was very hot, while during the race it was a cool morning. The systems on these bikes work less efficiently when they're hot, and cooling systems are one of the key developments allowing the bikes to race longer and faster.
They are on a steep slope of developing the technology, and we can expect every race to be better.
Results
| Pos | No | Name | Team | Best Time | Best Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 80 | Michael Barnes | Lightning Motors | 2:57.689 | 82.053 |
| 2 | 22 | Zoe Rem | Agni Motors | 2:55.874 | 82.900 |
| 3 | 37 | Thad Wolff | Team Electra | 3:06.374 | 78.230 |
| 4 | 23 | Jennifer Bromme | Werkstatt Racing | 3:20.053 | 72.881 |
| 5 | 20 | James Pooler | Electric Motorsport | 3:11.849 | 75.997 |
| 6 | 15 | Mike Hannas | Electric Race Bikes | 3:27.094 | 70.403 |
| 7 | 16 | Scotty Ryan | Square Wave Racing | 3:57.668 | 61.346 |
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Comments
Great article and it was a pleasure to meet you at TTXGP.
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