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AGV Backmarker: Okay, maybe the results weren’t exactly electrifying. They were still impressive
June 25, 2009 by Mark Gardiner
Filed under Backmarker
One guy who won’t see the first 100 mph lap by an electric bike is Manx local John Crellin. He’s long been a fixture in the Manx Grand Prix and TT races, and once climbed Mount Everest. He was 58 and (I think) the oldest man racing in the TT this year. The highlight of his TT career was reaching the podium in the TTXGP, but he was killed hours later while racing in the Senior. By TT standards, this year’s races came off relatively safely. Still, Crellin’s death will weigh on Manx fans, who rooted for him as an everyman who put his all into several sports. MG archive photo
I’ve been following two TTXGP teams in particular, Brammo and Mission Motors. Watching them developing their bikes prior to the races, I thought an 85 mph lap was just possible. I was pretty close, as the winner’s lap was around 87 mph average speed. That was handily better than the next three machines, which were all about 10 mph slower.
Right now, I guess we can say that nearly 40 miles at nearly 80 mph is the state-of-the-art for electric motorcycles. The TT course, with its long stretches at flat-out speeds, steep climbs and descents, bumps and surface changes, and difficult weather still represents a very good test of a motorcycle’s practical utility, and just finishing the inaugural race was an achievement.
There are those who scoff, pointing out that the lap times were typical of motorcycles competing in the 1930s. I don’t think that’s anything to be embarrassed about. After all, the TTXGP was the first serious race ever for electric motorcycles. In their first year, the electrics put in lap times it took conventional motorcycles thirty years to knock out. My bet is that we’re no more than five years away from the first 100 mph/zero emissions lap.
Perusing old TT records reminded me that it took about twenty years’ worth of conventional motorcycle development for TT lap averages to climb from the mid-80 mph range to 100 mph. By the late 1950s, 500cc four-stroke singles like the Manx Norton were capable of lapping right around “the ton.”
In the next fifty years—taking us to the present day—the bikes racing in the TT’s premier class easily tripled in horsepower. Flexible, steel-tube frames were replaced by rigid, alloy-beam frames. Tires, suspension, and brakes improved by leaps and bounds. And with all those improvements, speed increased only 30 percent. And much of that difference is the result of course changes (it’s still almost exactly the same length, but several corners were re-profiled, roads were widened, and the quality of paving improved).
Why did tripling the power with dramatically improved handling “only” result in, at best, a 25 percent improvement in practical performance? The answer is simple: because a modern superbike weighs about 120 pounds more than a Manx Norton.
The emerging electric category really needs the TTXGP as an open-source test-bed. But I hope that, if racing helps to define zero-emission sports bikes, we don’t end up concluding that the fastest (ergo, best) solution is a powerful bike weighed down by several hundred pounds of batteries. I hope that we take the opportunity of re-inventing sport bikes to refocus on lighter machines.
A note to electric-bike designers: It’s more fun to ride a light, maneuverable slow bike fast than it is to ride a heavy-but-fast bike slowly.
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