Between the Races: Arvind Rabadia

During this difficult financial stretch, electric motorcycles have been one of the industry’s few bright spots, highlighted by the inaugural TTXGP at the Isle of Man TT. Agni Motors scored the historic win in that race, and we spoke with company CEO Arvind Rabadia. (The following are outtakes from that conversation; for the main interview, see the November/December issue of Road Racer X.)

RRX: What’s your team’s background?
Arvind Rabadia: [Engineer] Cedric [Lynch] used to work for another company before, and he got the know-how—so they got rid of him. I’ve known him for about thirty years; actually I’m the person in this industry who’s known him the longest, because I’ve been a good friend of him for quite a while. I used to have a hardware shop, and I sold that, so I had a little capital of my own. Along with Cedric, we started to make the motors.

What were the motors originally made for?
Off-road bikes are also a good market for us; this motor we raced in the TT was specifically designed for an off-road bike. You can really get a lot of power out of it. It was keeping up with one of the [gas-powered] bikes which was racing—I think a 250 or 300cc motorbikes. It just means electric is not really behind. We’re getting good respect, which I’m proud of—it’s quite nice to have that. That’s all we’re asking for. We entered the race, and I think it’s paid off.

Heading into the TTXGP, there were some pretty big claims coming out.
It was really quite bad, some of the stuff people were putting on the forums, but once you’ve won the race and realized 87.43 mph, it’s not slow. The slowest sidecars were doing a similar speed to us, and come next year, the whole word knows the target now, which we’ve set. Everybody’s going to try and beat that target or go nearer 100 mph—and the average speed of the big bikes is about 130 mph. The slowest of them is about 120 or 115 mph. We’re not that far behind, if you think about it in racing terms.

When do you think you’ll reach the same level as gas-powered bikes?
There needs to be a lot of money put into battery technology. If you can get enough battery at a low rate, then literally, you can stay with a motorbike that’s 1,000cc. The battery pack we had was one of the best, so we had enough energy to do that run at that speed as well, where a lot of people had maybe not a good enough motor or not a good enough battery pack.

What was the key to winning?
The Isle of Man team had all the know-how and the budget, and two of our motors with the same power-rating and similar batteries. The only thing is, their cells were smaller, and they had to do a lot more work in putting them together. Maybe that was their downfall. Another thing is, all these guys who brought their bikes out there did all this testing on dynos and all that, and our bike has still not gone on a dyno yet. People say, “Oh, no, it has to go on a dyno; we need to know this; we need to know that.” Cedric does this thing: he worked out what that battery’s capable of, what the motor’s capable of, and he finds out what the rough aerodynamic of the bike is, then he comes out with a figure. Even though he lied to me a little bit [laughs]; he told me it can do about 110, 115 mph, where it was only about 105. I told him I want something that does 130 mph.

What’s your role?
In the beginning, I was not in this field. All I’ve done in my life is sales; I know how to talk to people. I’m not really familiar with racing—I just went there as an ignorant boss trying to prove a point. There are a lot of people who think they know about electric vehicles, but Cedric has been doing it for almost thirty-five, forty years—making vehicles and actually running them. He knows literally everything about them—ups and downs, what’s good, and what’s not good. Some of his ideas are a little bit eccentric, like full streamlining and all that, but you have to get the win first, then do the streamlining. With the streamlining, you don’t look normal; you look odd. He always insists on feet-forward, but I always tell him, “Feet forward is brilliant—with very good streamlining, we can do 30, 40 mph more with the same bike we have.” That’s a lot of speed, but at the end of the day, the people don’t want it. What’s the point of going against all these people and proving a point when nobody wants to know about that point? It’s going to come, as soon as someone comes up and starts winning a race—or they abolish feet-forward, or whatever, just like they did with the dustbin fairing. They were winning all the races, and I think they had a silly accident with a little bit of wind; they both fell over, and they banned it. That gave them an excuse. Something strange is happening where they don’t like it, and they just need a little excuse. When something happens, “Oh no, forget it—no more.”

You guys seem a little rebellious.
For people at the top level, it’s business—half of these people have ridden, and half of them haven’t. We had a little bit of a scuffle with the scrutineers and all that. About half these people doing electric vehicles are amateurs. Honda or Yamaha could easily make these things race at maybe 100 mph, because they have the finance. If they put a million dollars or a couple million dollars in it, nothing would happen to them. It’s like writing off all their tax. It’s just one of those things for them. Sooner or later, they’ll get involved—they have to get involved. The other thing is, the technology they come up with will be totally different to what we have do. What we have is totally basic. As somebody told me, the word KISS—Keep It Simple, Stupid. I never believed in keeping it simple. I always said, “We need this, we need that.” Now I understand, it could be a problem.