Last weekend Tommy Heimburg, owner of ERIDE Motorcycles crashed his Zero MX at Motocross Wohlen track in Switzerland. The frame of the Zero MX broke behind the head tube. It seems this failure may have caused the crash. The history of this Zero bike is unknown as it was owned and race by a private party but obviously there is concern that this could happen to other Zero MX motorcycles and may cause a risk to owners.
Last month a video of the DERBI GPR EV showed up on YouTube. It was posted by someone who appeared to be working with Sevcon and it was hard to tell if DERBI was behind the bike. I recently found the blog of Derbi Project Manager Carles Carrera. And guess what, he has a detailed picture of the Derbi GPR EV front and center.
Carles describes the ground up development methodology DERBI and their partners used in designing and building the bike over the course of 3 months. He cites flaws in Brammo, Zero, Quantya, Vectrix mentioning thier “poorly developed mechanical platform” and saying they fail to deliver an electric motorcycle that has all drive components communicating in an orderly fashion.
Christian Amendt, an engineering student out of Germany is the first confirmed entrant of the FIM ePower Electric Motorcycle Race series. Using what might be called a quantified version of Lotus’s “performance through low weight” philosophy, Christian converted a Honda RS125R to electric using a “half the weight, half the power” design.
The 115kg (253.5lbs) electric race bike weighs 187 lbs less than the triple motor MotoCzysz e1pc. The theory is that the light weight will allow the 96 Volt, single motor, 3 kWh Epo-bike to out perform a 2 or 3 motor bike that weighs over 400 lbs with the batteries needed to power them. The Epo-Bike uses a Lemco D135 DC motor, LiFePO4 batteries from an undisclosed manufacturer and an Alltrax AX7425 controller to achieve 74Nm of torque and reach a top speed of about 111 mph. See more pictures and a video of the epo-bike on the track after the break.
Late last year Mavizen announced the TTX02 race bike with the intention of eliminating reasons for teams to pass on electric motorcycle racing. The TTX02 is a fully electric race bike based on the KTM RC8 rolling chassis and TTXGP winning Team Agni drive train. Today Mavizen and TTXGP founder Azhar Hussain rolled out supporting services for teams that still might be on the fence.
For aspiring racers with poor social skills or lack of budget for a team, Mavizen offers a factory support service of your race bike including transporting it from race to race. It sounds like all you have to do is put on your leathers and ride. The race plastic is all you really own with this package and you can put whatever sponsor stickers on it you want.
Tork India, third place Open Class winner at this year’s TTXGP at the Isle of Man, has posted up a teaser on Facebook announcing the imminent arrival of their new electric motorcycle racer. While the photo being displayed on Facebook is really just a GSX-R cover with the Tork logos superimposed onto it, we’re still excited to see our first glimpse of the new Indian racer after the new year.
It’s been nearly six months since the inaugural TTXGP race at the Isle of Man, but electric motorcycle racing seems to be a growing subject as of late. As discussion surrounds both the FIM and TTXGP, and their respective series, we’re beginning to see teams make their 2010 racing commitments. We reached out to Michael Czysz of MotoCzysz to see why his company has been suspiciously silent on the issue to date.







