Episode 26 of the Brap Talk podcast is now out for your two-wheeled audio pleasure, and as always, it is packed with some interesting motorcycle discussions.
In this show, we continue our European adventure from Episode 25, and talk about riding two very interesting motorcycles, as well as what’s going on at Ducati and MV Agusta.
In many ways, Ducati’s MotoE project is the opposite of all the electric motorcycle projects which have gone before.
Up until very recently, conventional motorcycle manufacturers have mostly stayed well away from electric motorcycles, preferring to wait and see how the technology, and the political and legislative framework in which this all takes place, will play out.
Exceptions have been few and far between: beyond electric scooters, KTM have the Freeride, an electric enduro machine, and Honda worked with Mugen on their bike which dominated the TT Zero race on the Isle of Man.
That has left the field open for a host of new companies, which have operated with varying success. Silicon Valley produced a large swathe of start ups, mostly run by motorcycle enthusiasts from the area’s electric vehicle and technology industries, and funded with VC money.
A few others, such as Energica, are engineering start ups producing electric vehicles and based in areas with strong automotive industry links. Small companies with limited manufacturing and engineering facilities which relied on widely available components and techniques for a large part of their bikes.
So when Energica won the first contract to produce the MotoE racer, they were competing against other specialist electric motorcycle manufacturers, sometimes no bigger than a handful of people based in of small workshops.
But all had the same philosophy: to take their existing products and turn it into a race bike, by stripping unnecessary ballast and upgrading suspension, braking, and various chassis components.
Their race bikes, and the Energica Ego Corsa which became the MotoE bike when the series first started in 2019, are basically the electric bike version of Superstock spec machines: production bikes which have been turned into racing machines by upgrading existing components to racing spec.
At the technical presentation of their MotoE machine on Thursday, the contrast between what has gone before and Ducati’s approach couldn’t be greater.
Monday sees the start of three days of activity at the Jerez ciruit, as first the MotoE teams, and then the MotoGP test teams get to work at the Andalusian circuit.
Alongside the full MotoE grid – it is an official MotoE test – the test teams of Aprilia, Honda, KTM, and Yamaha will be present at the track.
2020 sees the start of a new decade (convention has it that decades are zero-based, going from 0-9, so please, numerical pedants, just play along here), and if there is one thing we have learned from the period between 2010 and 2019, it is that a lot can change.
Not just politically and socially, but in racing too. So now seems a good time to take a look back at the start of the previous decade, and ponder what lessons might be learned for the decade to come.
It is hard to remember just how tough a place MotoGP was in 2010. The world was still reeling from the impact of the Global Financial Crisis caused when the banking system collapsed at the end of 2008.
That led to a shrinking grid, with Kawasaki pulling out at the end of 2008 (though the Japanese factory was forced to continue for one more season under the Hayate banner, with one rider, Marco Melandri), and emergency measures aimed at cutting costs.
That meant that in 2010, MotoGP had only 17 permanent riders on the grid, from four different manufacturers. Hondas filled the grid, supplying six of the riders with RC212Vs, while Ducati were providing five riders, including one to the newly joined Aspar team.
Yamaha supplied four bikes then, as now, though the Tech3 Yamaha team received satellite bikes, rather than the factory spec M1s the Petronas team has now. And Suzuki still had two bikes on the grid, though 2010 was the last year that happened. A year later, they were down to a single bike, and in 2012, they were gone.
It seems Zero Motorcycles is gearing up to bring us another machine for the 2020 model year, as the electric vehicle company is teasing the release of its Zero SR/S.
Officially, the company isn’t saying more than a February 24th release date, but by connecting some obvious dots and a bit of inside information from our Bothan spies, we are pretty certain of what to expect in a month’s time.
Bad news for electric motorcycle race fans, as the organizers of the Isle of Man TT have announced that they will no longer hold the TT Zero event for the 2020 and 2021 editions of the iconic road race.
The Isle of Man’s Department of Enterprise says in a press release that it has become “increasingly challenging” to run the electric class and to find competitors for it each year.
Of course, anyone watching the TT Zero race will see that the only promising entries came from the Mugen team, that the starting grids were single-digits in number, and that both factors made for lackluster viewing.