After hearing that Werkstatt Racing and Repair would soon be taking delivery of the first Mavizen to hit US soil, our ears piqued because we were under the impression that Zero Motorcycles must surely have recieved their Mavizens already, after announcing that the team would field two Mavizen bikes in the TTXGP series a while back.
With that apparently not the case, rumors suggested that Zero would be using another non-proprietary chassis at the first round of the TTXGP series at Infineon Raceway. While Zero wasn’t able to comment on their racing plans to us before the weekend, we do have some clues on what the company has up its sleeve from what we know already. More after the jump.
We’re not sure about what has transpired to cause Zero Motorcycles to drop using the Mavizen racing platform for their entry into TTXGP, but when we originally talked to Neil Saiki about Zero’s strategy in making racing count towards Zero’s business objectives, he pointed out that Zero wanted to highlight its core technologies, namely its batteries.
Judging from the fact Zero is using Agni motors in their 2010 line of electric motorcycles, the dots aren’t too hard to connect that we can expect to see a race bike from Zero with Agni motors powering it, and possibly a Z-Force battery pack to be found somewhere in the machine.
With the timeframe too short for Zero to have developed its own racing chassis (although a sport bike from Zero has been in the pipe for sometime), all signs point to Zero partnering with an established chassis developer or e-racer. One way or another we should know more on Monday in this regard.
Whatever the case may be, this news may also be the reason Mavizen shipped its KTM derived race bike to Werkstatt Racing and Repair before the team had actually secured the necessary funds to purchase the Mavizen outright (as of this writing Werkstatt has raised $3,600 of the necessary $20,000 in their fund raising goal, which covers about half of the $40,000 on the Mavizen’s initial sticker price).
This move by Mavizen would seem to reassure the presence of one of their bikes at the inaugural race of the new TTXGP world series, the absense of which would have raised more than one eyebrow.
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