Brammo’s new motors from Parker Hannifin – could they finally beat Lightning?

At the REFUEL race, Steve Atlas implied to me that Brammo was about to change something on the Empulse RR that would add some speed (reduce lap times). It sounded like “better motor” and we now have verification on the Brammo blog that they’ve changed the motor (see link below).

The other change in the team is the addition of a second bike, to be ridden by a top AMA Superbike racer, Eric Bostrom. While he didn’t make it out yesterday in practice I suppose we should expect good things from him.

As for the new motor – the blog entry doesn’t say much. It does acknowledge that the Empulse RR has been at a speed disadvantage compared with the other top bikes in the TTXGP field. These are Lightning and MotoCzysz. The blog entry does say “now that we have the chassis setup as well as we do, we should be able to put a good deal more of the available power provided by the new powerplant to the ground.”

While Brammo won the 2011 North America Championship, the team lost to Lightning and MotoCzysz on every outing. At Laguna Seca last year the team finished in fourth place.

At the 2012 REFUEL race (also at Laguna Seca) Steve Atlas’ best lap time was 1:40.441 and he’s already beaten that time with a 1:39.233. But of course Lightning hasn’t been sitting still, and Michael Barnes beat that time with a 1:35 while complaining about preparation and promising to beat Steve Rapp’s 1:31 time from 2011’s Laguna Seca Race.

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About David Herron

David Herron is a writer and software engineer living in Silicon Valley. He primarily writes about electric vehicles, clean energy systems, climate change, peak oil and related issues. When not writing he indulges in software projects and is sometimes employed as a software engineer. David has written for sites like PlugInCars and TorqueNews, and worked for companies like Sun Microsystems and Yahoo.