Muench Racing wins TTXGP Europe at Assen

Muench Racing’s Matthias Himmelman won last weekend’s race in the TTXGP Europe race at Assen (see the report on the qualifying round

), with two riders from Zongshen Racing about 20 seconds behind. Himmelman’s bike is running with a new motor, and the team is getting more comfortable with its characteristics. Zongshen’s Hi Chi Fung’s bike also has a new motor, but clearly given his performance for the weekend they have a lot of kinks to work out.

The Brouwers’ are a brother-sister racing team where Mike was given a 2010 Mavizen, and Kim was given Agni’s 2009 bike. Neither should be expected to be terribly competitive in today’s TTXGP, but the report on the TTXGP website makes it clear they enjoyed themselves anyway. The Mavizen ridden by Mike had run well on Friday and Saturday, but come Sunday developed a serious problem described as “the team discovered the bike built in 2010 had for the first time developed a flaw that resulted in excess weight being put onto the drive shaft.” Engineers worked on a fix, that let Mike take the bike out, but it wasn’t right and he had to bow out of the race. On Kim’s bike they had trouble getting things tuned right, and were unable to set the controllers past 70% and thus the bike didn’t have full power. Nelson Rolfes also had a Mavizen TTX02, but one of the motors blew up due to a chain that was too tight.

That left the field to Muench and Zongshen. The new #59 bike ridden by Hi Chi Fung was described as a prototype for what will be Zongshen’s 2013 race bike and as such they were looking more to collect data than anything. The other two took 2nd and 3rd, and the race results show they had nearly identical performance. Normally Zongshen has two bikes, but with the addition of a third bike this round meant taking on a new rider, and 18 yr old Dutchman Wayne Tessels was the lucky one. He said “I had a great weekend, it was a lot of fun and I would like to race electric again!”

Himmelman took the lead after 3 laps and ran a comfortable race, tussling a little with Tang Yu early on but ultimately making winning look too easy. The team had had some disappointment though as they had planned to enter a second bike into the championship – team engineer (Thomas Schuricht) wanted to get in on the action but sadly his start permission did not arrive in time from Germany. Look out for Thomas at Oschersleben, the joint TTXGP/e-Power race coming up next weekend.
http://www.egrandprix.com/news.php?id=301

Pos	no.	name	team	gap	total time	fastest	in	average speed
1	49	Himmelman	Muench	6 laps	12:28.080	1:55.654	6	131.52
2	26	Tang Yu	Zongshen	20.348	12:48.428	2:05.985	6	128.03
3	64	Wayne Tessels	Zongshen	22.277	12:50.357	2:05.803	2	127.71
4	59	Hi Chi Fung	Zongsehn	1:01.480	13.29.560	2:05.188	5	121.53
5	62	Kim Brouwers	Agni Racing Team		13:45.276	2:37.700	2	99.34
Not Classified
DNF	88	Nelson Rolfes	KTM Mulders Motoren	3 laps	6:45.871	2:07.514	2	121.2
DNF	25	Mike Browers	Brouwers Racing team	3 laps	10:50.209	2:19.291	1	75.65

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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.