Lightning Motors is heading to Le Mans for the e-Power/TTXGP Europe race

This weekend was the TTXGP 2012 North America Championship race, won by Brammo’s Steve Atlas

. The big question of the weekend is, where was Lightning Motorcycles? As we noted in the race coverage, had Lightning raced this weekend at Miller the results could well have been different. The answer came in the form of a posting yesterday on Lightning’s Facebook page

reading:

Gearing up for the FIM E-Power/TTXGP International Championship in Le Mans, France. The race is on the Eighth (7 days away!), so we’re shipping out pretty quickly here.

That answers the first question, why weren’t they at Miller. They were instead preparing for Le Mans. The question then is, “Why Le Mans?”

I managed to talk with Richard Hatfield by phone this morning, shortly before the race at Miller Motorsports, to get insight into the team’s thinking behind this decision.

The answer comes down to a pair of motivations. One is simply the prestige or glamour of not only being at Le Mans on the weekend of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, but to participate in a race held on-site during that weekend. The opportunity arose, and the team chose to take the opportunity. The second part is a little more complex and has to do with a path in which Lightning could well win the 2012 e-Power Championship. Going by the results at Laguna Seca, Lightning soundly beat Muench Racing and the same result could occur again.

For the Le Mans race, Lightning has selected famed AMA Pro racer Miguel Duhamel to ride for the team. Duhamel is the second winningest racer in the AMA SuperBike series, and has the most wins in the AMA SportBike series. He retired from racing four years ago, and is coming out of retirement to race with Lightning at Le Mans.

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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.