I feel okay now reporting the full situation for Catavolt due to them posting details on their Facebook page. Earlier I reported they had some problem and exited the qualifying round after one lap. They reported that in an earlier practice round they’d had a coolant leak (again, their hub motor is water cooled) which they fixed. In addition to being a water cooled hub motor, the Enertrac hub motor is actually two motors in one housing. Jason Morris, the rider, had to return to the pit right away and they found that one of the two motors was toast (had a short circuit). With some emergency repairs (and, no, you do not want to know the details) they converted it into a single motor and the bike is running again. Albeit with half the motor they intended. So obviously they won’t be as fast as they hoped. At least they’ll be in the race which is all that counts.
In other news, Adrian Stewart reported that Eric Bostrom hit 170.1 miles per hour absolute top speed during qualifying. He believes that is the highest speed for any electric motorcycle in race competition.
Having seen the majority of electric motorcycle competition I have to agree. It helps that Daytona has such long straights in which to build up speed.
There is a difference here that this is a road race track condition, not a land speed record event. Land speed record events has the bike going straight, no turns, for over a mile and the record is the average over the mile. In a road race you’re always having to adjust for the next turn coming up.
The record for land speed with electric motorcycles is held by Lightning Motorcycles, with a 216 miles/hr average, set in 2011.
Speaking of Lightning, I now have news why the team is not here at the race. There are certain life events that one simply cannot avoid attending, or rather would not miss for the world. In this case, not even for the TTXGP World Championship race, it would seem. I’m not going to give details, but when Richard Hatfield explained what it was it made total sense.
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