KillaCycle Racing sets electric streamlined sidecar speed record at Bonneville – around 213 miles/hr

It’s land speed racing time at the Bonneville Salt Flats and I see from Facebook that both Lightning Motorcycles and KillaCycle racing were there. In this post I’ll cover what KillaCycle posted on Facebook. The big takeaway is that they made it into the 201+ miles/hr club, it’s not clear if they got enough verification that they’ll have an official record because a rain storm came in and turned the salt into a lake.

View from the cockpit

On Aug 25, they were doing a shakedown run and hit over 170 miles/hr – meaning to hit maybe 150 miles/hr instead.

This is what the KillaJoule looks like this year. Looks a lot like last year but I think that’s because the outer skin is the same. I’ve been following their Facebook postings all year and know they’ve rebuilt quite a bit of stuff under the skin including new batteries etc. I see that A123 Systems is still a sponsor.

On Day 2 they made one run at 183 miles per hour, then went for a record run. The outbound run they hit over 200 miles/hr, and on the return run hit 191 miles/hr for an average of 196.168 miles/hr. At that point the controller was set to supply only 100 horsepower out of the 400 horsepower available.

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On Day 3 they bumped the power up, they had an outbound run at 210. 844 mph and backup of 213.250 gave a new record of 212.047 mph (341.2 km/h). They were looking at changing gearing to see if they could go faster. However, a little later they posted that rain had moved in canceling all the runs that day.

The next day they did a run at 214 miles/hr but then rain moved in for real and they had to skedaddle from the salt. Because the previous days runs were close enough to this one, that means they can use one of those runs as the backup for this run. If I understand the rules right that means they’ll have made a record somewhere above the 212.047 miles/hr average from the day before.

For their troubles they get to own this spiffy new hat.

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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.