Once upon a time, I stood in a hot fiberglass shop on the East Coast of Florida with Warren Mosler trying to convince him to give me a bunch of money so I could build a motorcycle. “Why?” he asked me. “What can you do with a bike that hasn’t been done?” and I didn’t have an answer for him. If I’d been smart, I might have said something along the lines of, “We could build an electric motorcycle concept that packs all the mass of the bike at the roll center and leave a huge hole down the center of the chassis, effectively cutting the frontal area by half and making the whole thing absolutely, ball-shrivelingly faster’n all Hell.”
Alas, I am not nearly as smart as I like to think I am — but Rob White is at least that smart. Like, extra-extra-wrinkly brain levels of smart, and that’s exactly the motorcycle that he’s built. Feast your eyes.
White Engineering WMC250EV
Image courtesy White Engineering.
“If you want to demonstrate to the rest of the world that you’ve just invented a new aerodynamic concept that means you can go faster for a given power, the best thing to do is go as fast you can,” says Rob White, head of White Engineering and former engine technician to Formula 1 World Drivers’ Champion Jenson Button. White, then, is smart, but his advanced aero concept isn’t just about speed. That’s only part of it. “The records we are aiming for are all champagne but actually they are perhaps the insignificant part of the concept. The real story is that, while for any given amount of power you can go much faster, if you want to cap the speed for the normal drive cycle of a London commuter the technology can be transferred to allow the bike to go significantly further.”
What he’s saying there is that he’s going to prove the concept with speed, then use the efficiencies gained to reach those record-breaking speeds to produce electric bikes that have record-breaking range, as well. “That has a direct benefit for CO2 emissions in urban landscapes,” he says, “(and) offers massive market-disrupting gains.”
White claims his new design concept reduces wind resistance by some 70% when compared to conventional designs, and he’ll need all the help he can get if he plans to unseat MotoGP Legen Max Biaggi’s 245.10 mph two-way record, set just last year on the Voxan Wattman electric streamliner.
We’ll let you know how he does next summer, when he takes his bike down to the Bolivian Salt Flats for a record run. In the meantime, enjoy checking out the concept’s wind tunnel test photos, then scroll on down to the comments section and let us know what you think of what may be the world’s fastest electric motorcycle.
White Engineering LSR Electric Motorcycle
Source | Images: White Engineering, via Motorsport Magazine and Top Gear.
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