Mission One – Ready to Race
May 21st, 2009 by Seth LaForge, Senior Software Engineer
At a startup like Mission Motors, everybody gets to wear multiple hats. I’m officially a (well, the) Senior Software Engineer, but I’ve had the opportunity to play many other roles over the past months of preparation for the TTXGP, such as working on our motor controller, wiring sensors for data acquisition, and helping diagnose battery behavior. I’m not the only one, of course – the rest of our team has shown amazing flexibility, with our Product Manager serving as test rider at the track, our Head Mechanical Engineer acting as pit chief and aeronautical designer, and our COO crimping electrical connectors at three in the morning (go Jit!).
We’ve been doing extensive testing at Infineon Raceway, but we faced a challenge: the Isle of Man TT course is totally different from a typical race track. On a track, the rider is constantly slowing for corners and accelerating out of them. By comparison, the TT course has few tight corners to slow for – in fact, superbike riders spend a significant portion of the course at over 160 mph. At high speeds most of a motorcycle’s power is spent battling wind resistance, so for the TTXGP we’re mostly concerned with the bike’s efficiency at high speeds, while at Infineon we were effectively mostly testing acceleration out of corners – very useful for our production bike, but not as important for the race.
To minimize our energy use at high speeds, we’ve designed an entirely new super-aerodynamic fairing for the bike exclusively for the TTXGP – you can see it in the images above. (Don’t worry, it’ll get a snazzy paint job soon.) We’ve also optimized our gearing for our expected race speeds rather than for outright acceleration or top speed, and we’ve developed advanced dash displays to communicate information that will help our racer Tom Montano get around the Isle in race-winning time.
All of this new technology demanded a test in a venue more similar to the Isle of Man than a race track. Our COO found a nice lonely back road near his home with an elevation profile similar to the TT course, but this left a small stumbling block: with the new race fairings our bike lacks the requisite mirrors, turn signals, and such for street legality. We came up with a great solution: a police escort. The police routinely escort military vehicles without even such niceties as tires, let alone turn signals, so they figured escorting a motorcycle would be no problem.
Of course, we needed a rider, so this past Thursday I got to wear another hat for Mission: a motorcycle helmet. In the most thrilling day of my working life, I rode 40 miles following a car full of cameras, with a police cruiser on my tail. The bike felt fantastic – perfectly smooth yet with an eerie turbine-like wail, it poured out gobs of torque with a turn of the wrist at any speed, no shifting required. Consistent corner entries were easy, using “engine braking” (actually regenerative braking – recharging the battery while slowing) to slow into a corner, then using easily controlled torque to power back out. I would have loved to spend the day exploring twisty side-roads, but instead I had to focus on my Mission: consistent speeds and power use for testing and data acquisition. The test came off terrifically, with great thanks to the California Highway Patrol who helped us pull off a safe and realistic test session.
We’ve spent the past few days getting the race bike crated up and shipped off to the Isle. In a way it’s a relief to be done with physical work on the bike, but now I have to put my software hat back on: there’s a pile of data to analyze.
