Blogging the TTXGP: Final Results and Reflections + Video + Photoset
June 16th, 2009 by Edward West
The Isle of Man TT, on the Snaefell Mountain Course, is like no other motorcycle race in the world, crossing 37.73 miles of twisting two-lane road, with bumps, jumps, hairpins, and a four-mile climb through the mountains. The TTXGP took all this and made it electric. The 2009 TTXGP was the first FIM sanctioned electric motorcycle race in the world. 20 bikes entered, 12 qualified, and 10 finished the race.
Make no mistake; this was a defining moment in the history of electric transportation and motorsports.
Mission Motors, entering our Mission One prototype in its first competition, was honored to take part. Thank you to all who have been following us on the blog and have wished us well.
The short story is that we came in 4th: by some measures a disappointment, but by other measures a major triumph over very difficult circumstances. Our team pulled together in the face of a breakdown during Wednesday’s practice that left us without a drivetrain. The team worked tirelessly throughout the night to make repairs using a non-optimal spare, which in the end led to the successful completion the full Mountain Course on race day. As our Sr. Software Engineer Seth LaForge put it, each team member worked a number of miracles to enable us to race on Friday morning. And, beyond our own team, we had to pull in a lot of favors around the Island, including three trips to the dynamometer shop (thank you DynoJet!) for motor tuning.
The first place Agni Motors bike, ridden by Rob Barber, finished well ahead of all entrants. This purpose-built TTXGP race machine was exceedingly well-matched to the course. Cedric Lynch, designer of the Agni bike and its unique “Lynch” motor, is a pioneering figure in electric vehicles who has held world records in electric propulsion, from cars to boats. After the Agni machine crossed the finish line, a cluster of bikes followed: Schoenfeld aboard the team XXL bike, Buckley aboard Brammo’s TTR, and Tom Montano riding the Mission One, placed 2nd, 3rd, and 4th respectively.
We would like to give a huge tip of our hat to our rider, Tom Montano, who worked with us through our technical challenges and executed on our race strategy—one that was necessarily conservative in the face of the component failures we’d corrected the night before. He has been a real pleasure to work with and is understandably a fan favorite at the Isle of Man TT.
There is no question that this race is a torture test for any motorcycle. And, it is a torture test in particular for an electric motorcycle. While our bike has a top speed well in excess of what we were able to demonstrate on the course, to achieve top speed during the race would have actually used more energy and in turn negatively affected our finish time. The gesture we made to demonstrate this was to cross the finish line speed trap at 100.3mph.
Because our bike is designed to be a production vehicle, it has, compared to our race competition, many important and unique features: Redundant battery safety systems, real-time temperature and state of charge data monitoring and logging on a per-cell basis, thermal management of our key drivetrain components, and robust commercial-grade battery packaging subsystems. Although these features provide a small disadvantage in a race such as the TTXGP, they are critical to bringing a vehicle to market.
We’ve worked out a lot of kinks during our time at the Isle of Man and will be using this valuable data to improve our production bike. The unrelenting intensity of the racecourse and the focus it provided our team allowed us to do months worth of R&D in the span of about a week. Using the Mountain Course as a crucible for accelerated product development and testing helps us optimize our technology and create the finest production electric motorcycles in the world.
This was a fantastic (and fantastically difficult) challenge for all of us, and I feel great gratitude to be a part of the team that made this happen.
Currently the electric motorcycle grand prix is not scheduled to happen next year during the TT but later in the year at a smaller event. We hope that changes because we would very much like to come back and challenge the great teams that competed this year to another race. Traveling as far as the Isle of Man is only feasible for such a storied and well attended race as the TT.
Last but certainly not least, a big thank you to the organizers for making this happen and huge congratulations to all the great teams that raced at this amazing event! We hope to see you next year.
You are a very smart person!