Right before I did the Refuel Event at Mazda Laguna Seca Raceway I got a message from the race director of the MotoE Electric racing series in Europe. This is a new series being started and they wanted me to come over and race with them. I was very interested in racing in their series and getting a chance to race on some new tracks outside of the U.S. Most of their tracks on the schedule are world class venues that I have always dreamed of being able to race at. Unfortunately I didn’t have an electric race bike ready. If I was going to go through the cost of shipping a bike all the way to Europe, making travel plans to get me and the bike from race to race and everything else that is needed to run a whole series, I wanted to make sure I had a good bike. So I declined the offer as I didn’t have time to get a bike ready, and then ship it over to Europe before the first race. Turns out, right at that time, the University of Nottingham team had their rider drop out because of other commitments and they needed a replacement rider. MotoE help to set up the deal between U of N and myself and next thing I knew I had a plane ticket to fly to UK to meet the team in a week and a half. I had my sponsor, Dragoon Pro Gear, work up a new product design so that I could sell them to make some money to help pay my way while I was racing in Europe for a few months, so that was a huge help in making this happen. I flew into Heathrow airport on Monday before the first race, and then traveled up to Nottingham to meet the team at the University. The race bike was a brand new build for the team and they had done a tremendous job getting it built in about 2 weeks. I spent a couple days in Nottingham (getting lost on their bus system lol) and then we headed out to the Netherlands for our first race at the Cathedral of Speed, TT Circuit Assen. This is a world class track and I couldn’t believe I was getting the chance to race there. The team did the final work to get the bike running at the track the day before the event started. The next day I found myself helping to develop another electric race bike. During the first practice session I did 5 laps to learn which way the circuit turns and to get a feel of the way the new bike was performing. The bike was missing drive coming out of the really slow turns, so I was trying to find ways to carry as much corner speed as possible through the rest of the track. After giving the team feedback they found the cause for lack of drive. Unfortunately it was an off the shelf component that they bought which couldn’t be adjusted with a dial or software. So I went out in First Qualifying and really tried to keep my corner speed up as much as possible. I managed to drop 3 seconds, but still was 35 seconds behind the number 1 rider on an AC motored bike and 21 seconds behind a few of the other riders. It seemed I could kind of run with them through the fast sections after the bike finally got up to speed, but they would open up such a huge gap before I got up to speed that they easily left me behind over the full lap. The University of Nottingham team did a great job of doing a lot of research into the problem and late Friday night discovered a way to hack the controllers and make a modification that would allow more current to flow through to the motors, which would give me better drive. They all jumped into it and tore the bike completely down to make the changes. The team worked very late into the night to modify the controllers and do some other rewiring. At about 2am, they decided to get some sleep and finish up the rest in the morning. When you are dealing with 12,500 watts hours of stored energy, it is a good idea to not make mistakes. I can just say that Jonathan Blissett has nerves of steel while dealing with that stuff. There was a big moment late at night that was one of the biggest I have seen. Jonathan stepped back, cleaned his hands and got right back to work. I was pretty amazed. Saturday morning I woke up to the sound of rain. This was very disheartening because the bike wasn’t sufficiently waterproofed in a few of the electrical components yet, and we didn’t have a spare set of rims to mount rain tires on. There was a pretty steady down pour on the way to the track early in the morning. When we got to the track the team jumped on the bike to get it finished up and I kept watching the skies. Our Second Qualifying session was up first thing and as the start time was approaching the rain finally let up. I had already told the team that if the track was too wet, I didn’t think we should go out for qualifying because of the water proofing issue and slicks in the rain. I wanted them to not be too rushed to make a session that wouldn’t be worth the risks. 10 minutes before Q2 start, there was a slight dry line appearing on the front straight, but it was well off the race line. The other teams also decided to skip the session and then it was officially cancelled by race officials. The team spent a lot of time double checking their work from the night before and making sure there wouldn’t be any issues with me. I wanted to stay out of their way and let them do their thing when it came to the electrical components, so I spent a lot of the day up in the media room doing an interview with MotoE and just catching up on my online stuff. About 2 hours before the race start they came up and got me to come down and test the changes they had made. I wasn’t able to give it a proper test as I was just going in a circle in the parking lot next to our garage. It was a pretty small area so I was just able to do small blips of the throttle. But just that alone let me know that the team had found some major improvements in the drive power. I had a feeling that it was possible to maybe drop about 20 seconds in the race with the better acceleration. At that point I was really looking forward to the race. The MotoE race director, Rupal Patel, told us that we were going to have a slightly different start procedure than the regular gas bikes. So we moved our bikes over to the pre-pit area and got ready for the race. We made our way out to the starting grid and did a warm up lap, in which I was really impressed with the new drive power out of the corners and was trying to change my throttle input for the increased power. At the start of the race I tried to take an easy start to not over heat the motor with the increased amps available in my right wrist. I jumped up from the second row to fall in right behind the leader on the AC bike while using half throttle. Things were looking good. I was coming out of every corner with about half throttle and would blip it down repeatedly to not be pulling steady amps driving out of the corners while I got a feeling of how the motor heat would react to the increased amps. I didn’t want to get in the thermal loop too early in the race. I knew the German racer was behind me, so I was trying to hold a steady pace to not try and out race him. I figured if he got by me I would be able to jump in behind him and try to follow him, maybe catch a draft. He got past me in the back section and I was able to stay with him through the rest of the lap down the front straight across the finish line. On the next lap I tried to enter one of the fast corners with the same throttle application I had before when I was missing power. I really over shot the turn and had to take a bit of drastic measures as I ran really wide mid turn. That allowed him to gap me a lot, so I then tried to concentrate on holding on to the final podium spot. The Chinese rider who was behind me was 21 seconds faster than me in Qualifying, so I was hoping that I would be able to stay with him when he passed me. The next lap I got a good look over through the 180 degree turn five. I noticed that he was just entering turn 4. I was really surprised to have that large of a gap on him at that point. Then I just put my head down and tried to pay as much attention to the data on the dash to ensure that I was able to finish the race at my pace. In the end I was able to hold on to 3rd place with a pretty healthy margin over 4th. Turns out I went about 22 seconds faster than I had previously done in qualifying. I was so stoked with the performance of the bike in the race. I was holding back a lot because we didn’t get any testing to see where the limit was at. I know I can go faster, but I want to make sure we systematically increase the throttle input when we ensure that the components can handle it. The team is looking to make more of the parts in house to see if we can get better components soon. We have had a lot of talks about the current status of the bike and have discussed a few improvements that we are going to work towards. I am so stoked to be with this team and really look forward to how they can advance through the season after seeing how well they stepped up in their first ever race event. Thank you to the University Of Nottingham team and MotoE for making this happen.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 04:29:22 +0000
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