eGrandPrix day 3

Still no photo's & video, seems that will have to wait until I get back home.. Tuesday/Wednesday.

The weather on Sunday was fabulous and the electric motorcycles got on the track twice. This was the first time I got to see them go on the track, and they were doing great. Tony (the 'young man' I mentioned in the day 1 report, he's also a VisForVoltage member) - his bike only made it around two laps. The first lap is led by a pace car at a modest speed, the next three or so laps were at full speed, and Tony's bike only made one lap. His bike has lead acid batteries and he'd said to me he wished his budget would allow for lithium batteries. In any case Electric Motorsports would-have-been-TTXGP-Pro-bike had everybody beat by a long ways.

Frodus & I did post-race video interviews of a couple of the riders ...

One of the TTXGP folk present has been doing technical and rules work between the various standards bodies involved. The TTXGP has an advisory board from the IET, an Engineering institute based in England. They're working with the FIM and the AMA for racing rules & standards and the TT has further standards that are extremely tough because that's the toughest race course in the world. Anyway I filmed about 8-9 minutes of talking with her about those rules negotiations.

A very interesting bit the TTXGP organization wrote into their rules is to allow for many other things than the normal FIM and AMA rules allow. Such as multiple motors, and most interesting to me is streamlining. A small group of streamlining people were at the event including Craig Vetter. Two of these vehicles were small electric scooters built by a velomobile maker and dealer in Minnesota. (Jon Nygren, www.beamerbikes.com)

I filmed a 10+ minute discussion between myself & Jon which I hope is interesting, it was very interesting to talk with him about this. The idea we went with was "what would be the iconic vehicle that captures the public's imagination and helps EV's take off into the public mainstream". In other words in the history of vehicles there's been several iconic vehicles that simply took off and defined a certain class of vehicle experience -- such as the Model T Ford, or the Ford Mustang, or the Chevy Corvette, etc.

I feel very fortunate to have been able to talk with Craig Vetter for approx 15 minutes over a couple times. He said to me a number of things including offering his personal help to get the fairing installed on my Lectra. Another which he repeated several times is he thinks the TTXGP/eGrandPrix presence is very historic, that we who are part of making TTXGP/eGrandPrix happen are taking steps of historical significance ...

This is a bit curious to me. On his website he'd said a couple times he didn't think electrics were "there" yet. But a) he'd started to put together a TTXGP team which of course would have fielded a streamlined bike, b) he was saying all kinda great things about the electric bikes which came to the AMA event. I suppose this means the TTXGP race caught his attention.