Rebuilding electric bike

Hi everybody,

I've gotten an old 2008 ebike, with a 220w 24v motor. It was just a fun project to get up and running; the previous owner had rebuilt the controller from scratch, and did a lousy job of it. Not only that, but the bike was showing some weird symptoms, which could've been the controller or the motor itself. When held at an angle off the ground and supplied power, it would spin fine. If you held it off the ground, and tried to spin it backwards, it would catch and start going forwards. It seems to be cogging as well

I've taken out the controller, and just set up a simple relay system with a switch to deliver full power to the motor. Same symptoms.

Now because the previous controller has been rebuilt, it could be an issue with the power being provided to the motor; the battery is fine, it's not 100% charged but reads roughly 26.5v. However I'm guessing the motor is brushless and thusly doesn't it need to have a proper controller with wires going to the hall effect sensors? I was also under the impression that the actual power to the motor needs to be 3 phase AC.

The motor only has a positive and negative wire so I'm assuming it's got some sort of second controller built into the motor.

I'm happy to take apart the motor, but as this is a bit of a mission I want to just check it's not the rest of the system that's at fault. The motor's resistance reads about 40 ohms.

If anyone has any ideas on how I could get this up and running, I'd really appreciate it. It's a project on a budget so "buy a whole conversion kit" isn't very constructive. Cheers :D