The MotoCzysz E1pc is one bad-ass machine, no two ways about it, and it may well be the first electric motorcycle to lap the Isle of Man at more than 100 mph at the TT Zero race Thursday.
We caught up with Michael Czysz on Wednesday when rain delayed the race and we got him to spill some details about his incredible new motorcycle. Is it really a significant step forward from last year’s revolutionary machine? Is a 100 mph lap finally in sight? And what's his response to Motorcycle News calling him a liar?
The answers to those and many other questions below.
On racing electric bikes at the Isle of Man:
The speed isn’t there. The electric bikes are generally the slowest on the island. But, when you think that we are doing seven-eighths the speed with one-eighth the energy? That’s remarkable. There’s not one other bike out here that you could put one gallon of gas in that could beat us on our bike. Not one. I could be the rider and we’d still beat them. At some point in our lifetime, responsible consumption is going to become a higher priority.
__On racing two electric bikes, and how to get a 100 mph average lap:
__
We don’t have many miles on the new bike, of course, which is why we brought the old one. I was talking to Mark Miller [riding last year's bike] on a regular basis and said, "Right now, our goal is to get that 100 mph lap," which is a lot harder than people think. We could take half the batteries out and do more than half the speed, but we couldn’t put twice the batteries in and do twice the speed. It’s a very elusive number.
There’s so many corners here that are so slow that it means you have to make up speed on the straights. You have to do 130, 140, Michael Rutter [riding the 2011 bike] was hitting 150 mph at some points. When you start pushing that much air, you’re consuming a huge amount of energy. It’s easy to do 190 on a straight for a mile or complete an eight-lap race. But, when you want to do both range and speed, it’s difficult.”
The differences between the 2010 and 2011 models:
Rutter’s bike has a lot more energy and a lot more power than Miller’s. When I rode it, dude, that thing is so fucking fast. It’s unbelievable. It hauls ass. It’s going to blow your mind when you ride it.
We’ve made so many efficiency changes that I can’t, at the moment, pin the amount of gain on which component. But, we’re up over 20 percent on last year. That’s a huge step. If you talk to anyone else racing here, they’ve increased efficiency maybe one or two percent. That doesn’t mean we’re geniuses, it just means that our bikes were so bad before that there’s room to make gains.
About that inboard suspension:
[Editor's note: The MotoCzysz features inboard front and rear suspensions activated by pushrods. The shock absorbers are mounted under the "tank" as shown in the photo above.]
Last year, we moved the shock on top of the swing arm because we moved the motor under it. If we’d kept the shock there, we’d have to remove much more stuff than I’d want to access the batteries. Plus, I keep wanting to push the envelope and try things. That’s what this is about, it’s prototype racing and we’ve got more ideas than we know what to do with. At some point, you probably should cool down the innovation, but we’re not there yet. We should be stirring the pot and trying to make things possible.
It’s efficient for the structure of the bike. Near the headstock, where you’re going to have have all the strength already, we’re bringing all the forces to that area. I don’t have to have fingers of carbon fiber reaching out here and reaching out there to grab all these points. We’re effectively redirecting all the forces to the same area, where we already have the strength, so that makes it more efficient and hopefully a less expensive and more successful frame.”
And then there’s the the whole thing of no or virtually no unsprung weight in the suspension. There’s not another bike in the world that has less unsprung suspension components than we do. The shocks aren’t hanging from anywhere, they’re laying in a drawer and they don’t have any influence on it. And, I can tell you, the effect of that is big. We had to recalculate all the suspension settings we thought we knew. The reduction in unsprung had a much bigger effect on our damping and spring rates than we thought. Is that better? I don’t know. Will we do it next year? All that is too early to say. But, there’s a substantial change going on here and we’re going to see how we can evolve it.
On starting from scratch:
We spent an awful lot of time evaluating batteries and I came up with dozens and dozens of scenarios. I picked the minimum capacity, we couldn’t go smaller. Then, we fit the rider around that and built the cockpit around them. The way to keep the overall stiffness up for such a heavy bike was to go back to carbon again for the frame.
The forks are all new, too. They’re an ovalized section and they carry no active springs or damping within them. They also have a Formula One push-rod solution. We’re pushing all the forces up into the shock that’s mounted in the shock tray. Last year, we had an oval bottom section, but the sliding components were round; you had your standard telescopic top end. This year, we have sliding components that are oval.
You're not a liar, are you?
[Editor's note: Guy Proctor of MCN said the MotorCzysz "makes nothing like 200 bhp" as claimed by Czysz.]
Here’s the bottom line: Guy’s right, we are using about 80 bhp. That doesn’t mean we have 80 bhp, it means we’re using 80 bhp. The reason we’re using 80 bhp is because we’re trying to set a 100 mph average over 40 miles. Not 37.7 [the length of the Mountain Course on the Isle of Man] because our racers don’t take those lines, they’re not on the edge of the tire. The distance they do is over 39 miles. To do that and to consistently go 100 mph, you have to go as slow as you can. You have to accelerate slow and there’s no reason to have 190 mph blasts. That’s just too expensive.
So, Guy took a negative and and tried to deduce a conclusion. Rutter used 50 percent throttle and went through the Sulby speed trap at 142 mph. Here’s the other thing, the trigger mechanism — two wires in the pavement — is deep into the Sulby straight. I’ve told our riders to primarily use re-gen and not braking. So, they’re both slowing down before they hit the speed trap. Rutter hit 150 on Sulby straight, hundreds of yards before they measure, and then he’s coasting down on the re-gen through the speed trap. So yeah, that speed isn’t so impressive. The speed trap represents 80 bhp, but that’s not an accurate picture.
Don’t call me a liar. Guess what? Electric bikes are the only vehicles in the world that we can’t lie to you on because it’s a mathematical equation of volts times amps minus efficiency that’s going to give you what we’re spinning at the rotor. Ducati says a Desmosedici makes 200 bhp, but when you put it on a dyno, it makes 175 at the wheel. Are they losing that 25 in efficiency or is it only making 190? You have no way of knowing. We can’t lie about that.
Our 200 bhp might be peak, but how long are you going to hold your Desmo on peak? Five seconds? Those guys aren’t asked about the difference between peak and continuous. It’s absolutely fair to call our bike a 200 bhp bike. What’s unfair is to take some bullshit snapshot with no information and then make up a headline about it.
What’s next
[Editor's note: Chip Yates recently set an electric motorcycle land speed record of 190.6 mph.]
Could we break the land speed record? In a heartbeat. We could do it on the Isle of Man tomorrow. On the Mountain Course. Rutter’s doing 50 percent throttle and hitting 150 mph. But, that would come at too much cost. The funny thing is that in this race, we need to go as slow as possible. I know that sounds like a ridiculous contradiction. What they need to do is keep the overall average as consistent as possible.
We’ll probably take it to Bonneville or one of those events just for fun. That’s a no pressure event, I don’t want to go there and worry. I just want to go, see what the bike does and get some data. Then, use that to help us make decisions for our next generation bike.
This is an excerpt of an exclusive interview by Hell for Leather. Check out all its coverage of the MotoCzysz E1pc.
Top photo: Michael Czysz with the 2010 MotoCzysz E1pc. (Grant Ray/Hell for Leather)
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