The Nova Electric Racing team from TU Delft has won the European Championship for electric racing motorcycles. Next year, it wants more competitors on the track.
Silent but swift: the NovaBike08 racing at Donington Park. (Photo: Nova Team)
The Nova Electric Racing student team won the European Electric cup title over the course of three races on the Donington Park circuit over the weekend of 7-8 October 2017.
The only other electric motorcycle team in the Moto E Championship was from Bath University. The electric motorcycles joined the 600 cc category racing motorcycles and kept up pretty well.
The NovaBike08’s acceleration is unrivalled with 140 kW (190 hp) of continuous power delivering a torque of more than 500 Nm on the rear wheel. However, the fun doesn’t last very long. Racing time is currently limited to 15 minutes before the batteries are empty.
The Moto E competition was set up to stimulate innovation in electric motorcycles. Both student and corporate teams can enter. This year, however, the teams from Nottingham and a couple of Chinese teams dropped out of the competition, mostly for financial reasons, leaving two teams in the final.
The technical challenge is complex, the team wants to increase both the top speed and the endurance
This year’s Nova Electric Racing team captain, Koen Engelen, has the ambiguous task of raising its own competition. Over the telephone, he said that although teams are sprouting at the University of Twente and in the UK, he hopes the Moto E organisation will encourage groups from elsewhere to join as well.
The technical challenge for the next Nova electric motorcycle NovaBike09 is complex. The team wants to increase both the top speed (currently 240 km/h) and the endurance (now about 40 kilometres under racing conditions).
The new team (nineteen male and three female students) is currently discussing how to comply with these contradictory demands. Adding battery capacity would increase the endurance, but it would also add weight, compromising the top speed. One solution, according to Engelen, could be to install a gearbox to lower the power consumption and thus shed some weight from the battery pack.
The team mostly posts its progress on constructing the new NovaBike09 on its Facebook page.
Below: the teams from Delft (left) and Bath who raced the European Moto E competition
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