Ripperton Racing Electric Bike Rips Around Gas Bikes At Wakefield Park at a Xtreme Race Your Mates Event

Al Bunzel standing beside Ripperton Electric Bike June 2013 after the bike raced competitively against gas powered bikes
At a recent Xtreme Race Your Mates event at Wakefield Park, Ripperton Racing’s Electric Bike was there racing against 1000cc gas powered super bikes and 600cc gas powered bikes. What should be remembered is that he format of this type of racing is slightly different to the eFXC category. The Ripperton Racing R1 bike is optimized for eFXC and not this event. The major difference is that this event has more sighting laps and to optimize for this event, the battery pack would need to be increased. It is analogous to having a smaller gas tank.
Qualifying
The morning consisted of qualifying with the Ripperton Racing Bike qualifying just under 0.7 seconds behind a BMW S1000RR super bike. I thought that was an impressive result considering the BMW S1000RR is one of the fastest production super bikes around.
Ripperton did not participate in the second round of qualifying which pushed the bike down the grid for the race later in the day as many bikes qualified faster with warmer track temperatures, hence more grip.
Race 1
The Ripperton bike started in position 15 and after dicing it with a couple of the gas bikes, it finished in position 13, gaining 2 places in the process. Around the corners, the Ripperton bike was competitive, thanks the agility of the bike. It should be noted that this Electric Bike (which originally was a Yamaha R1) is 10kg (around 22 lbs) lighter than the original Yamaha R1 gasoline bike. The fastest lap time was 1:10.4950 which is a fantastic result.
Race 2
The battery pack only required an extra 5 minutes to complete a full charge. The organizers would not allow Ripperton to start from the back in pit lane, insisting that the bike complete a sighting lap, hence, did not start.
Race 3
After missing out on Race 2, the Ripperton bike was ready with a fully charged pack and nice warm tires. During the race, the Ripperton bike was slicing and dicing, overtaking bike at the corners, thanks to plenty of low end torque and fantastic maneuverability of the bike. It was on the straights where the Ripperton bike was overtaken as the top speed did not match some of the gas bikes. The end result was that Ripperton finished 11th with a fastest lap of 1:10:0880 which was a further improvement to race 1.
Race 4
It appeared Race 4 started ahead of schedule which meant that bike was not fully charged and did not participate.
Conclusion
The Ripperton Electric Racing Bike has proven that it is competitive against the gasoline super bikes (1000cc) and super sport bikes (600cc). The Electric bike is fantastic around corners, but improvements can be made with higher top speed.
This is Al Bunzel signing out
P.S. Check out the videos of race 3 from the Ripperton Electric Bike.




