Racing to the future

Michael Neeves rides Energica’s Motoe Ego Corsa at Valencia’s GP circuit. Racing, after all, improves the breed and the new breed is ‘leccy…

It’s easy to be sniffy about the new Motoe championship. A gaggle of Energica Motoes create a faint whine at best, so all you hear trackside is the sound of knee sliders, the PA and the V8 boom from the BMW safety car. Next year Motogp are banned from warming their engines while Motoe is running because it’s too distracting. And, rather gruesomely, racers have mentioned that for the first time in their careers they can hear the sound of other racers shrieking when they fall off and injure themselves.

Occasionally you’ll hear the scrape of metal and plastic too, followed by a tsunami of stones as 258kg of Ego Corsa beaches itself in the kitty litter. It can take up to eight rubber gloved and booted marshals and a front wheel sled to pluck a crashed Motoe from the gravel.

Organisers are cautious, too. Firefighters guard the paddock (the horrendous Jerez fire earlier this year was actually caused by a prototype fast charger), race distance is reduced and the warm-up lap cut altogether to make sure the bikes see the chequered flag.

But the action is fast and loose. Tyres spin, paint is swapped and lap times are so quick that us ordinary mortals wouldn’t have a hope of matching them on anything with pistons. Thanks to Motoe, Energica are already using lighter, more powerful battery packs, with an extra 60% range in their 2020 road bikes.

Giampiero Testoni, Energica’s Technical Director says: ‘Riders are happy. They forget about shifting, the clutch and just concentrate on riding. They feel they can corner well with lots of traction and the bike feels lighter than it really is. They like its smoothness, throttle response and brakes. Overall it’s very positive.’