University challenge
Reborn Norton join Triumph in the race for electro glory. And their 200bhp race prototype was built in just seven months by13 students
‘Designed with the TT in mind’
If the lines of this new electric bike seem familiar, that’s because the fairing, frame and single-sided swingarm are from Norton’s TT superbike. Norton gave the shell to a group of students at Warwick University last October and they have turned it into a 201bhp electric racer that’s about to undertake track testing.
The bike has a cutting edge immersion battery as the power source – a first for a motorcycle. The system uses a nonconductive liquid to directly cool the cells to maintain consistency – if they get too hot, power has to be reduced to stop them being damaged. It’s one of the main reason Zero TT racers had to back off over the Mountain.
‘This bike was designed with the TT in mind,’ says James Grohmann, the project’s lead design engineer. ‘That’s where all our design principles came from in terms of robustness. Obviously we’re hoping the Zero TT is brought back soon because you’re competing against professional teams.’
The main challenge with the design itself was cramming the batteries into a bike designed for a V4. ‘Fitting the battery pack in was very difficult,’ says James. ‘It was designed for quite a narrow engine so we didn’t have much space to work with but we’ve densely packed the modules. Another problem was that we didn’t know how much rigidity the V4 engine added, so we’ve had to over-engineer everything to be on the safe side.
‘It weighs around 250kg. The reason it’s an estimate is there’s a load of coolant [for the batteries] we need to put in which will be a small proportion of the weight, but it means we can’t be exact. I thought it would be more than 250kg but it’s tailed off as we’ve come to the end of the build.’
The students’ brief is to research the future of electric motorcycle racing and, aside from donating the frame, Norton’s involvement is currently limited to checking that the structural integrity of the chassis has not been compromised by their meddling. But with Triumph using Warwick as a design partner in their TE-1 electric project, Norton clearly have a foot in the door of the right university. An electric Norton made by Norton might not be too far away…
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