Thursday, June 25, 2009

Electric Motorcycle Racing News: FIM Announce Electric Superbike Series



As announced yesterday, TTXGP organizer and founder Azhar Hussain has been behind the scenes working with the FIM (Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme) to introduce an international electric motorcycle roadracing series based upon the success of the TTXGP.

The FIM press release can be found here: Superbikeplanet.com
Discuss further at: ElectricMotorcycleForum.com

Details are very limited, but it will be interesting to see if the new, as of yet unnamed, series will run independently of the two current FIM World Championship series: MotoGP and World Superbike; or if it will be run as a support series alongside one or the other.

Conjecture would lean toward the electric bike series running in conjunction with one of the established FIM series and not as an autonomous series. How the FIM decides to position and market the electric series will likely depend upon a combination of financial sense and vision for the future.

The FIM purely establishes and enforces rules and regulations regarding international motorcycle racing. Promoting and organizing racing series and events falls on the two companies that own all of the rights to each form of racing: Dorna Sports for the prototype bike series: MotoGP, and Flamini Group for production bike series: World Superbike.

In a nutshell, Dorna and Flamini are marketing businesses that make their money sourcing sponsors, establishing television rights, licensing, and merchandizing their respective series. The bulk of the work they do is promoting their series, and handling all of the logistics and organization of races.

Will either promoter see value in an electric series and choose to bid on rights to it?

The bikes that ran at TTXGP were a combination of production-based (i.e. Brammo Enertia TTR, etc.) and pure prototype (i.e. MotoCzysz E1pc) motorcycles. Most of the prototype constructors do hope to produce production bikes based upon their race machines. It will be up to the FIM to decide if the vision they have is (and financial justification for) a production series or a prototype series, and make the rules to favor one formula over the other.

EnvironMoto will keep tabs on the rules as they come together.

Photo: MotoCzysz via Asphalt and Rubber

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