April 2019, what heady days those were, back before the post-modern plague crammed us into our hovels and forced us to take many long, hard looks at ourselves. I remember it being a month of plentiful avocado and bacon toasties, of carefree hand-shaking and friend-hugging. I remember brushing by people in supermarket aisles with a smile and a "'scuse me" instead of narrow-eyed suspicion and bated breath. I remember what normal used to feel like; it felt... Pretty normal, really.
I also remember squandering part of my precious last months of freedom extruding eight short paragraphs on the topic of ex-MotoGP rider Max Biaggi teaming up with French concern Voxan to take a stab at an electric motorcycle record that didn't seem like a record to me.
That attempt was supposed to happen this year in Bolivia, but has been cancelled, along with all our hopes and dreams for 2020. And today Voxan announced it's going to have another stab at it in July 2021, again with Biaggi on board, assuming people are able to do things again by that stage.
Along with this announcement, Voxan released these images of its specially prepared land speed bike, a juiced-up version of the Wattman cruiser. In street trim, the Wattman is a weird future-cruiser of a thing making a very un-cruiserlike 203 horsepower. In land speed trim, it'll make 367 horses and benefit from a large front fairing and a pressure-reducing tapered tailpiece.
The target is 330 km/h (205 mph) and beyond, that being the mark set by Ryuji Tsuruta aboard a Mobitec EV-02A in the category of "electric motorcycles propelled by the action of one wheel in contact with the ground, partially streamlined, under 300 kg."
With that kind of power on board and a slippery set of carbon fairings, it's also got every chance to break the 218 mph (351 km/h) mark set by Lightning's LS-218 many years ago, which to our knowledge meets the above criteria as well, and made its run at Bonneville.
Either way, the run is at least a year away, and frankly I can't even imagine what the hell 2021 is going to look like from the current vantage point, so it'll either happen or it won't, and a video with exciting music will either be made or not, and the world will keep on turning.
Source: Voxan
