Harley-Davidson suggests that the future of motorcycle racing is electric



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When it comes to evaluating the performance of motorcycle endurance races on the strip, you could hardly find a better group of people prepared for the task than Vance and Hines’ Pro Stock Harley-Davidson team. A year ago when I interviewed Andrew Hines After his winning season with the FXDR, I asked him what he thought about electric performance and if a LiveWire electric bike it could someday join the ranks of NHRA ProStock. Although obviously I received a non-binding response from the pilot, this video from Harley’s Science of Speed ​​series seems to indicate that it is a direction that The Motor Company wants to pursue.

Despite clearly being a piece of advertising developed by Harley for their own products, this little 10 minute video is actually quite interesting. The premise is pretty simple, put your three Pro Stock pilots—Andrew Hines, Angelle Sampey and Eddie Krawiec – used to run a quarter-mile in the six, on a fully stock FXDR 114 and a fully stock LiveWire to compare the company’s fastest gas bike with its only electric bike. Line them up on the strip and see what happens.

The test results are quite convincing. It doesn’t take long to see that LiveWire is significantly faster than offline FXDR. This adds up to a quarter mile of time in the low 11s, with a 0-60 of around 3 seconds on the nose and the fastest bike in the bar and shield ever built. It’s nowhere near the bikes these racers race at NHRA events, but it’s not nearly as easy as high-performance road bikes. The most interesting part of this, for me, is the consistency LiveWire delivers on FXDR. Even for riders who religiously practiced clutch and throttle discipline, their reaction times were significantly slower on the gas bike than on the EV.

If you’re Harley, why wouldn’t you want your racing bike to be based on your fastest road bike? And if you are the NHRA, why wouldn’t you want to show the technology of future and sustainable speed? Electric is the future of sports like this. It would be great to see a Harley Livewire built by Vance and Hines doing 6 second sprints. Here we go!

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