Eva Hakansson, one of the engineers behind the KillaCycle electric drag racing motorcyle (read about it here), and her team that includes husband Bill Dube, founder of KillaCycle, has been working for three years on an all-electric streamliner motorcycle with the hopes of breaking the 200mph speed barrier at the legendary Bonneville Raceway in Utah.
The KillaJoule, Eva’s motorcycle, was designed and built entirely in-house by the KillaCycle team. The final design, after trials last year, is a three-wheeled motorcycle (aka motorcycle with side car) under racing rules. Eva herself pilots the machine and it wears her personal slogan
“Gasoline?! that’s so last century!”
Below is the KillaJoule racing team along with the motorcycle itself at Bonneville. Photo courtesy of the KillaJoule team.
Races in her category at Bonneville are overseen by the International Motorcycling Federation (FIM) and her records set are pending verification, which usually takes a few weeks. In two runs, she was certified by the 2013 BUB at 210.844 mph and then at a record-slaughtering 213.250 mph. Time slips below again courtesy of the KillaJoule Team:
The KillaJoule has come a long way since the last time I saw it, when it was in the early stages of production, during an interview with Bill and Eva at their Denver, Colorado headquarters. You can read that interview here and here. In that second link, there is a photo of Eva standing next to the KillaJoule as it was then, nothing more than an unfinished frame. Eva is well on her way towards beating the massive 400mph overall speed record at Bonneville and may be able to do it, given that her and her husband Bill were instrumental in building the batteries that powered the record-shattering Drayson Racing run a couple of months ago.
The team plans to return later this month for another run, this time hoping to break the 224.201 mph record for sidecar motorcycle (of any kind) and the current national record for electric motorcycles, which stands at 215.960.
That will be something to see!
