Another interesting news development that has broke cover in the last couple of days is the announcement by the Mugen Shinden team of their entry into this tears TT Zero race.
Top riders John McGuinness and Bruce Anstey will both be riding what are described as significantly redesigned and faster Mugen electric race bikes in comparison to the version they raced here last year.
In last years event McGuinness recorded an average lap speed of over 109 mph to take second place on the rostrum with Michael Rutter beating him by a couple of seconds margin, Rutter was riding a Team Moto Czysz bike.
Neither of them managed to break the magical 100 mph lap average,though interestingly,McGuinness was averaging about 115mph at the 3/4 race distance mark.
McGuinness had made the decision to back of the throttle at the 3/4 distance to conserve battery energy,which he felt may be running low and could possibly put his chance of finishing at risk if he had continued to push at the earlier pace.
As it turned out on post race inspection of his bike he had miscalculated and did in fact have sufficient battery energy in reserve and could have kept the pace considerably higher with the likelihood of a race win and probably a 100 mph lap record.
Looking forward to this year and the expected improvements in motor and battery technology we could realistically be looking at a lap record speed in the 115mph territory,that is about the same level as a top flight 600cc sidecar outfit currently achieves.
All of this speculation is of course dependent on weather conditions,if there are any damp patches anywhere on the course then race speeds will be slowed down somewhat........OZ.
Link to TT press release here:
http://www.iomtt.com/News/2014/February/10/Anstey-Mugen-2014.aspx