Dorna Hints at Electric Series alongside MotoGP Races
Rennie Scaysbrook | March 17, 2017
Carmelo Ezpeleta puts forth his idea for a new electric motorcycle racing championship
The most powerful man in motorcycling, Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta, has said the MotoGP rights holder is working on a series for electric motorcycles that could begin as early as 2019.
“We are going to do some electric motorcycles soon,” Ezpeleta told Spanish publication ES. “It will be a real eco-label and it will not be a world championship. We want to charge the batteries with clean energy and not with a compressor.”
Ezpeleta has been in talks with a company who will provide electrical charging stations at the races, which he hopes will number five in 2019.
He also has plans to use the current crop of MotoGP riders and team to give the fledging electric series as big a boost as possible.
“We have a funny idea, which is to have the motorcycle management given to independent MotoGP teams,” he said. We have 14 independent teams and we want to races of 18 riders, which would be 14 MotoGP riders and the four best Moto2 riders, if they want to.”
The advent of the new series would be the first major one since for electric motorcycles since the FIM e-Power Championship, which officially stopped at the end of 2013. Currently, there are several countries with electric race classes for electric machines but none are as big as the Zero TT, the one-lap dash held on the Isle of Man at the TT festival every year. A new series with the MotoGP teams and brainstrust involved might just push the technology into petrol-powered bike realms, something Mugen Honda is currently doing after they clocked a 119.279mph lap with TT hero John McGuinness in 2015.