Going racing: Super Hooligan
From our newsletters of July 2024 ("Racing goes electric, even with NASCAR") and October 2024 ("Racing and Recordsetting")
Update, October 2026: our race program has changed course since this was written. We'll tell that story in a follow-up post.
Did you know the biggest name in American auto racing is making plans to go electric?
In its announcement of an electric racing prototype for the NASCAR series over Independence Day weekend, the organization says a lot about the future of motorsports. Probably the best-known American motorsport, NASCAR definitely knows a lot about its fanbase and how to share a story with them, and it clearly sees it's time to plan for an electric future in racing.
That same week, Shandoka was negotiating a place in the MotoAmerica Super Hooligan motorcycle racing series for 2025. It's a 5-race road course series that puts gas-burners and electrics on the same track at the same time, and it features over 30 teams with air-cooled and water-cooled combustion bikes, and two electric teams right now.
We won that preliminary approval, based partly on our goals as a company: to show the average motorcycle rider how they can convert almost any motorcycle to run on electric power, and so save money on fuel costs and maintenance time so they can ride more! Electric motorcycles are also easier to operate, and they're seeing strong demand from new riders as well as older riders looking for a bike that's easier to handle.
This is the backstory MotoAmerica wants to present to its viewers.
Work continues on the engineering for the 1982 Yamaha Virago 920cc V-twin, our Super Hooligan contender. Before we get our chance on the track, we have to prove the motorcycle will perform fully, at 140+ miles an hour, on the country's most challenging road courses like Laguna Seca. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations put us above the middle of the pack for available power, but at a lower total weight than the other electric competitors and with far more acceleration available than most of the gassers. I've ridden street versions of the other electric competition, and they're very top-heavy compared to our patented structural design that keeps the power pack and heavy components lower overall. Combined, this makes us real competition for the front of the pack.
This is gonna be a lot of fun!
Here's to the fun of summertime,
Ernest Eich, Founder
October 2024: racing is about pushing the edge of design
There's nothing quite like competition to improve your product, and there's no competition in motorsports quite like the Super Hooligan. This fall we launched our Racing and Recordsetting program at Shandoka, to support our attempt to qualify for this awesome race series. It's a unique event: liquid-cooled, air-cooled and electric motorcycles on the same track at the same time, racing to the top of the Super Hooligan contenders.