My piece on the Killacycle, an electric drag racing motorcycle, ran in this morning’s Boston Globe and is presently on the Boston.com’s home page. Quite a bit didn’t appear including a sidebar about why electric drag racing has not taken root in New England. The sidebar’s main source is electric car owner Bob Rice, who is a thoroughly entertaining and crusty retired Amtrak engineer. Some technical details were dropped in the main story, but those are nowhere near as good as the last line of the main story. It expresses the wonderfully contrarian nature of electric car folks.
>The Killacycle is not bad for a guy who finished 14th in his high school class. That’s 14th from the bottom in a class of 835, he proudly points out.<
Here’s the sidebar:
The popularity of electric vehicle racing is growing if the membership of the National Electric Drag Racing Association (NEDRA) is any indication. Now up to more than 100 members, the organization has come a long way since “a small group of ampheads” like Bill Dubé and John Wayland met over pizza a dozen years ago following the Saturday night races
“The Northwest is the hotbed right now,” says NEDRA president Mike Willmon who credits Dubé and Portland, Ore. forklift mechanic Wayland with pioneering the sport of electric vehicle racing. “Bill’s gotten in big with Harley drag racing. They brought him under their wing as a token electric.”
Wayland nicknamed “Plasma Boy” built the White Zombie, a 1972 street-legal Datsun 1200 sedan that holds the electric car quarter mile record. Both Dubé and Wayland have been building, racing and commuting in electric vehicles for a decade or more.
While New England has spawned battery maker A123 Systems and universities where substantial electric car research is underway, the six-state region hosts virtually no electric vehicle racing. A lack of drag strips, money and interest are to blame.
“It’s a different mindset out west in Wayland country,” says Bob Rice, a retired Amtrak engineer from Killingsworth, Conn. Rice is president of the New England chapter of the Electric Auto Association. “It was a whole different world when I was out there,” he says about his visit last year to the Wayland Invitational races. He made the cross-country trip to Portland, Ore., in his Prius, but locally zips round in the “Led Sled,” a 1989 Jetta he converted to an electric.
What’s missing here, he says, are drag strips. “I’d love to see it, but there isn’t enough racing support here. The City of Portland owns the Portland International Raceway.” As a result, he refers to the East Coast as the “Least Coast” with the trademark irreverence characterizing many electric racing pioneers.
“If you want to see real racing, you’ve got to go out west. Sure, drag racing is silly, but it’s a lot more fun than advancing technology through wars,” he says, citing how death and destruction propelled aviation. A drag strip is an ideal environment to determine when batteries overheat, explode, catch fire, under-perform or wear out quickly,
“The Least Coast is stuck in the 19th century,” Rice wryly observes.
