Ohio State’s Student-Built E-Motorcycle Breaks Speed Records

In 2016, IEEE Spectrum spotlighted Ohio State University’s Buckeye Current team, a group of engineering students who dared to test their electric motorcycle’s mettle against professionals in the grueling Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. The 20-kilometer “Race to the Clouds” challenged the students with 156 hairpin turns on a trek to the 4,300-meter summit.

By 2022, only two members of the team were holdovers from the Pike’s Peak days. The team roster wasn’t the only change. That year, the Buckeye Current team shifted its focus from conquering mountains to shattering land speed records. In a collaboration with the team’s sponsor, Monaco-based Venturi Group, students started building and testing an entirely new electric motorcycle, the RW-5 Voxan.

In August, the Buckeye Current team and the RW-5 Voxan, piloted by Venturi’s head of engineering, Louis-Marie Blondel, set four new world speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah during the Bonneville Motorcycle Speed Trials. The trials were overseen by the Fédération Internationale de Motorcyclisme (FIM).

Rebuilding a Record-Setting Team

David Cooke, the senior associate director at OSU’s Center for Automotive Research, is the team’s faculty advisor. He says the successful Pikes Peak team was scattered by the COVID-19 pandemic. “The timing was terrible,” he says. “The team had just wrapped up a whole sequence of races and was just looking to decide what it would do next. Then the pandemic hit, and the team shrank down to almost nothing.”

“On our last day at Bonneville, I told the team, ‘You started a few weeks ago as a great student club, but you’re leaving as a racing team.’” —David Cookie, OSU’s Center for Automotive Research

Cooke recalls that the remnant was two students who were working on related side projects, including an electric dirt bike. They and Laura Friedmann, graduate student who recently earned her master’s degree in mechanical engineering, formed the nucleus of the revived Buckeye Current team. In just two years, they were able to recruit new team members, design and build the RW-5 Voxan, and pick up a host of technical and project management skills and experience that they would never have gained inside the classroom.

Cooke credits the quick bounce-back to OSU’s rich institutional knowledge. “We have seven of these competition teams, with a total of about 300 students, that operate out of our facility,” says Cooke. “All told, we’ve been participating in competitions such as Formula SAE and Baja SAE for 35 years, so there’s a lot of institutional knowledge there. Even when the team has younger students coming in, there’s always some senior people around who know how to teach important skills such as machining, design, and how to organize themselves for quick turnarounds on the track.”

Record-Setting Performance

The FIM assesses a motorcycle’s speed using a straight path measuring 9 miles (14.5 kilometers) long. At the 2-mile (3.2-kilometer) mark, after the motorcycle has reached its top speed, it breaks a laser beam that starts a timer. A second laser, either 1 mile or 1 kilometer farther on the route (depending on the particular record being attempted), the motorcycle interrupts a second laser beam that stops the timer. The rest of the route provides room for the driver to coast down to a speed at which it’s safe to apply the brakes.

The FIM uses an average speed across two runs attempted within a two-hour window in its record considerations. Buckeye Current team president Sabina Williams, a fourth-year student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, says that by the time the Motorcycle Speed Trials began, the team was able to accomplish the turnaround within one hour.

The Buckeye Current team entered the 148-kilogram RW-5 Voxan in the speed trials’ electric motorcycle category for machines weighing between 100 and 150 kilograms. (There’s also a category for machines between 150 and 300 kg, and an “unlimited” category for anything beyond 300 kg.) Williams says the team added specially machined metal pieces to bring the RW-5 Voxan’s weight right up to the 150 kg limit. The added weight, the team figured, would be balanced out by improving the motorcycle’s traction on the salt flats’ slippery surface: Cooke says that the salt surface at Bonneville has about half the coefficient of friction of asphalt. “So instead of driving on grippy asphalt on a beautiful Sunday,” he says, “you’re driving on a surface whose traction approximates asphalt after anything from a light rain to snow and ice.”

To put the Buckeye Current team’s motorcycle in perspective, consider the iconic Vespa scooter. The peppiest of those lightweight scooters put out 18 kilowatts, or just shy of 25 horsepower, compared with the 130 kW (174 hp) the RW-5 Voxan’s Beyond AXM2 axial flux motor delivers. The electric bike’s power output is comparable to that of Ducati’s Panigale V2, a gasoline-powered, street-legal sport bike that weighs in at 200 kg.

The Buckeye team’s successful pairing of middleweight power in a lightweight package allowed the RW-5 Voxan to set new all-time speed records in four categories:

• Fastest average speed without a fairing (an aerodynamic cover designed to reduce turbulence): 271.323 km/h (168.59 mph) over one mile.
• Fastest average speed without a fairing: 271.515 km/h (168.71 mph) over one kilometer.
• Fastest average speed with a fairing: 289.74 km/h (180.035 mph) over one mile.
• Fastest average speed with a fairing: 289.79 km/h (180.065 mph) over one kilometer.

These records are still pending validation by FIM.

New Challenges for Buckeye Current

Though there was no mountain to climb this time around, the Ohio State team still faced challenges. While prepping in Utah, Williams says that racing the bike at or near peak power caused its motor to burn out. The team replaced it with a spare motor they happened to have on hand. After working late into the night calibrating the new motor, they were able to complete the final two of the four days of timed sprints, during which the bike was pushed to its limits. “That was a significant challenge I was proud to see the team overcome,” says Williams.

A common theme among electric motorcycle teams there, Williams says, was struggling with battery temperatures. The Buckeye Current team had difficulty keeping its machine’s 567-volt lithium-ion battery pack cool in the heat of the salt flats. Williams notes that another team had problems keeping its battery warm enough to race in the mornings when temperatures were low. And all of the teams faced a constant fight to keep the salt from corroding their bikes’ metal parts.

The world record achievements not only highlight the continued success of the Buckeye Current team but also underscore the potential of electric motorcycles to set new benchmarks in speed and performance. “What we had on this team were a lot of really bright aspiring engineers,” says Cooke. “But we didn’t have a single person who had experience with race cars or on a racing team. On our last day at Bonneville, I told the team, ‘You started a few weeks ago as a great student club, but you’re leaving as a racing team.’” Williams says the newly minted race team now has its sights set on a new goal: Eclipsing the 200 mile-per-hour (322-kilometer-per-hour) mark within the next year.