White Motorcycle Concepts’ WMC250EV Aims for New Land Speed Record

The first creation of new R&D company White Motorcycle Concepts, the WMC250EV clearly reveals at first glance its most obvious innovation: a vast aerodynamic tunnel running the entire length of the electric bike from its nose to the tail. As well as vastly reducing the bike’s frontal area, the aero concept massively reduces the front-end lift experienced by conventional bikes, eliminating the need for any add-on winglets that would only increase drag.

Dubbed V-Air, the duct system is at the core of the bike’s design, defining both its external shape and internal structure. Formed from carbon fiber, the duct supports the bodywork, the bars, and the rider’s seat, and sits atop a billet aluminum lower chassis that doubles as a case for the electronics and the lithium-ion battery packs.

Designed using computational fluid dynamics, the bike’s design promises a remarkable 70 percent reduction in drag compared to a Suzuki Hayabusa—a benchmark for motorcycle aerodynamics for decades. The figures have since been confirmed by real-world wind tunnel tests at the MIRA test facility.

Robert White, WMC’s founder and the brains behind the WMC250EV’s design, has more than two decades’ experience in motorsport engineering, from superbike racing to F1. He explains: “A Suzuki Hayabusa has got a CdA [drag area] of around 0.35-0.36, and in CFD [computational fluid dynamics] we achieved a drag coefficient of 0.11. That’s a significant reduction in drag. We have comparable rear-wheel load to a WSB bike, and we have five times more load on the front tire than a WSB bike.

“In MotoGP they’re applying a lot of aero elements on the front of the bikes to keep the front tire loaded. That’s for two main reasons. The first is that you need the [movement] to be relatively high for a motorcycle to change direction, so you have a high center of gravity, but when you’re accelerating in a straight line the high C of G means the bike wants to rotate under power around the rear tire. It wants to wheelie. As the power backs off and the aerodynamic forces increase at high speed, then the center of pressure on a bike is relatively high as well, and that is essentially trying to do the same thing. So that is also trying to rotate the bike around the rear tire.

“Generally speaking, a bike is lighter at high speed than it is statically, because it rises up on its suspension and creates lift. So what we have got is a bike that has got 70 percent less drag, equivalent rear-wheel load, and five times more front-wheel load. A very interesting combination. When we start to run the bike we’ll use linear sensors front and rear to monitor the wheel loads and use aerodynamic elements within the duct to tune the wheel loads.”

While speed record bikes often achieve a reduction in drag and frontal area by dropping the rider low, the WMC250EV’s seat height is about the same as a conventional sportbike. That means the same aerodynamic thinking could be transferred to a road-going motorcycle in the future.

“The riding position on the land speed bike is quite radical, but the seat height is the same as a Yamaha R6,” White said. “What we want to do is to demonstrate that this concept could be adopted into the real world, and if that’s the case, you need the rider and center of gravity to be high enough to allow the rider to turn the bike. The bike itself is radical in its design but going forward, if we were to look at a scooter, a sport-tourer, or a superbike, this would be comparable to the riding position you’d go for. The duct would be smaller but still give significant aerodynamic efficiency.

“A sport-tourer, for instance, is designed to give as much protection from the elements as possible to allow the rider to be comfortable for hundreds of miles. But in doing so they’re aerodynamically dreadful. So if we apply the duct to an idea like this, on the assumption that the power unit is shrinking over time and development in the years to come, you would be able to have a conventional riding position with the same protection but instead of being an aerodynamic barn door, the bike would allow air to pass straight through the rider’s legs and out the back, giving much better efficiency.”

With five times the aerodynamic front-wheel loading of a conventional bike, the WMC250EV’s second innovation makes a lot of sense—it’s driven by both wheels.

On conventional high-powered bikes, two-wheel drive is a pointless exercise because under hard acceleration they’ll lift the front wheel off the ground. However, on a long-wheelbase record machine like this, there’s a significant gain to be had. Reaching top speed—particularly on a surface like salt flats—becomes a battle between traction and aerodynamic drag. At that stage, adding more power doesn’t make you go faster, as the rear wheel simply spins in its effort to fight against the wind resistance that’s preventing the bike from accelerating anymore.

In that situation, the WMC250EV’s ability to put drive through the front wheel—using two hub-mounted motors—could prove a decisive advantage. But the same technology could be a game changer for electric road bikes as well, as it allows regenerative braking to be used.

White said: “For the land speed project, one of the major things is grip, and for us that could be the defining factor that allows us to push faster than anybody else. But all of our innovation looks at the application of technology in the real world. With [electric or hybrid] cars, regenerative braking is a big thing, and because the center of gravity and dynamic forces are different on a car, you can regen on most wheels without any issues. On a motorcycle, generally you drive the rear wheel, and when you’re braking heavily that rear wheel is vastly unloaded, or even off the ground, so it’s difficult to harvest energy effectively from an electric motor that’s connected to the rear wheel. If you’re going to improve efficiency further, you need to find a way to harvest energy from the front tire rather than the rear, so you must have a motor connected to the front.”

In its initial form, for development purposes, the WMC250EV uses two 20kW motors in the front wheel allied to a pair of 30kW motors driving the rear. That’s a total of 100kW, or 134 hp, but as the project develops the power is likely to rise.

Suspension is via swingarm at both ends. The front has a Bimota Tesi-style hub-steering system, though it uses cables rather than linkages to connect the bars to the wheel so there’s nothing to obstruct that huge duct. The rear swingarm, machined from billet aluminum, houses an enclosed chain drive that’s drip-fed with lubricant to keep temperatures down during the record runs. Between the two, the alloy battery case doubles as the main structure.

Given that packaging is a major concern for motorcycle makers—trying to fit mechanical components into as small a space as possible—driving a huge hole through the center of a bike might seem wasteful, but White thinks that as electric bikes develop, priorities are likely to change.

“EV technology will shrink in future,” he said. “It’s going to get smaller, cheaper, and lighter. But the defining feature of a motorcycle—and this is what differs from a car—is that the motorcycle’s form has to respect the rider. You can keep shrinking a car’s powertrain and give yourself greater cabin space or luggage space for an improved product, but on a motorcycle if you keep shrinking the powertrain and the bike gets smaller and smaller, are you aerodynamically respecting the form of the rider and being efficient in the way you’re passing air around [them]?

“I think that as the powertrains get smaller and smaller, we’re going to end up with greater cavities within the bodywork which aren’t being used. If you can arrange all of those together, you can utilize them by creating a duct through the bike.”

White Motorcycle Concepts might be out to prove its ideas with a land speed record, but the firm plans to prove the technology at more real-world speeds as well. It’s already well underway with the development of a second project, which applies the V-Air duct idea to a prototype based on Yamaha’s Tricity 300 three-wheeled scooter, targeting improved performance, better economy, and lower emissions.

The next step for the land speed record project is an attempt on the British record, due to take place later this year and targeting 200 mph—something the team believe is possible with the current motor and battery setup. This will be followed by an all-out attempt on the world record in the semi-streamliner electric class using significantly more powerful motors. That run is set to take place on salt flats in Bolivia next year, and the team believes 250 mph is within reach—enough to eclipse the current 228 mph record set by Max Biaggi on Voxan’s 367 hp Wattman bike last year.