FIM accepts FFs in E-power Championship!
Charles Hennekam, technical co-ordinator and Motorcycle Homologations Officer for the FIM, confirms in an email that it "Is possible to enter FF designs" in the new FIM formula that replaces E-GP.
He goes on to note the "Daunting" challenge of incorporating E-power into race motorcycles without factory support, something that all entrants will have to deal with.
This is a major milestone in FF development. This is the first time the FIM have relaxed their detailed streamlining rules since 1956. There is now no technical bar to entering a full, race-spec. Electric FF in a formal world championship.
Motorcyclists are unlikely to take this on board - they've got enough to deal with, going electric. Going faster, more efficiently, in greater safety will take more imagination, but not more money.
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eFFs for the same price as eHFs?
I would argue that developing an electric FF is not as cheap as developing an electric motorcycle. There would be very few race chassis designers with a deep understanding of the 'state of the art' of FF design. Learning that art, when they already know the alternative, will cost time and mistakes. It won't be free.
Teams can already pack the electric components into existing race chassis. How many light-weight FF chassis are currently available?
Lets hope someone wants to win enough to stump up the extra cash required.
EVFF
No doubt true re: extra cash. However, the 'state of the art' is all public domain and freely available on the web, for any engineer prepared to do more than the most superficial search, and bearing in mind the near-certainty that, whatever prroject they have started, someone else will have tried it before. The very fact that the FIM have lifted the 1956 restrictions on streamlining implies that people *did* try this sort of thing before, without the benefits of the knowledge of aerodynamics (including computer simulation, wind-tunnel and practical experiments) accumulated since.