On the Record Carlin Dunne
ON THE RECORD CARLIN DUNNE
IGNITION
INTERVIEW
He’s won Pikes Peak three times in a row, most recently on a Lightning Electric Superbike
Andrew Bornhop
ON RACE DAY, THE COURSE WAS REALLY GREEN because of heavy rains the day before. We had practiced and qualified on a really bed-in course. A good amount of the motorcycle field crashed. Micky Dymond went first and he crashed out, which was shocking because he’s so good there and he knows the place so well.
-> MY BIKE WAS REALLY LOOSE OUT OF THE GATE.
I couldn’t lay the power down like I had throughout the entire week. About seven turns in, I got the bike pretty out of shape. I knew then that we didn’t have the traction needed to beat our record run [9 minutes, 52.819 seconds] from last year.
-> ONCE WE FIGURED OUT THE PACE and figured out what the mountain was going to give us, we just tried to keep it on two wheels and take it to the top. We made it up in 10 flat [10 minutes, 0.694 seconds].
-> I JUST FOCUSED ON GETTING MY DRIVE OUT. Getting that good run out helps us at the end of each straightaway. You can think of Pikes Peak as a bunch of small drag races.
-> ALL OF A SUDDEN, ELECTRIC BIKES ARE A VIABLE OPTION. And at the end of the day, we were the fastest motorcycle there. You’re not losing any power because of the altitude.
-> WHEN I FIRST RODE THE LIGHTNING, IT FELT ODD. Everything you’ve been wired to know about a motorcycle doesn’t really apply.
At racetracks, you know that you can go through a particular turn in fourth gear at half throttle. On an electric bike [with no gears], it’s easy to overcook it into turns.
You don’t know how fast you’re going.
->THE LIGHTNING IS MORE OF A TRACK BIKE THAN MY DUCATI MULTISTRADA. More of a scalpel. It needs to be treated properly to go fast. But if you get it up on the meat and are really smooth on the “throttle,” it comes out of the hole like nothing else.
->THE GREAT THING ABOUT PIKES IS THE RESPECT.
Everyone knows they’re getting into something that needs to be taken seriously. It doesn’t matter if you’re the guy riding out of your van with a clapped-out 450 or you’re a guy like Sébastien Loeb, whose team has dropped millions and millions of dollars, you’re all racing the same mountain. EUM
“I’M A PETROLHEAD TO THE CORE, BUT I REALIZE THAT WE NEED TO HAVE AN ALTERNATIVE. ”
CD AND MORE
218 -> The Lightning Electric Superbike does not have an official name, but the company is considering calling it the 218, the mph a prototype reached at Bonneville.
FROM SHOWROOM TO SUMMIT -> The Multistrada Dunne rode to victory in 2011 was a demo bike taken right off the floor of his Ducati dealership in Santa Barbara, California.
60 PERCENT -> The level of charge left in the Lightning’s lithiumion composite battery pack after Dunne completed the 12.4-mile Pikes Peak hillclimb.
