Interview with Lucio Cecchinello: present and future of MotoE Part II

Interview with Lucio Cecchinello: present and future of MotoE Part II
Lucio Cecchinello alongside his rider Niccolò Canepa in Jerez

This is the second part of the interview with Lucio Cecchinello, team director of the LCR team engaged in MotoGP and MotoE.

This is the link to the first part of the interview.

How do you see the future of MotoE? Will it remain a single-brand championship for a while longer or will it become a free class?
“My point of view, which is not necessarily the future of MotoE, is this: on the one hand we have Dorna who is interested in making this category grow, make it spectacular and make it well known. To make this possible, the races must be spectacular, exciting and engaging. This can happen if the level of all the teams is very high and the gap between the riders is extremely small. Until now this has also been possible thanks to the single-brand formula which has another huge advantage: it allows to contain the increase of costs of the bikes that would otherwise surge to the stars."

The Energica Ego Corsa of the LCR E-Team

“It is clear that in the future, when MotoE will have become a category capable of attracting sponsors and manufacturers, the single-brand formula will decline and we will have several manufacturers directly involved in this category. In between, it is possible to think of a championship in which the Power Unit is common to all and teams can work freely to develop the bike's chassis and aerodynamics.
I imagine that Energica and Dorna will renew their collaboration for a few more years, but with significant developments in the bike to increase performance and range. From then on, we will see what level will be reached by electric mobility in the two-wheeler sector. Today we already see that important developments follow one another at a very high pace, perhaps in a few years we may already see manufacturers directly committed into electric competitions. In order to limit costs, we could fix some components and make them common to all, such as the battery, the control software and traction control."

Xavier Simeon at Misano

What is your general feeling about MotoE?
“What we are experiencing, and I am sorry that it is not adequately highlighted, is a historic change for motorcycling. Unfortunately, it is often reduced to a third or fourth order topic in the media. MotoE serves to create the environment for a change comparable to the change from 500cc 2T to 1000cc 4T. At that moment the 4T engine was clearly the future but was welcomed as a kind of betrayal of the spirit of racing. Today we are living a similar situation, but it is useless to turn around so much, in ten or at most twenty years, mobility, including two-wheeled mobility, will be electric. At that point, no motorbike manufacturer will invest millions of euros for a team in a competition with combustion engines to develop an obsolete technology."

A MotoE during the charging phase by a EnelX station

“I see the Asian market as a turning point: when the governments of those countries decide for the block of 4-stroke vehicles, a huge space will open up for electric vehicles. At that moment, a strong impulse will be generated towards electric propulsion in motorbike racing. 
At that point, what will happen to MotoE and MotoGP is still to be written: for a while I imagine two categories that will go hand in hand until internal combustion engines disappear and MotoGP merge into MotoE and from then on we will have a unique class. Of course, we are talking about a very distant future and who knows, maybe we will have motorbike batteries that will weigh 2 kg only."

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