Slaw Dog
What is the future of electric bikes in AMA Racing? Well, that is above my pay grade. I honestly have no clue. This AMA Arenacross season, which kicks off tonight in Reno, we will find out a little more as the series is introducing the “X-Pro” Class with Stark VARG electric bikes. The Stark Varg’s will also be able to compete against gas powered bikes in the Dash for Cash.
Josh Hill, Justin Bogle, Kelana Humphrey, Josh Varize and Trevor Stewart are all competing in the class, which will debut tonight.
At the opening press conference last night, the AMA’s Mike Burkeen spoke about the decision to get the class up and running and what the future of electric is.
“To start with we’ve we’ve always been pro electric bike and I know the word out there is the AMA hates electric bikes they won’t let them work,” he said. “But we’ve always been pro electric bike. Our issues have been safety related with racing electric bikes and gas bikes together due to the fact that they’re just difficult to hear and the awareness on the track kind of a struggle. This was an opportunity for us. We wanted to get Stark involved in the season and Sean and I went back and forth, gosh probably a hundred phone calls, trying to figure out a way. We weren’t going to start off right from the get-go and go full bore. Yeah, let’s just let them all race together, but we wanted an opportunity to see what it would be like and doing the Dash for Cash together as well as having the the electric bikes race their own class for their own electric bike national championship. It will be our first AMA electric bike national championship and we’re excited to have it come through the Arenacross series.”
Burkeen went on to talk about how the decision to allow four-strokes to compete against two-strokes turned out and that they are obviously being cautious with allowing electric to compete against gas.
“I mean all of you guys were around when two-strokes and four-strokes came out and you know the rules were made and turns out they weren’t very good and they basically killed off the two-strokes and once it happened we couldn’t put the genie back on the bottle. So with the electric bikes we didn’t want to go full bore and say I will just cut it off if it turns out not to work because then everyone’s made purchasing decisions And then we’ll have all these guys with bikes that they bought under, you know, what they would consider bad pretenses. So we want to walk before we run, but at some point we definitely want to run. And what that looks like, you know, no one really knows. At this point, they’re doing it in Europe, racing them together a few places. And, you know, some pretty good success here, some challenges. But we just cannot be more excited about having them. One, run the X -Pro class, and two, have the opportunity to see them battle out in a class that is perfect, it’s tailor-made to race gas against electric. The Dash for Cash, and one of the things the AMA is pretty adamant about is, our membership is saying we don’t want to be out there with electric bikes. That’s what they’re telling us. In this sense, we’re not forcing that on them. If you don’t want to race to Dash or Cash, they’ll take the next guy and they’ll come in and race through the money. So we think it’s a great, I don’t want to say compromise, it’s a great solution and we’re excited about it.”
