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The KillaCycle is coming to New Zealand! In June my friend Philip blogged about his plan and now it's officially on. There has been a little bit of press coverage, the Dominion Post has an interview with Philip, and Radio Live has a 8 minute interview with Bill Dube, owner of the KillaCycle. The Radio Live piece is hard to find because they don't have any metadata on their archives. The interview is 8 minutes in, after the news and a song on part 1 and continues in part 2. Hopefully Philip will get permission to host these files as one piece before it is purged from Radio Live's website.

Don't miss Bill's interview -- he talks about his new battery pack from A123 Systems: more than 3 times the power density!

The plan is a tour of the North Island, with exhibition runs at the 4 and Rotary Nationals in January. The KillaCycle team hopes to take the New Zealand drag bike record. They are in talks with the current record holder, Athol Williams to do a head to head run, possibly at Taupo. Athol has set better times in Australia and will be a formidable challenge.

I've been invited to be the New Zealand pit crew member for the KillaCycle team, a job I'm very much looking forward to. I'm going to have to go down to Meremere for a few meetings to bone up on what goes on, I haven't been drag racing for years.

Sponsorship opportunities are available!

Martin Eberhard has made the Roadster Foundry Mobile Charger. This is a box of tricks which lets you connect your Tesla to a bunch of different wall sockets and the charge current is automatically limited, depending on the socket used.

I need to do a similar thing for my car, but my implementation will be somewhat different because my charger is different. Also, in New Zealand I believe I will need an in-line circuit breaker. I'm told electricians are supposed to destroy any 16A caravan plug to regular 10A plug adapter cables they find without a circuit breaker. I guess this will apply to an adapter from a 32A PDL 56 plug to a regular 10A plug too.

The motorkhana went very well. People were very interested and nothing broke. Unofficially, I'm told I got the fastest time by 2.1s on the second course! , the results will be available at the club meeting tomorrow. I configured my motor controller to allow reversing at speeds below 50km/h (instead of 5km/h) and used this to good effect for changing from forwards to reverse.