It started on Tuesday morning, all the preparations were completed and we were ready to go. The team managed to leave the Future Factory at 6:45.

Around 8:30 the team arrived at the pit-box at the TT Assen Circuit. The sun was shining and we had the entire track for ourselves. Ready for a great test day. The motorbike, the tools, the spares and everything we thought of to take to the test day was unloaded and organised into the pit-box.

Then, we met our Driver. Finn de Bruin has been racing on motorbikes since he was twelve years old and now he is looking towards the future. He wants to get used to an Electric Superbike as soon as possible such that he can be ahead of the game when the motorbike sport transfers from gasoline to electric motorbikes. Together with Finn and two of his engineers, we inspected the bikes to make sure everything was working optimal. This also gave the added benefit of us getting advice on certain improvements we could add to the DELTA-XE. One of these improvements was a method in which we could do a much faster tire change!

After all the checks were done, it was finally the time to start testing. To keep the first test day as safe as possible, we only tested on the straight start-finish lane. After Finn was fully briefed, he got onto the bike, ready for action. He took off from the pit-box and drove around to the start-finish lane and then, for the first time, Electric Superbike Twente witnessed the DELTA-XE in action. The power of the DELTA-XE was limited in order to allow for safe testing. We started with a power limit of 20%. After the tests were successful, power was gradually increased to 50%, which ended up being our maximum for the day. Hearing the DELTA-XE slice though the air sounded similar to the sound of a Jet Plane, only this time on two wheels.

Sadly, around the middle of the afternoon, the weather took a turn for the worse and rain started falling from the sky. This was a great opportunity for us to get some rest, have something to eat and start practicing a tire change. Since the race track was now wet, we decided to exchange the road tires for some rain tires. During this action, we noticed that we could still improve certain parts of the DELTA-XE in order to make our lives much easier during the racing season.

Once the rain cleared, we did one final test with the DELTA-XE to see how well Finn could handle the bike in straight, wet conditions with rain tires. He raced back and forth along the start finish straight and started being able to tame the DELTA. However, after an hour it started raining again and it would keep raining for the rest of the day. We ended our first test day by packing everything up again. The people at the TT circuit were even so kind as to give us a tour of all the facilities there. Once everything was back in the bus, we started our drive home. Everyone was ecstatic from the day we just had and we made sure to celebrate this during the evening hours.

After a lot of hard work, we finally were able to go to the dyno at Ten Kate!  

The goal of the day at Ten Kate was to finally be able to run the bike at full power. Because while we have our own dyno, the dyno at Ten Kate is more powerful and more accurate, meaning it gives a clearer view of what our bike is capable of. This is also because this dyno allows us to keep our swingarm and rear wheel on the bike, making this an even better integration test. On top of this, with the bike running at full power, we can also see how the temperatures develop in the battery pack and the motor. 

We left for Ten Kate at 7:45, to make sure we could make the most of the day there. When we got there, we got started unpacking and started our first test at 12, during which we were already able to go at 80 km/h. But this was nothing compared to the max speed we reached, as later in the day we reached 320 km/h! During this test, we were also able to get a power of 221 horsepower or 162kW. This to us showed that not only were we able to reach the specs for which the motor was designed, but even beat them.  

Sadly, when we opened the throttle rapidly, we experienced some issues with the bike shocking a bit. Because of this, we had to spend a long time trying to get to the bottom of this issue, and sadly we were not to fix it on that day. This meant that we did not have enough time to run all the tests we wanted, but we still learned a lot from the tests we were able to run, got a lot of information about how much heat is generated by all the systems, and got some very useful data that allows us to further develop the bike