On June 13th, 2018, Chinese AMA champion supermoto rider Sun Tong visited the Luna Cycle headquarters in El Segundo after a month of taking his racing team across the united states to compete in several super motor events. He had with him a stock Sur Ron bike with a sur-ron modded controller which gave his sur-ron about 20 percent more power than stock…also, of course, he had his gas race bike a heavily modded Husqvarna 450.
Last month when he visited us we had just recently lost our tune settings and had to go with an older controller tune setting on our Hot Rodded Sur-ron… you can see in the video Sun Tong wheeling the bike but not enough power to ride the bike for sustained levels. We could tell that Sun was not that impressed, and even though we had members of the Sur-Ron team there to translate for us…I think nobody believed us that we can get twice as much power out of the same bike if we just have it tuned correctly.
Here is the video from last month:
This month Sun Tong returned to just say hello on his way back to China. We let him ride the newly tuned Hot Rodded Luna Bike which now has a knob so you can decide what power level you want from 1 to 11…..He tried it at level 1 and loved it….and then we turned it up for him.
He was blown away….He rode up and down the block doing power wheelies…we could hear him hooping and hollering. This guy is hard to excite…and even though he has been racing a “souped-up” Sur-Ron bike (at about 80 amps) at 700 amps he finally saw the light that is this bike could dominate real supermoto races. Suddenly we have a contender…. Not just a sideshow bike that is a fun pit bike and a bike for the kids to ride.
After 20 minutes on the bike, Sun was so excited that he wanted to race the Hot Rodded Sur-Ron against his supermoto….Really something we would not have dreamed possible. He says his modified Husqvarna has 76 horsepower…. We are guessing the Hot rodded Sur-Ron is putting out at best 50 hp…but it’s electric immediate power. Still, to take on this magnificent Hasqarvana seemed like a real stretch.
At first, he tried to get Ashley to race him and Ashley grabbed her helmet but we know Ashley and did not want any mishaps so went inside and got Luke (liveforphysics) who geared up and the following races ensued.
In the end, the Husqvarna with its launch start won 2 out of the 3 ⅛ mile races but what is amazing is all the races were close. Without launch start, we think the Sur-Ron would have won every race because it’s so much easier to hold start.
Here is a video that Ashley proudly edited documenting the amazing day that kind of sporadically unfolded.
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