Delving into how an electric supermoto beat a track record held by an Audi R8 LMS—a purpose-built race machine—driven by two-time World Rally Champion Carlos Sainz wasn't on my bingo card. But here we are, courtesy of Stark Future.
The record that Stark now holds is the lap record at the Autòdrom de Sitges-Terramar, which is a two-kilometer (1.2 miles) concrete oval track in Spain. Aboard a Stark Varg SM Skoll, Stark rider Jonas Skovby lapped the track in just 41.888 seconds, beating the 42.600 record that Sainz set in 2012 by a mere 0.712 seconds. To secure the win, Skovby averaged 172 kph (106 mph) over the two-kilometer circuit and hit a top speed of 210 kph (130 mph).
Skovby, a Swedish Supermoto champion and freestyle rider, said, "Slamming through a century-old track at 200 km/h means you are constantly on the edge, either about to be launched off a concrete wall or losing the front tire by a hair. With zero time to react or fix a mistake at those speeds, all I could do was completely trust the bike. It was an absolutely insane adrenaline rush and easily the wildest thing I have ever done."
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You might think that riding at 130 mph in an oval wouldn't be close to the wildest thing a Supermoto Champion has ever done, but then you might not know much about the Autòdrom de Sitges-Terramar. The circuit was constructed in just 300 days back in 1923; the concrete oval hosted racing for barely a year before being abandoned to nature for a century. The banked walls are steep enough to walk up, but the concrete is rough at best and quite literally missing at worst.
The concrete track has been disintegrating for the past 100 years, making the sleek, new, electric Stark Varg SM Skool a crazy contrast against it. The last cars to race around this circuit used carburetors; this bike doesn't even have an exhaust.
In pursuit of the record, which was a joint project between Stark Future, Alpinestars and DC Shoes, Skovby pulled a face-melting 6.6 Gs, which is crazy on an almost stock motorcycle. The Varg SM Skoll had been altered so it could achieve its 210 kph top speed, so technically it wasn't in off-the-showroom-floor condition, but I give this a pass because, in theory, anyone who knows what they're doing could take the speed restrictor off this bike and achieve the same result.
