Today, whenever Petty works on one of his personal computers or tinkers with his Zero motorcycle, he can’t help but be amazed at just how far technology has come in the world.
“I’ve always thought of myself as being a forward-thinking guy, and I’m amazed,” Petty says. “Look at the power and capability of a cell phone,” Petty says. “It’s overwhelming. I remember back in the middle 1960s we were trying stuff a computer numerically controlled (CNC) machining program into a Honeywell computer, and we had to get the whole thing to work in 12k of memory. We thought, ‘God, if we just had 16k it would be so much easier.’ One of the guys we were working with said. ‘Listen, one of these days you won’t have to worry about that. You’ll have 128k!’ I said, ‘Whoah!’ Bill Gates used to say that nobody would ever need more than 640k! [laughs]
Plastics. Computers. Alternative power sources. All represent technological advancements of the kind that excite Petty and make him feel just as alive today as he was when he was a youngster, riding that little Ariel Colt in the Santa Monica mountains. So it’s no wonder that he has become attached to his Zero. He’s just as amazed with it as he is with other emerging technologies that would stimulate a forward-thinking individual such as he is.
“This the MX model, which they don’t make any more, but they do have another version called the FX, which is the dual sport version of the MX,” Petty says of his race bike. “They also have the DS, which is a completely different chassis, for their streetbike models. But you could take an FX and turn it into one of these with no problem. The real plus side of these is the electricity, the instant torque that it has, and the fact that it is silent. If this was an all-electric motorcycle race out here, you’d actually be able to hear the announcer during the race! [laughs] I know that for some people the appeal of the internal combustion engine is the noise and the smell. There’s still a giant world for the internal combustion engine out there, but electric power has a definite place in society, especially in urban transportation. It’s going to be one of the more desirable means of transportation in urban areas.”
And as a competition machine? About the only issue Petty has with his Zero as that he can’t spin quite as many laps as the gasoline burners—yet. His fun only lasts as long as his battery charge, and replenishing the battery quickly is still part of the emerging technology that is improving virtually every day. Still, Petty can get in more laps than he needs at Perris—a typical night requires about about 25 laps between his heat race and his main event—using just one of the two batteries with which the Zero is equipped. He always carries an extra battery just in case, or for longer, more demanding events. He rarely needs to change batteries. Beyond that, other than sorting out the stock chassis to make it excel under the stress of flat track competition, Petty says that the bike is pretty dialed-in, and he does have some tuning options.
“I can adjust the engine braking to whatever I want, from practically zero engine braking, like a two-stroke, to more engine braking than your typical four-stroke,” Petty says. “It has a three-phase AC motor, and when you back off, it reverses the poles and turns into a generator to put some energy back into that battery.”
That’s a good thing, Petty says, because the one drawback right now is that the batteries aren’t small.
“They weigh 48 lbs. each, but that will change,” Petty says confidently, “I look at like when I lived in Oregon in 1972, I went down to the local motorcycle dealer, and he had a Casio calculator, and it had a digital display and function buttons that calculated the square root and such. I said, ‘Man, that’s the neatest thing since sliced bread. I want one of those. How much are they?’ He said, 595 bucks [adjusted for inflation, that same calculator would cost $3341.14 today]. To me, that was a great investment, and as that technology snowballed, the power went up and the cost went down. We’re going to see that same kind of growth in electric powered motorcycles. For Elon Musk of Tesla to put billions of dollars into a battery manufacturing plant north of Reno [Nevada] over the next two years, that tells me he knows something.”
Electric motorcycles will continue to proliferate, Petty says. It will only take time to create awareness and acceptance, but they will come around just like Petty’s father did long ago when he conceded that maybe his son’s motorcycling career wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
“In the summer of 1960, Dad and I took our only long trip together, a month long trip to Europe,” Petty recalls. “We bought a Volkswagen to drive around over there, and we stopped by the NSU factory in Neckarsulm, Germany, and Dad got to know the export manager there, and he got to see the enormity of it all. He wouldn’t say much about it. We finished up in London, and I told him that I wanted to go to the Greeves factory, so we went there, and I got to meet Dave Bickers and race one of his motorcycles in a race that weekend. When we got back, I finally asked him what he thought of it all, all he would say is, ‘It’s impressive.’”
Looking at Preston Petty’s list of accomplishments and at what he is doing now, one can’t help but say the same.
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