With a group of her Canterbury University engineering student colleagues, Charlotte Knight has built an electric land speed racer that the team hopes will set a new world record. Photo / Whakatāne Beacon
With a group of her Canterbury University engineering student colleagues, Charlotte Knight has built an electric land speed racer that the team hopes will set a new world record. Photo / Whakatāne Beacon
With a penchant for motorcycles from an early age, Whakatāne’s Charlotte Knight hasn’t allowed the grass to grow beneath her wheels.
In fact, she’s hoping for a land speed record-setting attempt in the not-too-distant future.
The 21-year-old completed a mechatronics engineering degree at the University of Canterbury and is starting work for Triumph motorcycles near Birmingham, England next month.
With a diesel mechanic father who is passionate about restoring motorcycles and cars, Knight grew up riding dirt bikes and competed in motocross and cross-country events throughout secondary school.
While attending Trident High School, she converted a motocross bike to its electric counterpart as her engineering technology project, taught by Dave Dobbin.
“I converted the bike in my final year of high school in 2018,” she said.
At one time, Knight planned to become an aircraft avionics technician or engineering officer in the New Zealand Air Force, but the wheels of fate spun otherwise, and she enrolled at the University of Canterbury instead.
At the beginning of her second year at university, she chose to specialise in mechatronics engineering as she believed it would best set her up for the future.
“Mechatronics is a combination of automation, mechanical and electrical engineering,” she said.
Knight completed her first summer internship at the Essity factory in Kawerau, and after completing her third year, she interned with UBCO Bikes in Mount Maunganui.
It’s the final-year project that led to Knight and 15 fellow engineering studies students hoping to set a world record.
The University of Canterbury Motorsport (UCM) team normally builds a Formula Student race car as a final-year project, but Knight said due to the pandemic, UCM already had a car built to compete in 2022, and the team decided to build an electric land speed racing car instead.
“We hope to set the world record for the E1 class, which is electric under 500 kilograms,” she said.
Charlotte Knight's first serious project was converting a normal motocross bike to electrical power.
“The current speed record is 330km/h, and we’ve simulated for speeds greater than that.”
The team hopes to take the 7.5-metre car to Bonneville Salt Flats Race Track in Utah, US, for a land speed world record attempt.
The car is now based at Wigram Airforce museum in Christchurch.
The car was inspired by Kiwi racing legend Burt Munro, who is also known as the World’s Fastest Indian.
At the age of 68, Munro set a new official land speed record racing his heavily modified Indian Scout Streamliner at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats in 1967, a record that remains unbroken.
The Invercargill-based Munro family has given the university’s engineers permission to base the car’s livery design on Burt’s Indian motorcycle and support the team’s future endeavours.
“It was awesome to have Burt’s son, John Munro, speak at the launch of our car and to meet more of the Munro family.”
Knight said she was the only female in the team, and her section of the project focused on the design and manufacture of the powertrain with two other mechanical engineers.
It is not yet decided who will drive the car.
The group has contacted other racing veterans for feedback, including Auckland-based mechanical engineer Eva Håkansson, originally from Sweden, who broke the land-speed record at the Bonneville Motorcycle Speed Trials on a custom-built motorbike in 2014.
“Our car exceeded her expectations,” Knight said.
