Speed Redefined : There are a lot of parameters, but top speed is surely the de facto trump card — and bragging point — for any car with a performance bent. A few months on from the Ultraviolette F99 blitzing the quarter mile in a record-smashing 10.712s, it was time to tackle the biggest question of them all – how fast does this thing go?

The science of speed

In case you are wondering, the F99 is a bespoke project that UV’s R&D department has been developing for more than a year, just for the purpose of stretching the boundaries of performance. Everything on this motorcycle is all new and has nothing to do with the production-spec F77. Moving to high-voltage 400V architecture, the F99 required the addition of liquid cooling. The regular F77 makes 40hp, and this model triples that number to 120hp. The torque figure is equally ludicrous — 200Nm at the motor, or a whopping 972Nm at the rear wheel when the gearing multiplication factor comes into play!

Creating an all-new 400V architecture is no small feat, and it was a plunge into completely uncharted territory for the company. Even so, they pulled it off in a remarkably fast timeline, especially considering it’s not just the powertrain that’s all new. A new trellis frame had to be made to accommodate this powertrain, which is linked to a superbike-style underslung aluminium swingarm. Talking superbikes, the F99 features high-end Brembo, Öhlins and Marchesini hardware for braking, suspension and wheels. Clever engineering combined with plenty of carbon fibre has also kept weight down to an admirable 180kg.

All bodywork on the F99 can be had in bespoke carbon fibre, which the company even used for the battery pack’s external shell. Aerodynamics is also a big part of the F99’s speed, and bodywork was finalised from 10 iterations. The front of this thing deals with heavy gales, has a massive air intake to eliminate frontal air pressure, divides the air into two directions and releases it down the left and right side fairings. Aside from looking really cool, that intake is only deepening a very good note that the electric motor is already screaming at high speeds – but, we’ll come back to that.

Behind the run

But a record attempt such as this doesn’t come together overnight; an enormous amount of preparation, testing, and teamwork goes into making it happen. As the Ultraviolette team themselves divulged, they had never experienced riding this bike at such high speeds before.

With power numbers to rival a supersport motorcycle in a package weighing less, the F99 has big top-speed numbers on the cards. If it was going to attempt this, we figured it might as well do it at the best place in the country possible for such an attempt, the high-speed test track at NATRAX, which is a perfectly flat 11-km long track with long straights. In fact, the F99 speeds up so well we’d never even need to use half of the stadium-shaped track to reach the top speed.

The premise was straightforward behind the effort. One was multi-national championship winning racer Abhishek Vasudev who had already set the quarter-mile record. The second rider would be me, so that I could give you a first-hand feel of the experience of pushing this bike to the ragged edge. This record, as usual, would be validated with highly precise VBox data loggers.