Josh Herrin threw his leg over the OrangeCat Racing Lightfighter V3-RH electric bike for the first time in a two-day test last week at the Podium Club in Arizona, and guess what? He liked it. A lot.
“It’s only different because the sound isn’t there,” two-time AMA Superbike Champion Herrin said of the bike he will race in the 2026 Mission Super Hooligan National Championship. “My first thought leaving the pits was, ‘This is weird. I don’t hear anything.’ You’re just rolling around in the pits and it’s like you’re ridng a scooter. Then you get on the track and you’re like… I’m coming off a 250-horsepower Superbike, so it’s not like I was like, ‘Whoa!’ But from what I was on, I was shocked that the thing was as quick as it was.”
The odd thing about electric bikes isn’t so much that they are quiet, it’s that they’re not. Well, not the way you’re used to.
“It’s like you hear the noises, but what you hear is all of the chain, and the tires screeching when you’re backing it in,” Herrin explained. “You hear all those things, but it also makes everything on the track so calm. There’s so much less chaos going on in your head, so you can think a lot more, which was weird. To me, it was so different but also so familiar feeling. I still felt like I was riding a race bike, and it did everything the same as a race bike. It was just different. It’s hard to explain. It’s still a race bike, but you have a whole new experience with the electric feel. It’s really hard to put into words, to be honest.”
If Herrin was impressed with the Lightfighter V3-RH, he was even more so with the OrangeCat team.
“This is one of the first times that I feel like I’ve ever been part of a program that wasn’t just the rider is a tool, and you need to go out and go as fast as you can, and the bike is capable of winning,” Herrin said. “It’s kind of like a project. It’s cool because I think Andrew (Sieja, the founding principal of OrangeCat Racing) is passionate about the team, racing, and technology. So, these guys were building this Lightfighter bike on their own and then Andrew met them and kind of wanted to help them out. Now he’s really invested in the race team and wants to make it work. He’s so into it. You see a lot of these guys in the past that maybe are successful businessmen coming to our sport. With Andrew, it just feels different. It feels like he’s extremely passionate about riding. He has been doing track days for, I think, 20 years or something. So, he’s really, really into it. It’s not like he’s a first-year team. He’s been around for a while. It’s really cool working with the team because they are doing everything the right way.”
Another thing that Herrin is excited about is the whole “electric vs. gas” on-track battle.
“It’s just something that you really have to experience to understand what it’s like,” Herrin said. “I think that’s what Lightfighter is going to do. They are trying to make it to where this is something that everybody can come and experience, and really just see for themselves what it’s like. Hopefully, people can have an open mind to it and not just hate it to hate it. If you look at the bike, if you don’t know anything about bikes and you go up to it, you’re really into it. This is cool-looking. So, I think that’s also something cool that a lot of people who are hating on it… they have to realize. I go and look at that bike, and I can appreciate how much work went into it. The whole tail section is a one-piece sub-frame, carbon-fiber thing. It’s cool-looking.”
Herrin feels the Lightfighter can be competitive straight away and was happy with the lap times he turned on the second day of the test. The only issue at this point is battery life, but the bike is scheduled to get better batteries and more mileage at the next test
“The biggest thing that we have to figure out is will the battery last long enough for the race?” Herrin said. “It’s all that kind of stuff. So, this test was just to give them some data on that. This was the first time that anybody has ridden the RH model, which is the Super Hooligan bike, the naked version, with the one-piece bars. It went really well. We got there, and at first the lap times didn’t come right away. I was a little bit nervous about everything. Towards the end of the test, though, we were able to do some really competitive lap times. I got really comfortable on the bike. So now the biggest thing is just the battery life.”
Herrin says he and his OrangeCat Racing teammate Kaleb De Keyrel will benefit greatly from having an Alpha Racing race support engineer, specifically Peter Schouten, Cameron Beaubier’s former data man at Tytlers Cycle Racing, on the team. Schouten is dedicated to the Lightfighter project, along with supporting the OrangeCat Racing Superbike program.
“Peter (Schouten) was his main data guy from Alpha Racing,” Herrin said. “He decided that he wanted to work on the Lightfighter. So, he’s helping them with Superbike stuff, but his focus is Lightfighter. We’re getting an updated battery for the next test, and Peter is basically working on tuning the electronics for the bike. So, everybody is really smart in this program. As far as a race-data engineer, Peter and Alpha Racing have already had input on this bike to build the engine brake maps, the torque maps, the TC maps, or whatever all the bike is capable of doing. He’s the first one that’s really building all that for a high level of racing, so that the bike knows what it’s doing on the racetrack. When I first got on it, everything was great on the bike, but I don’t think the computer inside knew a racetrack yet. So, he’s building all the strategies for the bike. Even at the end of the second day he had a big change for us that helped a lot. So, it’s cool seeing that it’s not just like green, new guys on this project, or just the Lightfighter guys who are maybe not crazy knowledgeable about racing. It’s cool that there’s a guy like Peter, who is coming in after just winning a Superbike title, and his focus is making electronics work on this bike, which I wasn’t expecting.
“The team is really knowledgeable. It’s not like they’re just like, ‘Oh, this is an electric bike.’ They’re really knowledgeable and they have a lot of experience in racing, and also in top-of-the-line electric vehicles. It’s a really cool program. Just for our test, we had, I think, a mechanic, crew chief, suspension, data, the CEO… I think we had eight or nine people just working on my side on the Lightfighter bike.
The OrangeCat Racing team already has two more test days scheduled at Chuckwalla Valley Raceway in Southern California.
“My idea behind it is how far can we take this bike, and can electric beat gas? It’s not because I want to sell electric and be anti-gas, because I’ll always be for the gas bikes, but this is just a fun project.”- Josh Herrin
“I’m doing more testing on this bike than I’ve done since I was a kid on Yamaha, and without the pressure,” Herrin said. ‘Yesterday it felt like we won a Superbike race. I’ve never been a part of something like that, where we’re building something. It’s crazy seeing what everybody’s reaction to electric bikes is. I never really understood there was so much hate towards the whole electric bike thing. I made that post with the bike flying by, and it has 210,000 views and 800 comments. A lot of them are negative, but to me that’s good because there’s a lot of attention around it.
“My idea behind it is how far can we take this bike, and can electric beat gas? It’s not because I want to sell electric and be anti-gas, because I’ll always be for the gas bikes, but this is just a fun project. To me, it’s just something different. It’s a motorcycle and it’s different. Why do we always want to be on the same stuff all the time? This is just something fun. It’s a different sensation when you ride it. There’s a lot of cool technology in it. None of the guys on this team with Lightfighter are anti-gas or anti-Superbike. They just want to do something that nobody has done before. They want to try to win some races against gas bikes. It’s not because they don’t like gas bikes or they’re trying to change what everybody’s thought process is. They just want to do something cool and different.”
There are seven Super Hooligan National Championship rounds scheduled for 2026, so Herrin will have seven rounds where he will compete in two classes. He’ll race in the Hooligan races on the Lightfighter and the Supersport rounds on the Rahal Ducati Moto Panigale V2. Switching back and forth won’t be difficult, Herrin said.
“It’s so similar,” Herrin said “That’s what I’m saying. It feels like I’m riding a regular race bike. The only thing is there is no clutch and no shifter. But I think that makes it easier for me to hop on another bike, because I don’t need to worry about shift points and stuff like that.”
