After months and months of talking about it, Max Biaggi and Voxan have finally gotten around to setting a new electric motorcycle land speed record.

Voxan isn’t a household name in North America, but it’s a much better-known brand in France, where its machines are built and sold. It doesn’t build high-volume bikes; in the past couple of decades, it was one of the boutique manufacturers of Europe’s busy cafe racer/naked bike scene. In 2010, Venturi bought Voxan, and turned the company towards electric motorcycle production. That’s what it’s been working on ever since, with a series of big-money, big-horsepower machines.

The Wattman is one of those machines. Voxan unveiled this electric musclebike in 2013, and has been tinkering with the design ever since. Voxan claims the machine makes 150 kW of power, which works out to 203 horsepower, with about 147 pound-feet of torque available everywhere in the engine’s range. The original design accelerated from 0 to 100 km/h in 3.4 seconds.

Voxan has tinkered with the design ever since its 2013 debut, and every few months it sends out a press release about how it’s going to take ex-GP racer Max Biaggi to some desert somewhere, to set a new land speed record. It looks like they finally got their act together near the end of October and actually made their land speed run down an empty French airport runway, getting the bike up to a speed of 228.05 mph. That’s a new world record in the category for partially streamlined electric motorcycles over 300 kg. Biaggi’s run also set a few other records, and at one point over the weekend, he hit a top speed of 254 mph.

Although this doesn’t really mean anything for the average consumer, it’s encouraging to at least see some interest in electric motorcycle racing. The scene has basically died out since the glory days of Chip Yates duelling with Lightning Motorcycles.

Featured image credit: Voxan

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