Electric Wheelie Challenge

Two buttons and 117 metres. The scoreboard only counts the metres you spend with the front wheel off the ground, so getting to the finish is not the hard part.

The track

Seven sectors, and they get less forgiving as you go. A run-up to find the balance point, a bump and a table top that reward you for holding it, rollers that punish anyone feeling clever, then a kicker, then the gap.

The gap sorts everyone out. Two point nine metres of nothing, and you cannot roll it. You either arrive with the front up and enough speed to carry it, or you arrive on your back.

We tested it on people who had never touched the game. Nobody cleared it first go. Riders who knew what they were doing cleared it five times out of six.

Then a short run home, which looks like a victory lap and is not one.

How to actually wheelie

Four things, roughly in order of how much they will help.

Stop mashing the wheelie button. It is a lean, not a lift. Short taps to set the angle, then let the throttle carry it.

Let go earlier than feels right. Everyone loops it the first ten times because they hang on to see what happens. What happens is you land on your back.

Speed is your friend over the gap and your enemy on the rollers. Learning to give some back is most of the game.

Metres, not seconds. The score is your wheelie distance divided by your time, so a quick lap with the front wheel down is worth nothing at all.

None of it is animation, by the way. The bike is a real physics body, and an electric moto is genuinely easier to loop than a petrol one: instant torque, no clutch, nothing to wait for.

Forty is the shop target. Fifty is shop record pace. Fifty-eight, so far, nobody has done.

All of which applies in here. The real thing is harder and the ground is a lot less forgiving.

Why we built a game

Because a bike shop with a quiet Tuesday is a dangerous thing.

Also because most people who wander in have never had an electric moto underneath them, and there is a limit to how much of that you can explain across a counter. This is a much cheaper way to find out that holding a wheelie is harder than it looks, and that you want to.

The real ones are in Ascot Vale. They do not have a reset button.