Bizarro Corp.’s online store has a T-shirt that reads ?café racer is dead.? It’s a little rich coming from a custom workshop with a number of café racers in their portfolio. Then again, the Spanish crew isn’t exactly known for being conventional.
If you need proof, we’d like to present ‘Esputnik II’: an electric drag racing ‘bitsa’ that doubles up as a canvas for kinetic art. Built with Zero and Suzuki parts, and painted by the contemporary artist Felipe Pantone, it’s the perfect example of Bizarro’s unhinged creativity. And it was one of the stars of the recent Glemseck 101 racing festival.

It’s an evolution of ‘Estputnik I’?a bike that Bizarro built three years ago, when they decided to shift their focus to electric motorcycles. They started by pulling the brushless electric motor from a Zero DSR, good for 157 Nm of torque in stock guise. That was shoved into a scratch-built steel chassis, alongside a salvaged electric car battery. Bizarro took Esputnik I to the Wheels and Waves event that year, and finished fourth in the fabled Punk’s Peak race. Then a global pandemic hit, and the team had time on their hands to put some more thought?and elbow grease?into their creation.

Armed with a digital render of what the Esputnik II should look like, Bizarro stripped the first iteration’s haphazard bodywork off and started over. Work on the front end began with a wireframe, over which ...