REINVENTING THE WHEEL

Burt Munro would have approved. She builds most of it herself in her backyard garage. She runs it at Bonneville, on a shoestring. She’s broken records with it. But where he stayed with the old, she is, quite literally, reinventing the wheel. Meet Eva Håkansson: sheddie extraordinaire and, at 434kph, one fast lady.

Born in 1981, to a Swedish motorcycle builder/racer and his pit-mechanic wife, Eva was the last in her family to gain an engineering degree. While still a teenager she assembled her first motorcycle, a 1972 Moto Guzzi, from a pile of parts. Her initial university studies culminated in a Bachelor of Business Administration with an emphasis on ecological economics, followed by a Bachelor of Environmental Sciences. She also took classes in energy technology, wind power, fuel cells, and nuclear energy.

The interest begins

At the end of all that, she found that she had developed an interest in electric vehicles (EVs). In 2007, she took a Cagiva Freccia C12R-90, a