Compared to the conventional SRM, fully-pitched winding reluctance motors have a higher salient ratio for given motor dimensions. In addition, since the generated torque of the motor is determined as the product of the rate of change of mutual inductance with respect to a rotor position and winding current amplitude of the corresponding two phases, the motor is suitable for the bipolar current drives. Accordingly, the conventional general-purpose inverter drive of the fully-pitched winding reluctance motor is possible. In this case, the optimum lead angles of voltage play an important role in obtaining the maximum torque and maximum torque/current ratio operations. In this paper, a scheme for determining the optimum angles of voltage without any measurement, and a method for evaluating the drive characteristics in the design stage are proposed by a combination of simple magnetic and electrical analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed analytical scheme is verified by an experiment using a 400-W prototype fully-pitched winding reluctance motor. © 2000 Scripta Technica, Electr Eng Jpn 134(1): 45–52, 2001