Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/1190846
PIKES PEAK-WINNING APRILIA TUONO 1100 RSV FACTORY R I D E R E V I E W P102 Carlin Dunne (the same age as Rennie) and a four-time previous winner of the event, was killed after inexplicably crashing at the very last turn aboard the Ducati factory's prototype V4 Streetfighter running in the Exhibition class. Now do you see why I was so relieved that Rennie had survived the race intact? That's because the young (well, he is to me!) Aussie has been a semi-detached member of the Cathcart family ever since he came to stay with us in England at the age of 11. My friend- ship with his dad Jim, the first Aussie to race in the AMA 500cc MX Championship, as well as Mike Hailwood's teammate on the Great Man's return to road racing in 1977/'78, led to Rennie and I also becoming the best of friends, and now colleagues on the Cycle News masthead. In 2018, Rennie suffered the heartache of winding up second aboard a KTM 1290 Super Duke R to factory Ducati rider Dunne by a mere 0.692 of a second, cracking the 10-minute bar- rier for the second time in the closest-ever finish at Pikes Peak. "That one really stung," says Rennie, "so there wasn't any question about coming back in 2019 to try to turn the tables. But doing so meant switching brands, so I was about to start looking around to see who might help out, when Shane Pacillo from Aprilia took me to lunch, and asked if I'd be interested in do- ing it on a Tuono 1100 Factory!" California-based Pacillo is PR & Event Manager for Piaggio Americas, covering Latin America as well as the USA and Canada, and he'd watched the hefty publicity payoff both Ducati and KTM had obtained from success at Pikes Peak with some envy. "Aprilia's brand ethos is all about racing," he says, "and the American market needs as much representa- tion in significant events here in our Western hemi- sphere, let's call it, as it does in Europe. So I pitched the notion of supporting Rennie to my bosses here and in Italy, and they liked the idea. He liked it even better, so now we had to deliver!" Rennie had a clear idea of what he needed, and that involved hiring Jeremy Toye as Crew Chief. Toye, 48, is widely regarded as one of America's best-ever open-roads racers, and won Pikes Peak in 2014 on his self-built Kawasaki. "I wanted Jeremy on board because I knew that he knew what's required to win there," says Rennie. "I especially wanted his input into the chassis side of things, because I thought we had the KTM too stiffly set up in 2018. So this year we went the opposite way and made the Aprilia a much more compliant bike, I figured with the little bit less torque it has as a V4 against the V-twins, to get the thing around the corners faster it would be better to have a bit more of a road-bike feel to it." So a brand new 2019-model Tuono 1100 Fac- tory was shipped to Toye's shop in San Diego, to be built up as a PP racer with several parts cannibal- ized off an RSV4 1100 Factory. Aprilia chose not to (Left) Scaysbrook had a Brembo thumb brake fitted to the Aprilia, something he immediately gelled with. (Below) Mission control for the Pikes Peak racer. Notice how the traction control switches were moved from the left to the right (next to the kill switch) to facilitate the thumb brake.