Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

BY ALAN CATHCART Aprilia and Renault still talking? Informed rumors continue to link Aprilia with the French car giant Renault, who e rival Peugeot is France's largest scooter manufacturer and which, aside from dominating the home market, is currently breaking. sales records in many countries on the back of the European scooter boom; the. 125 Peugeot Speedfight is Britain's best-selling powered two-wheeler under 500cc, for example. Renault is understood to see a link with Aprilia as a means of countering that dominance, by offering the Italian scooters shared showroom floor space alongside their cars. But, as reported in this column six months ago, there are strong indications that the joint venture extends to the design of a range of 600cc-to-1000cc V-four engines bearing the Aprilia name but developed on its behalf by the Renault Sport division, using the same engineers who produced the Formula One World Title V10 engines that dominated car racing's elite class for half a decade in Williams and Benetton chassis before Renault's withdrawal from Formula One a year ago. Renault Sport has already produced a motorcycle engine, at one stage removed - one that's just entering production, having been designed by their Sodemo colleagues, who are responsible for research and development of the Renault factor)('s touring-car and rallycompetition contenders. That is, of course, the 72-degree V-twin Voxan, which has now at last reached the startup stage of production after three short years of development. Just as manufacture of the planned series of preproduction bikes was commencing at the Issoire factory in December, there came the news that Voxan boss Jacques Gardette has sold a 10-percent slice of the shareholdings to a very prestigious partner: France's Dassault-Systeme. A division of the huge aviation conglomera te responsible for such benchmark warplanes as the Mirage jet fi!hter, Dassault-Systeme is headed by Laurent Dassault, himself a bike enthusiast who has apparently taken a token slice of Voxan equity in order to become personally i.pvolved with a project close to his heart. Voxan will thus benefit not only from the added credibility of such a prestigious partner but also from Dassault's sophisticilted CAD/CAM operation, as well as its buying power, says Gardette, who will also rely on his new partner's worldwide marketing expertise in gearing up Voxan's export opera tion to kick off in the year 2000. Speed-up Derbi Derbi's return to Grand Prix racing in the 125cc class in 1999 with its own motorcycle - exactly one decade after the final80cc World Champion Manuel "Champi" Herreros won the last of the Spanish marque's total of 10 World Championship titles back in 1989, and 11 years after Jorge Martinez"Aspar" clinched the company's last 125cc crown - has now been confirmed, with a works team to be run next season on behalf of the Barcelona.based factory by Italian team manager Giampiero Sacchi. The riders have also been announced: ex-Yamaha 125cc GP star Youichi Vi, and a famous name from Derbi's history books· Pablo Nieto, youngest son of Spanish GP legend Angel Nieto, five of whose 13 (or, as he superstitiously prefers to refer to them, "12+1"1) World titles were scored on Derbi machines. • Derbi's R&D team is hard at work on developing the new motorcycle's engine - understood to be a rotaryvalve design like that of the reigning Aprilia World Champion, as well as of all previous works Derbi GP racers in the past - which is set to be housed in a chassis designed in Britain by TWR, who collaborated with Kenny Roberts on his Modenas project until KR. broke away to design his second-generation bikes in-house. Derbi ainls to be on the starting grid for the first GP of the 1999 season in Malaysia, though time may be too short to get in much testing beforehand. Still, it's good to see another famous name. returning to the GP world - alongside the return of the Bultaco marque (now also under Derbi's control) to the World Trials scene in the coming year, with the new Sherco. The Ducati legend grows U you're a fan of Ducati's most famous range of bevel-drive twins, the SS, there's a must-have book hitting the shelves: Ian Falloon's new history, Italian star The star of the Bologna Show that opened in Italy at the beginning of December was the new Aprilia RSV1000sP - the ultra-trick and ultra-costly (selling for 50 million lire, or about $32,000 each) street-legal basis for the step up by the Italian World Champions in 125 and 250cc GP racing into the World Superbike series in 1999, when Australian Peter Goddard rides a single bike for the factory-backed team run by Nando de Cecco. Like the Yamaha R7 of comparable specification and price, the Mille SP is a racer-with-lights that will only be built in very limited numbers: just 150 units to begin with, anyway - the minimum quantity required for WSC homologation by any European manufacturer. This is important, because in many key areas, especially engine dinlensions and chassis design, the hand-built SP is significantly different from the volume-production RSV1000 sportbike launched last summer, which represented Aprilia's long-awaited entry into the large-capacity four-stroke market. So, for the purposes of homologation as well as performance, the Mille SP must be regarded as a new model in its own right, just as the Ducati 996SPS is a different product from the 916. . As proof of this, the Aprilia's Rotax-built, 60-degree V-twin engine has been developed in cooperation with Cosworth in Britain to deliver a claimed 150 bhp at the gearbox at 11,000 rpm, making it the most powerful twin-cylinder motorcycle on the market in SP guise, compared with the stock RSV1000's 128 bhp at 9250 rpm. Though delivered only when the bike is fitted with a racing version of the carbon-canned titanium exhaust and a remapped EPROM chip for the Nippondenso EFl (both are included in the SF's stiff price, along with a racing stand and machine cover), this impressive horsepower is produced at high revs, underlining the SP's more radical internal dimensions of 100 x 63.4mm for a capacity of 996cc, against the standard Mille's 97 x 67.5mm/99&c format, or the 98 x 66mm layout common among its 916/TL1000/VTR1000/VR1000 rivals. This is the same ultra-short-stroke loornm-bore configuration as the forthcoming Moto Guzzi VA-lO Superbike V-twin engine announced I3st summer, and underscores Aprilia's determination to match ~he benefits of Ducati's desmodromic positive valve operation with their valve-spring V-twin, via high revs - thus breaking new ground in terms of piston speed for a large-capacity twin-eylinder engine. Expect close to 13,Ooo-rpm engine speeds for Goddard's works superbike racer, though it's surprising that the bore size of the twin throttle bodies used on the Nippondenso EFl remains the same as the stock Mille at 51mrn (Ducati uses 60mm on its Superbike World Champion), and there is still only a single injector per cylinder on the sequential EFI (Ducati uses two on the road SPS, and three on the racer). The SP's cylinder heads are the same castings as the original bike, but with a reworked, smaller combustion chamber, while the bigger bore also allows Aprilia to fit larger valves (using revised profiles for the double 6 overhead camshafts per cylinder), which, however, means there's only room for. a single spark plug on each head, rather than the dual ignition of the stock Mille. The dry-sump engine's double-oil-pump lubrication system has also been revised, with a larger extraction pump, while the water and oil radiators have also been upsized. Maximum torque is also improved, with 79.6 fl.-lb. at 8500 rpm delivered in track configuration, against the 75.9 ft.-lb. at 7000 rpm of the stock Mille. Aprilia chassis guru Gaetano Cocco's heavily revised twin-spar frame for the SP also breaks new ground, with the V-twin engine located 5rnrn higher than in the stock Mille, in order to compact the mass and reduce the polar moment, for more stable yet responsive steering. But just as on Aprilia's title-winning GP two-strokes, the position of the engine within the chassis can be altered to optimize weight distribution and handling the first time on a four-stroke, or on any street bike, that this has been available. This will, for example, avoid the problems with which Honda has had to grapple throughout the life of the RC45, in having the engine in essentially the wrong place for ideal handling: Aprilia tearns can just change to suit. In addition, while 20-percent stiffer than the stock Mille frame, the SP chassis has an adjustable swingarm pivot at the rear, with a.n OhIins shock, while up front the reinforced steering head allows the fork angle to be altered one degree either side of the stock 24.5-degree setting. The adjustable triple clamps housing the 43mm Ohlins racing forks fitted as standard also allow trail to be varied 10mm either side of the stock 97mm setting. Basically, on the SP, Cocco has brought the multiadjustable chassis geometry of his race-winning GP package to the street - and thence to the World Superbike grid, as well as to the new Stocksport support class, in which the new Aprilia seems set to be perhaps the leading twin-cylinder contender against the Yamalla Rl and other one-liter fours. . Thanks to copious use of carbon fiber, including all the single-seater bodywork (apart from the six-gallon fuel tank, which is now alloy rather than the stock Mille's steel), the SP weighs in at a clainled 407 pounds dry in street form - 8.8 pounds less than the stock RSV1000. Though basically unchanged in styling, the SP is even more aerodynamic than the Mille, breaking the benchmark 0.30 Cx barrier for the first time in a street production 11lotorcycle, thanks to lower fron t ride heigh t and thus reduced frontal area. This im'pressive new superbike contender confirms Aprilia's entry into the big league, and will be available early this year. How many of the production run's planned 150 bikes end up on the street rather than on the race track will be an interesting question, though. a

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