Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

Castrol Honda RC45 By Alan Cathcart Photos by Kyoichi Ohtani nce again World Superbike delivered a fitting finale to a hardfought season, with the result of the 1998 World Championship in doubt until the final race at Sugo. There, much against the odds, it all came unstuck for Honda on home territory, and Ducati recaptured the World title it had lost to the Castrol Honda team one year ago. By finishing 4.5 pain ts adrift of eventual champion Carl Fogarty, Honda's Aaron Slight cemented his position as the "nearly man" of four-stroke racing, adding a second runner-up slot to the four third places in the final points table he's achieved in the past six years. However, it's worth noting that, this time around, Aaron lost a certain 20 points at least when his Honda's engine unchar- O acteristically expired on the last lap at Monza, while even afterward, had team orders been applied and teammate Colin Edwards II instructed to finish behind Aaron at Brands Hatch instead of narrowly beating him, Honda would have retained the World Superbike crown - by half a point. But, hey - that's bike racing, not Formula One cars! Riding Aaron's Castrol RC45 six weeks after Sugo on Honda's new Mofegi Twin Ring GP circuit posed more questions than it answered - for sharing test du ty was the similar Lucky Strike bike. Shinichi Itoh and Tohru Ukawa had used this to put the icing on Honda's corporate 50th-birthday cake, by taking it to victory in the 1998 Suzuka 8 Hours. Then, just a week before my test, Tadayuki Okada underlined his four-stroke racing credentials by taking the same motorcycle in sprint guise to victory in the Sugo Big Race at the end of the season - a mere wheel in front of Slight on the Castrol bike at the finish. Though the two bikes are mechanically identical apart from a lower, 14,750-rpm rev limit for the endurance racer, the engine of this felt sweeter and even more forgiving in its response low down, but with the same appetite for revs up high. Get either of them spinning above 12,000 rpm and you're making friends with the rev limiter quicker t1lan you can think. Chassis setup on the Lucky Strike bike was definitely easier to ride with, too, especially in the way it rode Motegi's few bumps better, and cUd n' t understeer out of turns like the Slight machine cUd. This wasn't only my humble opinion, but also that of Okada. "1 never rode Castrol sprint machine before today, but now that I did, [ like A new frame made this year's RC45 easier to handle than the previous version. my bike even better!" Okada- an said with a smile. Still, Slight can't have been too despondent about coming in second to his Honda teammate at Sugo, because not only did he blitz the man who dominated the proceedings in the World Superbike round there four weeks before, Yamaha's oriyuki Haga, he also completed the same 25-lap race distance no les than 32 second faster than he had achieved in either race the month before - that's more than one second per lap faster, more t1lan enough to redress the 15-second gap in One race and the 12-second gap in another, behind the winner of each event. Wh

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