Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

(Left) Old Cagiva leathers and all, Doug Chandler instantly got up to speed on the HMe Ducat!. The resident of n ~ Salinas was the talk of the test. (RIght! Miguel DuHamel and his co..- spent the maIol'tty of the test trying new suspension parts. in the last week, then I should be a lot better off." The Honda teams had so Jnuch work to do for Fontana that thE;y left after two days. But not before Nicky Hayden and Kurtis Roberts could clock times just above Chandler's. Hayden and Roberts were both in the low 26s, according to their team, but rival stopwatches had them a few tenths slower. Hayden might have gone faster but for the limitations of time. It took him half a day to get used to having compliant race tires under him after a week spent on the Daytona dual-compound rocks. On Wednesday, he got frustrated and stuck in a rut. "Right there toward the end, I kind of started riding a little bit better right toward the end," he said. "It didn't go great or nothing, but it went all right. We should be good for Fontana now. At the end, I just had to settle down because the team don't have much time to work on bikes or you don't have much time to heal up, so I just wanted to finish up the day and not do anything too stupid there at the end." Roberts said that if he and Hayden had a third day, they'd both be in the 25s with the progress they were making. "I always seem to have a lot of chatter here when I get grip, when I get the times down," he said. "And then, towards the end, I started having a tire problem, which prevented us from going faster. I did my best time on the race tire. It's like we get ripping on the thing and it just starts chattering ... That was something Chandler noticed when following various riders. "I got to have a good look at everybody," Chandler said at the end of the second day after running consistently in the mid 1:26s. "Our bike is definitely the smoothest of all. They're all losing it on entry. This things just falls into place." American Honda's Miguel DuHamel couldn't match the speed of his teammates, but he wasn't overly concerned. The team was constantly swapping suspension components and he got them headed in the wrong direction at one point. "I think we hit some really good set-ups and I didn't insist enough on maybe trying to work on those and going forward, because obViously we were out of the box fast this morning. I think we got away from that. But on the flip side, it is a test and we needed to test a lot of stuff... So did Kawasaki's Eric Bostrom, but he wasted the first two days chasing a maddeningly elusive problem. All signs pointed to front-fork response, and the team worked diligently to isolate it. What was finally discovered was that he was fighting defective steering-head bearings. By then it was Wednesday night and they had one full day to test. "We ended doing a pretty good little session on race tires," Bostrom said. "We just went out and ran like a couple of 26.2s, one on the third lap, one on the ninth lap, so that was good. Then all the others were mid 26s. We got some consistency going at least. I would have liked to have seen our times come down a little bit more than they did. Maybe that's just with me digging a little bit deeper." Bostrom also said the team was getting more comfortable with the gascharged Ohlins forks. Not so for Yamaha's Anthony Gobert. Gobert crashed entering turn two on Wednesday. He admitted he hadn't gotten enough heat in the front tire. When he crashed in the exact same way in the exact same place, there was less explanation. Again it was on his first hot lap, but the tire had 15 laps on it. One rider thought it might have been because of the gas forks, the way they can unweight themselves if you let off the gas quickly after braking. Gobert's crew chief, Tom Halverson, said that wasn't the case. "We were trying some new suspension and the position of the bike in that corner was a little bit different than the suspension we'd used before," he said. "I don't want to blame it all on that, but that was the only thing we could see that was different. He [Gobert] really didn't think it was anything to have to do with the bike. Just a coincidence, really." Yoshimura Suzuki's Aaron.. Yates and Jamie Hacking were the 6~ly two A year after their worst Formula Xtreme results in years, Honda goes into the first race of the FX campaign at California Speedway with more questions than answers. Erion Honda and Bruce Transportation Group head for Fontana with tittle in the way of information after a mostly problematic shakedown at Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca. And what the riders did learn, they didn't necessarily like. There were only two of the new Honda CBR-954RRs at Laguna Seca, those of Erion Honda's Roger Lee Hayden and Mike Hale. Hale's spun a rod bearing after only three laps. "I'm pretty disappointed," Hale said. "We needed these two days as a shakedown for Fontana." Roger Lee Hayden's 954 wouldn't run on the first day, so he rode his F4i. By the end of the second day, Hayden was fastest of the FX riders, a lap of 1:28.4. The time would be eclipsed by Graves Motorsports Yamaha's Damon Buckmaster, who tested for a third day at Laguna Seca. Still, it was encouraging for a new bike. "The difference between the 929 and the 954 is I think the 954's got more stability," Hayden said. "That took me a while to get used to, because when I rode the 929 the bike would always try to slide and throw you down. And this thing has so much stability it feels like you're not even riding at all. "You used to have to ride all at the rear and now it seems like the bike is more evened out. Coming off the corners, it don't slide hardly anything like the 929 did. At ·first, I'm thinking they'll come out with the new bike and there wouldn't be that much of a difference. But it actually took all day for me to get used to it and try to leam and feed off of it." The Bruce Transportation Group team was testing hybrid machines, 929 motors in 954 frames. (They expect to have their 954 motors ready for the Fontana race.) Alex Gobert liked it; Jake Zemke thought he needed more time. "I think it should suit me a lot more because I'm shorter than most of the other guys and you ride up over the front of it and that's one of the troubles I've had on the 929," Alex Gobert said. "I've got to really lift myself over the front to stop it from wheelying. On the 954, you're already up there, so that should be a big help. I think the steering has improved on it a little bit too. It should be good when I get my own and put my own set-up on it." Zemke said that everything about it was different and the team was running through adjustments on the various suspension and chassis pieces. "The bike has a really different feel compared to the 929," he said. "We had the 929 set-up and the way this is set-up it's a totally different feeling, not to say it's better or worse. It's just different. It's going to take a little while to get used to how this one works. I think, all in all, we made improvement through the weekend, the last two days. By the end, we were able to do consistent times, which was important. Because earlier yesterday and even earlier today we put in a so-so time here or there. but we couldn't do it lap after lap, where at the end of the day we got to where we could do consistent times, time and again, time and again. "For me it seems like it has a real vague feeling. On the 929 you would get on the gas the thing was connected from the throttle to the rear tire. If you gave it gas, the thing would step out, spin sideways and be on your way. This one seems to have a lot more vague feel in the sense that you get on the gas and it doesn't have that instant connection back to the rear tire. It seems like the suspension works and digs and starts to really drive forward. In a way it feels a little bit more vague in just the sense that everything doesn't happen right away. It doesn't react Violently to what's going on, where the 929 was kind of a violent-reacting motorcycle. in the state that we ride them in. It's [the 954 chassis) a bit more forgiving. Whereas the old one, you'd get on the gas and it would really spin sideways. This one, it doesn't do that, it digs in and it starts driving. You have this feeling that you're not quite sure when it's going to break loose. It's got so much traction and so much drive right now it's hard to find the confidence to really get on the throttle hard because you don't know when it's going to break loose. I had it break loose a couple of times on me, and when it did it was real violent. Whereas before, with the 929, we got it set up to where, like the last time we were here, I could come off the comer and get the thing spinning and just ride a nice slide and still have it driving forward. Whereas this one it would just drive forward, drive forward, but then if it broke loose it was going to break hard and fast without any waming and those are the kind of slides that you don't need to be having." cue I .. n e _ os • APRIL 10, 2002 11

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