Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

couple of weird spots in some comers. and the main thing is the middle of the banking, their line and them keeping the gas on. They would kind of yard me out right in the middle. I learned a lot right there." Bostrom began the test on the new Honda CBR-600RR. which he'll race only at Daytona and possibly Laguna Seca. He remembers how bad the 600 was that he raced back in 1998 and how much better the new bike is. "Back then, when you went to tum them in, you waited for the chatter to stop, and then the thing would start tuming," he said. "Now they're incredible. They're like little Superbikes. If the Superbike would handle like the 600, that thing would do incredible lap times. The thing's amaZing. It's just an amazing bike. I just hope the Superbike's like that next year." Honda is expected to come out with a race-inspired large bore inline four-cylinder for 2004. With Bostrom racing just a few Supers port races, he leaves the 600 in the hands of the most successful rider in AMA Superbike and Supersport history - DuHamel. DuHamel first rode the 600 during a photo shoot at Califomia Speedway [in Fontana]. He knew it was something special then, but once his crew, led by AI Ludington, worked its magic, the machine was that much better. After the first time he rode it, DuHamel said to American Honda team manager Chuck Miller, "Give me 200cc more, and I'll race that in the Superbike class. This is the best race bike I've ever ridden." "I think it shows, like, the future of Honda," DuHamel said of the CBR-600RR at Daytona. "This is what they've been working on for a while; It's a c(erivative of the RC211 V. It works so good. It used to be more of a street bike. Whereas this is a race bike, and you don't have any reason to have any fear. Everything's working really good on it. It's really planted. It works really solid. They designed it the other way. Before, they used to design the street bike and give it the racing edge, where now they just made a race bike and let's make it street-legal for people to go out there. When you sit on it, you see that it's a race bike. And it doesn't just feel like a race bike. Some people in the past have said that, but it's just uncomfortable. Whereas this thing is a race bike and comfortable. It really is a race bike. They really made a significant step up. I'm happy, because there's a lot of hype about it." DuHamel said the bike works so well that it's not physically demanding and shouldn't affect his Superbike program. "The bike is so easy to ride, I'll be fresh as a daisy when I get on the Superbike: he said. "I'm really happy that Honda did what they did to come up with this bike because no matter what the competition comes up with, with this bike, I feel very confident we will be competitive at every track this year, whether it be a horsepower track like Daytona, because the engine is just fabulous," he said. "It's amazing. It pulls hard to 15,000. The old bike would pull to 12 or 13. It could overrev, but the power was only being made in that area. This thing just keeps going. It just breathes really well going over 15,000." Despite the winds in Las Vegas, DuHamel said the bike wasn't fazed because of the fairing design. Most impressive Miguel DuHamel concentrated on the new 600 dUring the test. in the handling department is the Uni-Unk rear suspension. The rear of the machine is isolated from the motor, allowing it to work independently and stay planted. It's clear that Honda's making a strong push in the Supersport class, adding a pair of satellite teams to the two it's run the past several years. Last year, the factory allowed the satellites to contest the series, and the results were disastrous. By having DuHamel back in the class, they've proved they're serious. DuHamel is in the second year of a two-year contract and wasn't originally scheduled to race the Supersport class. They came to him for 2003, and he obliged. "The new bike was coming out; they wanted to win; they wanted to get their best odds: he said. "Obviously, as you can tell, they're throwing a lot of 600s out there. They asked me if I was interested. And I told them 'Yeah, are you guys serious about bringing this bike out?' And they said this bike is pretty serious, so I said, 'Yeah, why not?'" Honda will also support four satellite teams: Erion Honda, Bruce Transportation Group Honda, Annandale Racing and No Umits Racing. "We're trying to gain more presence and marketability, and racing is one of a number of ways to do that," American Honda team manager Chuck Miller said. "The more Honda teams are on the track, the more the market value, the more chances to win. Our goal is to get as many Hondas as we can in the top 10, the same as we do in motocross and supercross. Suzuki's been able to do that [in road racing] with the depth of their support." DuHamel spent the time he had at Daytona on the 600. His lap times weren't stellar, and he crashed once when the front end tucked on the cool-down lap. "It's working pretty good, but you know what? The good and bad of it is, it's not working to the point of where I like it ery better for the March race. rather is, that's the way Kurtis rides the bike, and we've got to make a better tire, one that's going to last for him. And, hopefully, that won't mean a tire that has less grip. We'd like to give him as much grip as anybody else, but that's pretty damn hard to do. If you take a section from a tire that Kurtis did his stint on and take one from Ben's, and you look at the amount of the rubber left, Kurtis used more rubber." Various riders and crew chiefs noticed that the times slowed as the extended runs went on, but that's normal. During last year's test, Nicky Hayden's lap times in one extended stint went from a 1:49.8 to a 1:52.5. The race times from the March Daytona 200 vary from a 1:49.68 down to a 1:51.5 over roughly the same distance. Bostrom turned in the best time of the test, a lap of 1:48.651 on a race tire. The only other rider in the 48s was Yoshimura Suzuki's Mladin, who turned in a 1 :48.789. Then came Austin Ducati's Anthony Gobert at 1:49.271. Because of the limited amount of time - most of Wednesday and about 90 minutes on Thursday morning - riders concentrated on making their machin- than doing one hot lap. Gobert, who tested all of the tires, voiced a common observation of the Daytona tires: that they work well initially, but soon falloff. "They all feel pretty much the same for the first six to 10 laps. It's just the last 10 laps that they vary. Unfortunately, with the limit of track time, you can't go out there and bang a heap of laps on them in one day. I think that we've achieved quite a bit. We've given the Dunlop guys some good information. Those guys don't normally need much. They just have a little bit of input, and they come back with some really good stuff; no doubt they'll come back with good stuff in March." Kawasaki's Tommy Hayden was pleased with the new Supersport-spec tires, especially the front. "I think the front, for sure, is better," he said. "There's a front that's really good. There's a couple of rears that I liked better than last year's tire. I was hoping today we would get maybe a little warmer weather to give it a little more accurate test. Yesterday, as hot as it was, it was better for sure. " Ben Spies, the newest member of the Yoshimura Suzuki team, put in to be: he said. "I think it can be better. If you take that into consideration, the lap times that we established are pretty good. I'm not quite happy on it. It feels really good and works great; it's in the ballpark, but it's probably not in the playing field right now." DuHamel has a mostly new team, with Yuki Kikuchi leaving Yoshimura Suzuki's Mat MJadin to do his motors, bringing former Yosh mechanic Jason Lubber with him. DuHamel said his priority isn't just winning the Supersport title. "The thing is, I never did anything like, 'Okay, I'm going to get on the bike for a parade,'" he said. "I get on the bike, I want to win. So, yeah, I want to win both classes." Kurtis Roberts, like Bostrom, will ride the 600 at Daytona and possibly one other track. Otherwise, he and crew chief Dave McGrath will concentrate on the Superbike title. Roberts had a miserable 2002 campaign, a crash at Fontana in Aprtl keeping him out for a number of races. He returned at less than full strength and crashed again at Laguna Seca and finally at Virginia Intemational Raceway in the last race of the year. Roberts rides with an aggressive throttle hand, a technique that got him in trouble at Daytona last year when he destroyed his rear tire. American Honda thought he could benefit from some tutoring, so they've asked Freddie Spencer to work with him. What that union will yield remains to be seen, but Spencer was instrumental in helping Nicky Hayden fulfill his promise. Roberts spent most of his time at Daytona on the Superbike, not trying to go fast, but simply trying to get a machine he can bring back for the race in March. The team was using a new motor and new chassis, though it won't be what they'll race next year. In February, the American Honda mechanics will make their annual trek to the Honda factory outside of Tokyo to build this year's race bikes. "I was just trying to get the Superbike right: Roberts said after the first day, when he was fourth fastest. "It was easy for the beginning. I did 49s straight away and was just trying to get the race setup right. I'm not trying to go really fast; I'm just trying to get the bike setup. That's about it." ICurtIs Roberts ,. Ilop1I'1lJ for a better ~In.......!ii' the most laps of any Superbike rider, running through more than a dozen sets of tires on a hybrid Superbike - a GSX-R750 main frame with a GSXR1000 motor. It's strictly a test mule, though the suspension and swingarm will be the same ones he'll use in March. "I was doing about seven, eight laps on every tire. Because the tire's stuck them on the track. From our standpoint, there's going to be less visible failures on the tire itself. So we got a faster, safer tire just by duplicating last year's specification in a new size. Then we went on, and out of some [of the] new constructions we tried, there's some ideas there that will be incorporated that should make the tire faster and safer again, and here, it doesn't matter how good you have the bike set up, after about five laps they got so much heat in them, they're going to spin. Even if they're then we've got some compounds to look at." Dunlop's Allen said they were able to run only half of the Japanese tires and the same amount of their own. The lack of accumulated data forces him to make educated guesses on the final product. "We got a day, and we've got to make tires for March based on a day's testing," he said. "You pretty much have to go with what you know or what you think you know, rather not getting worn down, they're going to spin up," he said. "I picked a really good front tire I liked, and we got about three different rears that are going to go race distance and see wh ich one does better." Despite having only one day, Dunlop proved that what they thought would work, did. "We've upped the performance. We made a faster tire," Allen said. "We have a new rear size; that size in than going with new ideas. For instance, we had one new specification rear tire that Ben [Bostromj, Eric [Bostrom] and two of the Suzuki guys all liked, but we probably won't produce that tire. If we had three days of testing and it carried on the way it did the one day, we could well be looking at a wholesale change and flipping over to that spec in March. But with the same construction that we used in March of '02 is faster. It's a faster tire. We found a way to make the longitudinal, circumferential joint integrity better on that tire. Now it's a much safer tire. Not that we had any failures that cost anybody any time or cue I e n e _ S • JANUARY 8,2003 35

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