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/128215
Foggy Petronas Racing's Froy Corser that maybe the only item of concern you had was that the swingarm was maybe too short. That hasn't been a factor then? TC: To date no, but as the horsepower increases, we may have to start changing the length of the swingarm. What we have now is working well. hampion in 1996, short term MotoGP rider the year after, and a 23 times a race winner in Superbike, few are as experienced as Troy Corser. The expectant father has been the spearhead of the Foggy Petronas project on track and has already stuck the triple on the front row of the starting grid. At 31 years of age and with flair for machine development as well as racing, he could be thought of as the perfect man for his present job, a task he explains below. C GR: How would you describe your Foggy Petronas experience so far? TC: It's been interesting of course; to start on a bike that was once just on a piece of paper and then go out and ride it was certainly something new. I think the progress that we've made has been really good. GR: During the launch of the bike you mentioned MAV21,2003· cue I e n e _ GR: Do you enjoy that development of the machine as much as the racing? TC: I do, but at the same time, come race day, I want to be able to go out there and race to win. I don't mind trying stuff in qualifying or practice preferably we could do it in tests somewhere else but unfortunately the rules state that we cannot go to a track unless we've been there for the race already, now that we've started the season at least. We didn't do a whole heap of testing last season, but we did do quite a few days where there was absolutely no pressure. GR: Most people have said that you are maybe further along the road to competitiveness than you were expected to be already. TC: I went into this with my eyes open, really. Not expecting too much at the start but expecting it to go forward. A lot of it is just to do with the work we have done at the track, on the engine and chassis. Part of it is that we don't really need to go out there and do one, two, three days of testing to try new things on the bike. We can make alterations on the bike after maybe just five or ten laps and have found a positive out of it - gone in the right direction. To this point we have not tried anything on it that has made it worse. That is part of the reason that we are up to speed so quickly. For myself it has been good because we have been doing things I want to do to improve the bike. James (Haydon) has been doing his own setup of the bike, but I think he just doesn't have enough GR: How much input to the early stages of the project did you have? TC: The actual engine, chassis and aerodynamics package that we have was all done by the engineering group. Steve Thomson, my chief engineer, pretty much came up with the figures of where the pivot position should be and where the headstock angle would start, and that was based on his own experience in the past. The actual basis of the bike we haven't changed that much. Maybe went for a different trail and offset and so on, changes I just wanted to make the bike fit myself. 36 experience yet to be able to say "This is the way we should go to make it better. n If he gets on it, tries it, and if he doesn't go any faster, then he doesn't think it's any better, but that's not always the case. If you use the tire less or get a better feel, then you may have to change something else on the bike. GR: How close is what you have now in terms of engine performance compared to the opposition? TC: The handling of the bike I feel is as good as anything out there. I am really happy the way the bike handles, but we are about ten to 15 percent down on what we could be - to be on par with everyone else. But with what we started with at the start of the season compared to where we are today, we've improved the bike dramatically. The next step is to fine-tune it to get that last 15 percent. By GORDON RITCHIE PHOTOS By GOLD £, GOOSE 50 GR: How frustrating was that time in 2002 when you had a contract, hoped to go racing but could not even test your own bikes, never mind anyone else's? TC: I was disappointed. I knew it was going to be quite a big task for us to be ready for the homologation, but at the same time I thought that they would do whatever they had to do to get it done. I was all ready to start the season last year more as a test season rather than to race. At that time I had not even sat on the bike, and it was difficult to think that we would be racing at the first race of this season. Looking back at what stage we're at, when we were supposed to go racing at Laguna but we wouldn't even have been able to go around the track.