Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

Goodridge makes the trick quick disconnect front broke lines for Hacking 's R6, no bleeding required if the system needs to be swapped. te mp . Co mp lemen ting the ECU is a Dynojet Powe r Commander that allows the team to alter maps for different race conditions. The kit ECU allows some remapping on its own , but the PC has broader abilitiesfor EFI and ignitiontiming. little is done internally to the engine beca use little is allowed outside a five-angle valve job and removing head or case mate rial to increase the combus tion radio. This is a rece nt rule change dictated by the impossibility of enforcing a rule against it, if it' s done properly. The cam timing is altered, and the engine is put together carefully. You can bet the bore is tight and everything else internal is very loose. The clutch of choice is a SO/SO stack of aluminum and steel plates for the best feel; all-aluminum are too grippy and all-steel are too nongrippy. The side covers are stock , and little is req uired in the way of safety wiring. A shift kill is now also allowed in Supersport for full-throttle shifting, and Hacking's is made by Battle Factory, a Japanese company. Hacking uses a race shift pattern. For fine-tuning the power delivery for different tracks , the team sometimes use pipes with different collector locations and some with cross-overs and some sans them. The standard pipes are available for the R6 through Yamaha's GYT-R catalog and through Graves, but special pipes are hard to come by. Most riders wouldn't want the limited-use pipes anyway. Other sponsors of the Yamaha team include AFAM chains and VP fuel (there is no spec fuel rule, just limits on specificgravity and oxygen level). For 2004, Hacking's bike is unchanged, and so is he. Now that Honda has quit the 5upersport class it' s down to a battle among Yamaha's R6, 58 Kawasaki's ZX-6RR and Suzuki's new GSXR600. As you may have not iced, the Yamahas are still in the fray with a win by Jason DiSalvo at Daytona, and afte r two races Hackingis tied for fourth in the points. ORIENT EXPRESS R6 Drag race r Ed Krawiec's R6 is campaigned out of the O rient Express race shop , located on Long Island, New York. This is indicative of how drag racing is an East Coast endeavor. It's partly why the motorcycle industry at large doesn't see it, doesn't do it, and doesn 't understand it. But either way, at the professional level it's a much smaller club than road racing. The drama is subtle and the story line is short, so spectators have a hard time relating to the show. Even drag racers don't watch other drag racers race , But 600 Supersport is a standout class with an unusuallyhighlyrespectable field of riders. Getting to the finals in this class takes a smoothly flowing stream of planning, preparation, riding and luck. Unlike road racing, in drag racing nothing, not a thousandth of a second, can be tossed away or ta ken for granted. And if a mach ine cannot perform to the tas k, there's nothing any rider can do to ride around it. Drag racing requires that the bike come to the ride r. That said, drag racers consider the rider more important than in road racing. That's because even ifa bike can win, it can't if the rider doesn't get every detail of a run perfect. In drag racing, not perfect is called losing. There's no replacement for reaction time. There's no second chance . A drag racing R6 is unmistakable from a road racing one even from across the paddock on a dark night; it's slammed as low as the rules allow. Toachieve this, Orient mod- MAY 12, 2004 • CYCLE NEWS ifled the fork internals with shorter springs and a maximum of 1.5 inches of fork travel. The front is set massively stiff and doesn't compress under the we ight of the ride r. This is so that under hard acceleration which is all this bike does - ther e won't be any lifting of the front from the suspension. And I use the word "suspension" loosely . The Orie nt Express R6's chassis and engine are prep ared at the O rient shop by Joe Hahn and Ed Krawiec. O nce the bike is built, Krawiec takes it to a track to dial it in unde r race conditions . Replacingthe rear link is allowed in drag racing. Krawiec's bike uses an adjustable link so that the bike can be fined-tuned to the proper he ight. A Penske shock with Orient Express-de veloped drag -racing valving handles the rear suspension loads. It's tuned to have moderately fast com pression damp ing and very slow rebound damping, making it come up slowly so that it doesn't fight the bike's shift of weight to the back. Running ballast weight low and as far forward as possible under the fairing is permitted, and this R6 carries 40 pounds of it. As you can see, the advantage of keep ing the bike on the ground well outweighs the burden of the added weight. The OE team uses a 520 non-O- ring chain for the least possible amount of friction. The chain spins on Vortex sprockets of 13 to 14 teeth up front and 42 to 43 teeth on the wheel. The stock-supplied wheelbase adjustability is all that 's permitted to lengthen a 5upersport bike, and at its maximum the R6 is still an inch shorter than the Kawasaki ZX-6RR. This is a handicap that the R6 has to have advantages elsewhere to overcome. And it does . The Yamaha finds that advantage with its horsepower, usually running the highest trap speeds even though it' s the slowest 40th Anniversary Road ra ce rs use their brake enough tha t on·the-f1y adjustment s need to be ma de. The clutch-side adjus me nt knob, which adjusts t span of the front brake lev mokes this possible. bike in the class off the line. And it has so much mo re power than its competition, it often makes up all that it's lost with the one-eighth mile, if not with the 330 foot mark. That's from a typicalgift of .005 seconds off the line to the rider in the oth er lane. That's impressive. The rims are fitted with ceramic bearings with trimmed seals, and OE polished and pow ered coate d their wheels because bling-bling mea ns something in this sport. All brake components are stoc k because drag racers don't brake , they sort of coast along and slow down slowly. The tires used by OE are noth ing more than the OEM fitment with air pressure in the high 30s psi up front and between 8 - 13 psi in the rear. Tire makers hate hear ing that. Krawiec lowered the rear sets an inch and a half and moved them further back from the stock location, which isas much his individual preference as anything else. The c1ip-ons are stock and in their stock location, although that location is much lower due to the stance of the bike. Bodywork is by Sharkskinz and might even have been pulled from the same mold as Hacking's body. Krawiec paints the body himself. The e ngine is fully blueprinted , as allowed in the rules. As with the road -racing engine, OE's R6 has a milled head for increased compression. Cam timing has likewise been altered, but a comparison of the numbers is lmposslble since neither camp will speak specifics out loud. Orient uses a Ti Force , full-titanium exhaust system , wh ich is a brand exclusively available through it. A Power Commander is used for dialing in the bike for each trac k, and OE owner Skip did offer that their R6s produce over 120 horsepower with over 50 foot-pounds of torque, compared to

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