VOL. 51 ISSUE 40 OCTOBER 7, 2014 P79
>>COLE SEELY
With the departure of Justin Bar-
cia came the announcement
of the signing of Cole Seely to
Team Honda Muscle Milk. From
the outside, Seely seems like
the perfect fit: He's clean-cut,
personable, nice, and very fast.
He's filled in at the Honda factory
team on 450s quite a few times,
including in 2014, when he rode
Canard's bike for a few rounds.
"I'm excited," Canard said. "It's
cool to have someone like Cole
who's excited and has a lot of en-
thusiasm and is really happy to
be on the team. I really like Cole,
too. It's cool to see. His story
hasn't been a story of immedi-
ate factory success. He's really
had to crawl his way from priva-
teer-level to where he is now. So
that's really cool to see him make
it. I think he's really going to ap-
preciate it and I think he's really
going to do well, especially in Su-
percross."
Having already put Canard's
bike on the box at the Indianapo-
lis Supercross, it's probably also
a good sign that Seely and Ca-
nard share similar feel for what
the bike is doing, and how they
want the bike setup.
"I think he's really going to sur-
prise a lot of people for sure,"
Canard said. "I've only ridden
with him twice, but his first two
days on the bike, I was really im-
pressed."
>>KYB
It's no secret that racers have
struggled quite a bit with the fac-
tory Showa air forks. Some rac-
ers, such as Ryan Villopoto, got
along with them just fine, but
from day one, for example, Chad
Reed said that although the forks
seemed to work pretty well, the
problem was that he couldn't feel
what the front end was doing.
The forks wouldn't feed informa-
tion back to him to let him know
what the front end was doing. If
you can't feel what's going on,
you can't push that extra little bit
that it takes to win at the top level.
When Canard hurt himself dur-
ing Supercross in 2011, Honda
made the decision to hand his
factory bike off to Reed—who, in
Supercross, was racing a mostly
Pro Circuit-built CRF450R. Reed
jumped right onto the bike and
said that he loved Canard's set-
tings. He thought they were per-
fect. And he led the outdoor-title
chase that year until soon af-
ter his famous Millville sky-shot
crash.
So, Reed and Canard appar-
ently have very similar styles
when it comes to how to set
up a race bike, and it's safe to
speculate that Canard was hav-
ing similar issues with the Showa
air forks in regard to feel. He also
indicated that his bike had a ten-
dency toward headshake with
the Showa units.
With three rounds left in the
2014 Lucas Oil/AMA Pro Moto-
cross Series, Canard showed up
to Unadilla with KYB suspension,
front and rear, on his CRF450R.
It wasn't an easy switch to make,
as Honda has a controlling inter-
est in Showa, but more than any-
thing, Honda wants to win.
"It wasn't easy, for sure," Ca-
nard said. "Not only is it a com-
pany with a different component,
there's personnel involved, too.
There are people you've worked
with for years. So, there are
changes as far as that goes. Any-
time you make a change, it's not
easy. Everyone has to do it very
tastefully, not step on anyone's
toes, or make it to where it's cra-
zy disrespectful. I think the rea-
