Cycle News

VOL. 52 ISSUE 11 MARCH 17, 2015 P131 wanted to prove that he was still a capable Super- bike rider. Pegram, who scored podiums on the Ferracci Ducati a couple of seasons earlier, was consid- ered a perfect candidate to help develop Suzuki's V-Twin. Unfortunately Pegram never came to terms with the TLR. His best result that season was a 10 th , something he did four times, but that was about it. Crevier said he could understand why Pegram and the TLR didn't make a good fit. "Larry being a flat tracker, he was good at getting killer drives out of the corners," Crevier ex- plained. "And in spite of being a big V-Twin, that's something the TLR just didn't do well. It would just buck and wiggle if you tried to give it too much gas. Try to push it beyond the bucking and you'd get in trouble real fast." Most felt the main source of the acceleration problem on the Yoshimura TLR had to do with a new and unproven rear shock and linkage design. By all accounts the bike had some very odd han- dling characteristics on the gas out of turns. "It had some pretty complex shock linkage," Crevier explained. "Another problem was the rotary damper they were using as a rear shock. Yosh [Yoshimura] never really got the chance to play with it enough to make it work properly. That was one of the main things holding them back, a weird rear suspension." In spite of the challenges Crevier managed some decent results. In fact if you look at his 1998 campaign, had it not been for a crash at Daytona (which wasn't his fault), one at Mid-Ohio that was, and a broken motor at Road Atlanta, Crevier would have easily finished the season ranked inside the top-five. As it was he finished the year ranked seventh, not bad considering the depth of the field and the fact that it he was riding a first- year Superbike. The highlights for the TLR were three top-five finishes for Crevier, including a fourth at Loudon. "Loudon was a place where I could just ride the wheels off the thing and it worked pretty well," Crevier recalls. "I enjoyed trying to race that thing. I rode it on the front wheel because it actually steered well and had good brakes. The power was decent, but I still revved it and back shifted the shit out of it to set it into the turns with engine braking because the rear end was boingy off the gas. And on the gas it would feel stiff, it had so much binding with all the arms and links. We could not control high and low speed damping. It was scary to get on the gas and spin it until I stood it up. It was a fun test, but I was a hot-headed racer and hated to not get up front. My mechanic Chris Wiedel pulled his hair out every time I came in to change something on it." In spite of promising results Suzuki pulled the plug on the TLR project after only one year. Maybe one of the main reasons was the bike's sales were lukewarm at best. Mat Mladin once bragged to reporters that he tested the bike and not only went faster than Crevier and Pegram, but he claims the bike had more potential than his GSXR. Several riders chased Suzuki con- tingency money on the TLR in the club racing ranks with great success, chiefly Tray Batey. For a Superbike that was around for only a single season, Crevier said there is hardly a day that goes by when he's at races, that someone doesn't come up to him and say they loved the TLR and remember how well he did on it. "I mean the TLR's legend has grown over the years," Crevier says with some amazement in his voice. "The people who love that bike are really passionate about it. Who knows—maybe if they would have developed it for a couple more years they might have been able to lighten it up and figure out the rear suspension. The motor was certainly potent enough to serve as a good start- ing point to build a winning Superbike." CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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