Cycle News

VOL. 52 ISSUE 37 SEPTEMBER 15, 2015 P109 where as I speeded up I began encountering a severe front end shimmy if I hit a bump when even slightly leaned over from vertical. This lack of stability was dra- matic enough to be frightening, though fortunately not terminal, in my case, but was quickly di- agnosed just by holding the front wheel between your legs and wiggling the handlebars, which revealed a huge amount of slop in the steering. Yet how could such an eminent technician as Warren Willing have given such a design the thumbs-up? Turned out the rose joint in the steer- ing had worn quite dramatically, necessitating a redesign as well as upgrading the component to the best available off the shelf. Ray Van Steenwyk redesigned the front wheel hub/kingpin unit on the bike and addressed all potential issues of bearing slop throughout the system, while also adapting it to the use of BST carbon wheels, which he calculates reduced the rotational mass by 50% on the front wheel, and 30% at the rear. Ten months later it was time for me to try the bike again, this time at Broadford where it immediately started tick- ing all the boxes. I'll admit to some trepidation as I upped the pace at the tight, twisty Victorian track, which we were able to use thanks to the support of track manager Nick Selleck. Broadford is in fact an excellent test venue in spite of its short length, since it allows you to replicate a wide range of dif- with the supple suspension suf- ficiently well damped to absorb Broadford's more significant bumps on the angle. As I upped the pace and gradually began using all of the front Pirelli's con- tact patch to increase and hold turn speed, the TS3 responded well. I could brake later and later on the angle into a turn like the 180º right-hander by the Pad- dock entrance, or best of all the uphill turn one at the end of the pit straight, where holding off the brakes to a point that would have been suicidal on a tele- forked bike, allowed me to keep up hard-earned uphill momentum as I rounded the turn onto the top straight. There, the TS3 rode the bumps on what amounts to a tarmac staircase really well, even with enough torque from the desmodue motor to lift the front wheel over the first step, in which case even though there was no steering damper, it would only flap the front wheel once very quickly, before resuming normal service. And best of all it was very stable under hard braking from high speed, even trailbraking into the off-camber right at the end of the straight, with not a trace of the shimmy it had suffered from before. Job done. The only slight initial quibble I had was that I got some bump steer descending through the esses, where the light, precise steering of the TS3 came into its own, as the quickest steering hub-center bike of the many I've sampled. That's especially so compared to the Bimota Tesi, which thanks to the copious links and changes of direction in the steering between the front tire's contact patch and the handlebars definitely didn't have the same front-end feedback that the Motoinno has. I doubt I ever went through the Broadford Esses quicker on any of the 50 or so bikes I've ridden at Broad- Each test recorded showed that the Motoinno gained up to one second per corner over the GSX-R750 in the hands of the same rider. That's a lot! ferent situations dynamically. But I needn't have worried, because Van Steenwyk had done his homework well. The near-termi- nal shimmy had been replaced by a great sense of stability and composure; the Motoinno was now predictable in its behavior, and thus confidence inspiring,

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