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/783081
VOL. 54 ISSUE 5 FEBRUARY 7, 2017 P115 turns, too. In the beginning, it was because a couple of guys ended up in the grandstands (again: higher speeds), but now it likely has just as much to do with trying to slow the racers down in general. The problem is that today's elite racers, on today's unbe- lievably gnarly racetracks, are stressing their production-based motorcycles beyond what can ever possibly be tested prior to creating a motorcycle for homolo- gation. In terms of the Big Four Japanese manufacturers, they do the bulk of their new-model testing with Japanese racers on outdoor tracks in Japan, or on the outdoor tracks of the MXGPs (which do not have any sort of production rules). The same is true of manufacturers like Husqvarna and KTM, whose steel chassis are almost entirely tested on outdoor tracks in Eu- rope. Simply put, nobody testing out these pre-production motorcycles can possibly stress these chassis the way they need to be stressed in order to guarantee they don't do anything "funny" underneath a guy like Eli Tomac on a super- cross track. When Honda spent the years necessary to develop their new 2017 CRF450R, there was no way for them to stress the pre-production stock chassis even remotely like Ken Roczen could stress it on a supercross track. To give you an idea of the kind of stresses I'm talking about, I'm going to tell you a quick, true story: In 2009-2010, Kevin Windham was out at the test track with the Factory Connection team try- ing to sort out settings, and the team had brought two suppos- edly identical motorcycles for Windham to go back-and-forth between. Problem was, he kept complaining that one of the two was acting way different than the other, and he didn't like it. The team poured over the machine to double-check everything and make sure all the suspen- sion settings and whatnot were identical. They couldn't find it. It wasn't until Windham's mechanic, Brian Calma, had the offending bike laying on its side to change the clutch, that team manager JC Waterhouse noticed that one machine had a carbon-fiber skid plate on it, and the other was alu- minum. In order to control against the placebo effect, Waterhouse occupied Windham inside the box van long enough for the team to switch the skid plates on the two machines. Sure enough, the next time out on the machine Windham actually liked, he came back in after only a lap or two screaming, "Now this one's doing it!" That's what I'm talking about here. None of us are going to be able to tell a difference between skid plates like that, but the top guys in the sport can literally tell if a single spoke is even a little bit loose. When you're on that much of an edge, and stressing the motorcycles to that sort of extent, I think the production rule—again, at least as far as the chassis is concerned—can actually be dan- gerous. The motorcycles simply aren't adequately tested in that kind of environment, under those kinds of racers, and the produc- tion rule actually prevents it from happening. What I'd like to see is doing away with the production rule as far as chassis are concerned, and even make exceptions for where the engines mount to the frames (as long as the internals of the engines still meet homologa- tion standards), too. (After all, if Windham could tell a difference between skid plates, you bet it would make a difference how the engines are mounted to the frames, as well.) One factory-team manager I talked to even suggested that they would be willing to make these full-factory-tested chassis available for purchase by other pro racers. But bigger than that, I think that it can only make the sport safer for regular people like us to have guys like Eli Tomac fully sussing out our production motorcycle frames in those kinds of environments. I think this idea is good for everybody. CN