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/887961
VOL. 54 ISSUE 41 OCTOBER 17, 2017 P105 F or my weekend at the Barber Vintage Festival, I was given the key to one of the KTM RC Cup 390 bikes to race in the Sound of Singles 3 class. For the past two years, the KTM RC Cup has been the breeding ground for the fastest kids in America, all honing their skills on bikes with little horsepower but massive corner speed. Well, that's with 100 pound whippets on board, not 200 pound fatties that make the little black and white bike look like it's quickly disappearing up the crev- ice where the sun doesn't shine. Not to mention my extra weight compared to what this bike is used to carrying meant top speed was somewhat hindered and I had to seriously raise my corner speed game. At one point in my life I was actually rather good at riding little bikes, using the corner speed inherent with bikes like the Suzuki RGV250 and 450GP to my advantage. But that was a long time ago, and after one day riding the 390, I was vastly out of my depth. I couldn't, for the life of me, crack the 1:46s bracket as the little KTM struggled to haul my butt up the various hills of Barber Motorsports Park, and with zero spares that might help me, like a heavier rear shock spring, it had to come down to improving my riding. One of the reasons Moto3 is always the best race of a MotoGP race weekend is because it's contested on bikes with tiny horsepower numbers that require the riders to get off the brakes and roll through the corner at maximum velocity, and using the draft as much as possible to gain an advantage. Riding the RC is exactly the same—you hold the gas open until the very, very last second, downshift immediately to get that part of the turning equation out of the way and roll your way through the turn, opening the gas wide open as soon as humanly pos- sible. The RC brutalizes you if you're lazy, expecting it to do the work for you. You have to pay absolute attention to your lines, picking them as precisely as possible to allow ultimate drive to be achieved. The brakes, by modern sportbike standards, feel wooden. The combination of a single Bybre caliper and tradition- al (read: cheap) master-cylinder makes for a distinct lack of feel at the lever, so you must be careful not to extract the maximum brak- ing power without overloading the front end, which, on my bike, was seriously under-damped. I did, however, have a set of excellent Pirelli Supercorsa SP SC1 tires underneath me. These are not the tires that were used in the MotoAmerica series, the last of which was the Dunlop Sportmax Q3+ that debuted at New Jersey's penultimate Mo- toAmerica round. Having ridden both the Pirelli and those Dun- lops back to back at Barber, I have no doubt that if the kids had the Pirellis this year, they'd be at least 1-2 seconds faster and lap records would be smashed across the country. I finished in fifth overall on the practice time sheets but as I and my teammate Chris Fillmore had accumulated no points this season, the AHRMA regula- tions stipulate that you must start at the back of the grid. It's an archaic way of racing as it makes the first few laps a touch on the dangerous side when the quicker guys come charging through the field–me thinks it wouldn't hurt to make one of the eight practice sessions count towards qualifying. Starting in wave two, 38th place, one ahead of Fillmore who was on an experimental RC390 that will be used as the basis for the new MotoAmerica Junior Cup in 2018, I was quietly confident I could get a top five in Sound of Singles 3. I knew Fillmore would win, he always does (he even won the damn darts game later that night), so I figured if I tagged onto the back of him, he'd bulldoze everyone out of the way and it'd be plain sailing. Not quite. I got boxed in when coming through the pack and within two laps Fillmore was gone. I finished the first lap in eighth place, and worked my way up to fourth with Dale Quarterly about three seconds up the road. Over the next three laps I reeled him in and finally got out of the '47s and into the '45s as the KTM and I finally gelled, passing Dale with three laps to go. I thought that would be the end of it, a safe third. Wrong. Quarterly did a 2008 Laguna Seca Rossi on me, passing me back immediately and slowing the pace enough for Isle of Man TT rider Mark Purslow to catch up and ultimately pass both of us on the final lap on his little 125GP bike. But I had a great time racing with Dale. We must have passed each other seven or eight times in the last two laps, and he got me on the line by running around the outside of me when I wasn't forceful enough on the last cor- ner block pass, relegating me to fifth place. The event gave me a re- minder of just how physical little bikes are to ride. To make one of these things really go requires you to be so, so precise, a skill I must have blunted a touch over the years. It's no surprise guys like An- thony Mazziotto III and Brandon Pasch turned out to be such good riders because these little RCs really teach you how to ride. Even though the RC Cup is now gone and will be forever known as the Junior Cup in MotoAmer- ica, a 2017/2016 RC390 is an excellent club racer, as it doesn't chew tires and won't scare you like a big bike. There were about 15 of them in attendance at Barber, proving the worth of the machine. For now, if I'm ever to get another race on one, I'd like to know about six months in advance so I can get my butt to the gym. Channeling My Inner 16-Year-Old On KTM's RC390