Cycle News

VOL. 55 ISSUE 4 JANUARY 30, 2018 P107 commitment from Yamaha to put in the resources needed to win, so efforts began in early 1996 to build a new motorcycle. "One thing I was proud of was Marlboro decided to go with us into such a scary project," Rob- erts said in a 1997 Cycle News interview. It was quite amazing how quickly the new team went from concept to working team. Warren Willing, who worked on the Roberts Yamaha team, had a concept for a bike he'd been drawing on his computer over several years. Most people didn't know that a couple of years before the Modenas KR3 was introduced, that the team actually built a V-twin 250cc test motor a couple of years before in America. "It was a concept that we wanted to do for our motor," Rob- erts explained. "Part of our three is that twin. So we'd been toiling with the thing for quite a while." Roberts based his new Kenny Roberts Group squad in Ban- bury, England, a small town about 70 miles northwest of Lon- don. Banbury was the heart of Formula One racing. Nearly 60 percent of all Formula One teams were based there, so the knowl- edge base and technical exper- tise were at hand for Roberts. Formula One concern Tom Walkinshaw Racing actually built the original KR3 V-3 motor. That company had been milling around building a motorcycle racing motor at the time and then through a mutual friend Walkinshaw found that Roberts was also interested in build- ing a GP bike, the two met just a couple of times before they decided to work together. The financing of the Roberts team was made possible by Malaysian company Modenas. Roberts had talked to Harley-Da- vidson and Aprilia about partner- ing with his GP team and actually came close to working out a deal with Aprilia. Roberts said the problem was the pace at which Roberts was putting together his team. "It made them nervous that we were putting this together so quickly," Roberts explained. The Modenas relationship turned out to be the perfect fit. The giant industrial company, which produced motorcycles for the Asia market among many other things, was large enough to provide the financing Rob- erts needed. Modenas initially signed a three-year deal to fi- nance Roberts's GP efforts. The thought of going with a three-cylinder two-stroke was to allow the KR3 to be lighter than the four-cylinder GP bikes and theoretically be easier on tires, more nimble handling and more fuel efficient. Willing said by the time a prototype was made the engineers had something like 800-900 drawings. Willing spent a lot of time at Walkinshaw where the KR3 engines were assembled and tested on the dyno. The first completed engine ran in mid- December of 1996. In January of 1997 the first prototype was fired up for the first time. "It was nice to see it start up as a motorcycle," Willing told Cy- cle News in 1997. Kenny Senior was the first to have the honor of riding the prototype on a nearby airport runway. Then Kenny Jr. and Jean-Michel Bayle. "Kenny Jr. did wheelies and Jean-Michel created imaginary chicanes to test the handling." While there were the inevi- table teething problems for the Modenas KR3, in the amazingly short amount of time it went from concept to racetrack, the motor- cycle showed flashes of bril- liance in its inaugural 1997 sea- son. Roberts Jr. had four top-10 finishes on the KR3, while Bayle scored three top-10s. Bayle actually managed to qualify the bike on the front row on a wet Brno, in perhaps the highlight of the season for the KR3. The Modenas KR3 will go down in history as one of the most unique motorcycles ever raced in GP. It opened the way for an independent effort of unique GP Modenas and later Proton machines through several generations all the way through to the Proton KR5 in the four- stroke MotoGP era. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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