Table of contents for October 2016 in Performance Bikes

TRIUMPH DAYTONA 675 TONY O’CONNELL “I THOUGHT YOU might be interested in taking a peek at my Triumph Daytona 675 trackbike. “After throwing it down the road at Circuit de Andalucía in January this year, I thought I’d do the decent thing and at least fit a fresh set of fairings and some new sprockets. The Trumpet is a brilliant bike and I commuted on it for years after buying it new in 2013. It was only later that it became my track-only bike. “It’s needed little in the way of mods as the Arrow exhaust, quickshifter, rearsets and ÖhIins shock were fitted when I bought it. I’m taking it to Mugello in August, via Brands Hatch, just to make sure all the bits stay on when it’s on-track. Hopefully…

PB AND MT-10 STOPPED ME GIVING UP ON BIKES I was a sportsbike fan for years, but as I was approaching 50 and I had a bit of backache, I thought I’d give something else a go. So, along with a couple of my mates, I bought a BMW GS Adventure. I spent the the next few years riding slowly with my slow mates and wobbling around with the wife on the back. It was tedious – so much so that I was about to give up on bikes. Perhaps I was just too old? Luckily I still subscribed to PB, and I read the last issue with the MT-10. It looked crazy and I took a test ride. I’ve now traded in the GS and I’m back on a…

‘Despite feeling crazy on the road it metes out its power perfectly on the track’ I’D FORGOTTEN HOW good these were – the power delivery, the feeling from the front end and the way it changes direction reminds me of a proper racebike. Not surprisingly, the Panigale R is stupidly fast – the second-ever fastest bike we’ve tested at our Mallory Park test track over the last few years – and one of my favourites. It’s a reminder of the Ducatis I used to win on in BSB. It’s impossibly trick – a proper homologation special and the lightest production superbike we’ve ever tested, but in the company its keeping today, sitting next to a £65k mega-money factory special and a full-on BSB racer, it looks well, standard. But the…

ELECTRONICS Last year, these bikes were running in WSB with factoryagneti Marelli ECU and rider aids. BSB insists on a simpler Motec M170 system as a control ECU, which doesn’t have true traction control, wheelie control or any other rider aids. Making the most of mapping and rideability is crucial to using the bike without aids EXHAUST New to the Panigale for Thruxton, the 916-esque underseat exhaust doesn’t improve power or change the handling dynamic, compared to the various Akrapovic designs used in WSB, but Shakeyeports a small different in character. “It feels freer-revving at the top – though for the first few laps it didn’t feel like my bike, because the noise level and where it was coming from really changed. It was like a new bike to listen…

IT’S A HOT and sticky British heat, and the thick, perfumed air hangs heavy with evaporating volatile hydrocarbons. It’s a rich, petrol-heady bouquet: I’m getting strong flavours of boiling tarmac, the subtle aroma of melted Bridgeston S20, notes of leather and polish, topped off with the crackling finis of hot metal and oil. If they could bottle this stuff they’d clean up: de Bayerische Motoren Werke – e h eau it smells like fast. The 2010 BMW S1000RR explodes between sizzling Staffordshire hedgero with a detached, casual violence. The R wonky face and vivid, Motorrad motor colours are a boss-eyed maelstrom of r white and blue, spearing across the landscape’s greens and golden brown lacerating, pin-sharp focal point of performance. It snarls and growls, ri through quickshifted gears in a…

‘VALENTINO ONLY KNEW ONE SPEED AND IT WAS HAUL ASS!’ NOT TO DROP Valentino in the grease or anything, but when we went to Suzuka in 2000 on the Castrol Honda he was fast, but too fast,” says Colin Edwards, Rossi’s partner in the 2000 and 2001 Honda 8-Hour line-ups. “I was like, man, it’s an eight-hour race! I don’t think he’d done any endurance racing, where I’d been doing it for a little while. At that point Valentino only knew one speed and it was haul ass! “The first hour, as is his fashion, he tracked down the leading guys, got in front and started to pull away, going very fast. Then he tucked the front at the hairpin and we knew that was it. Suzuka is crazy competitive;…

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE IS hard to deny – these wheels allow a bike to carry more corner-speed and change direction faster. But they’ve also made the R1 a much nicer road bike; better over the bumps, more stable and with suspension that works slightly better in every situation. Like any other high-end aftermarket bolt-on, they’re accurately machined and amazingly well-made, making you realise just how average the OE item it replaces looks. They’re stunning things and have lifted the look of the whole bike. If you want to upgrade your older, sorted sportsbike and only have a limited budget, you may be better putting your money into a set of wheels than a new bike. In my R1’s case the bike feels lighter, newer and is faster and better in every…

KNURLY Unlike the GSX’s standard stepped preload collar, the Hyperpro’s is threaded and, because range of adjustment is greater, is easier to set up. SUPPORTIVE Better spring rate than standard. Original shock isn’t up to supporting the ‘fully-figured’ European man. HOW LONG 500 MILES COST £625 CONTACT WWW.PERFORMANCEPARTS-LTD.COM THIS HYPERPRO SHOCK is half of the solution to making the flawed GSX-S1000F decent. Adjustable for preload, high/low-speed compression and rebound damping, the remote reservoir shock made an instant improvement out of the box on our 3000-mile old long-termer, whose original shock had already all but given up on damping the movement of the (soft) standard spring. We’ve made a few tweaks to the high-speed compression and rebound (a little less of the former, more of the latter), and it’s turned the…

HOW LONG FIVE MONTHS/4000 MILES/ONE HIGHSIDE COST £179.99 CONTACT WWW.TRANAM.CO.UK NEVER LEND PEOPLE your kit. A friend of the magazine, who will not remain nameless (say hello, Nathan Colombi) asked to borrow a set of gloves on a trackday to take his trackbike for a few shakedown laps. I carry a couple of pairs in case they get wet or sweaty, so I loaned him these. Four laps later, his shagged ex-race tyres spat him out of Luffield at Silverstone in a 70mph collarbone-snapping highside. He gave my gloves a sound beating but didn’t hurt his hands. There are a couple of small tears, but they’re on secondary outer layers of leather and the glove isn’t compromised at all – they kept him protected to the end. If you were…

2016 YAMAHA YZF-R1 CHRIS NEWBIGGING YAMAHA EQUIPPED MY test bike with their posh CCU integrated datalogging. It’s fascinating stuff; not only does the GPS system perform a basic datalogging function (laptiming and so forth), but it also uses the heavily-digitised R1’s sensors and electronic features to attach data on throttle opening, brake pressure, lean angle and more to that lap data. It’s not quite full-on race telemetry, but it’s more than any other system has offered. You’ll need the CCU kit first. Initially only available on the R1M, or as a ‘spare part’ for the premium model, it’s now available as a packaged accessory for the common-or-garden R1. It’s a whopping £999.99, though, and requires a single seat cowl (£199.99 colour-matched, or £309.99 if you order the carbon cowl from…

2016 TRIUMPH SPEED TRIPLE S THIS MONTH WE’VE spent a bit of time tweaking PB’s long-term Speed Triple, attempting to make it lighter, faster and prettier in the process. The first addition was the Arrow Low Boy exhaust system listed as a genuine Triumph accessory. The Low Boy has been a staple go-faster part for 1050 Triumphs for the past decade. It certainly ain’t subtle – a short, stubby scaffold pipe of a 3-1 system that exits at wheel spindle height, it basically sheds the upper half of the Triumph’s exhaust system, saving 6.5kg, upping the dBs and costing £1120. The exhaust also comes with a new throttle map for the bike, and Trumpy claim the two combine to give another 3bhp. We’re sticking it on the dyno next month,…

1997 SUZUKI TL1000S JAMES MORSE “I HAVE BEEN gradually evolving my TL1000S for about seven years. The priority was to sort its handling, so I fitted a Maxton shock and a Hyperpro steering damper. After this, I decided to check the bike’s weight distribution, only to find it is very rear-biased, which I suspect is the root of its instability issues. I modified a GSX-R750 SRAD swingarm, which is 26mm longer than the TL-S’s swingarm, and it transformed the handling. The next step was to update the front end. “A set of GSX-R750 K5 forks gave the TL upside-downers with radial calipers and that’s when I started to read about PB’s project TL-R... One call to TL expert Sam Matthewman and a 1080cc engine making 138.6bhp was soon installed. While…

THE DUCATI SUPERLEGGERA is the lightest, most nimble, most exciting roadbike that I’ve ever ridden. It weighs less than a BSB bike and turns so instantly so easily that, once you get used to it, makes it very easy to ride fast. When people say big bikes turn like 600s they’re usually bullshitting and it wouldn’t be true in this case either – with a wet weight less than any production 600 it turns better than any of them. It’s heaven. But what the hell’s a Superleggera? It’s not a homologation special, it’s what happens when you build a Panigale without cost being an option. The Superleggera is a Panigale just like the R. It shares the same engine, electronics and architecture. From an engineering and design point of view,…

HIGH-SPEED DIRECTION CHANGES SUPERLEGGERA: 7.97s BSB: 8.01s 1199R: 8.69s A 288-metre sector taken from the point where Rutter shuts the throttle in Chris Curve to set up for the narrow entry to the Gooseneck, to the point where he hits the brakes for Mansfield. It’s a high speed direction change from right to left on the narrowest possible line. To commit to the Gooseneck you need a lot of confidence in your bike’s ability to change direction fast, otherwise you’re on the grass Rutter is actually faster on the Superleggera through the first right-hander, taking the apex at 73.3mph compared to the BSB bike’s 70.28 and the 1199R’s 65.81mph. It’s only when the bikes are passing through the vertical on their way to full left lean that the BSB matches…

‘The older racers get, the fewer risks they take. Look at Valentino’ “I LIKE TO work in fascinating places with extreme environments. In MotoGP I have two lives: one is the rush of adrenaline I get when I reach the side of a rider who’s had a bad crash; the other is my job inside the Clinica, which is a bit like being a normal doctor, helping riders with flu and gastroenteritis, as well as with broken bones, dislocations and so on. “I have the most beautiful job in the world, but also it can be a terrible job. When I worked with the air ambulance I’d get to the accident site, where people had very bad injuries and could die, but I didn’t know them, so I just used…

BETA TOOLS ‘Working on suspension is very kind on tools and we hardly ever need to change them. Maxton has had a relationship with Beta for years and they make very good tools.’ SHOCK DYNO ‘We test every shock and fork on this before they are sent to their owners. It stores each customer’s suspension data and allows us to measure and examine lots of different forces and graphs. There are more advanced electromagnetic dynos, but they are overkill for what we need.’ ACETYLENE CUTTER ‘This is a last resort, but occasionally we need to introduce a lot of heat to free a seized part off or remove a fork leg from a stanchion.’ 1980s TIG WELDER ‘This is really old and was used by Ron in the 1980s when…

WE WEREN’T REALLY expecting any gains, but the bike does feel slightly more lively on the Dymags. There’s a small difference in straight-line acceleration, especially before drag becomes the main limiting factor. This makes sense – the bike is 2.8kg lighter with the Dymags and has less mass to spin up. Braking is better on initial application, but the bike wants to stoppie more in crash braking. Not a problem in normal track usage, so a net gain there. Surprisingly, the R1 also feels more stable at high speed on the Dymags and less prone to tankslappers over surface changes. STRAIGHT-LINE PERFORMANCE…

‘The chassis exhibited a new level of feel, confidence and composure’ 1989 SUZUKI RGV250K CHRIS NEWBIGGING IF YOU BLINKED, you’ll have missed the RGV250 lapping Rockingham on the PB trackday. I did five laps, pulled in and wheeled out my R1 test bike. Mutterings about the heat being too much for it were only partly true. I just wasn’t feeling it. £500 of Shock Factory rear suspension, £1000 of Maxton GP20 fork internals and £200 of ContiAttack SM tyres aren’t an instant guarantee of handling. A shock made in France, forks fettled in Cheshire, and German tyres for supermotos unsurprisingly didn’t mix straight off the bat. It was underdamped at both ends, and for the moment, access to the retro-fitted fork compression adjuster requires removal of the front wheel spindle.…

HOW LONG 150 MILES COST £178 (REAR), £143 (FRONT) CONTACT WWW.METZELER.COM THESE £320 METZELER Racetec RRs really need to be amazing for such a salty RRP, and they didn’t disappoint with their performance. I used them on my Panigale 959 for the PB trackday, which was an absolute scorcher of a day. The RRs coped with 145bhp punishment over a whole session with no fade in the heat. The tread was worn away on the left at the end of the day, though – Rockingham’s surface is harsh on tyres but not especially grippy, so it’s a tough circuit for a tyre. I covered 150 track miles – over £2/mile, or £4/lap at Rockingham. Cold performance wasn’t tested in the record heat. The K3 compound front tracked across the bumps…

WHAT THE YZF-R1’S DATALOGGER CAN TELL US CIRCUIT MAP Using Google maps, the Y-TRAC app matches your position on the circuit. In track mode, it also provides a start/ finish point for preloaded tracks. INFO PANEL You can configure this, to compare throttle opening (rider vs actual), front/rear wheel speed, gear, lean angle, brake pressure, G-force, rpm and levels of rider aid intervention. RIDE BY WIRE QUIRKS At this point in turn one, I’m turning the twistgrip 48 degrees, but the ride-by wire is giving me 50 degrees. On other parts of the circuit, the relationship is reversed. RIDER, NOT AIDED Think traction and slide control hold you back? Here, the rear wheel turns 10mph faster than the front, with no slide or TC intervention. The IMU sees no danger,…

2016 BMW S1000XR MARK WHITE I BET RIGHT now, as I’m writing this, Chris is preparing for his trip away on the S1000XR and stuffing the topbox full of spare pants, deodorant, slippers, his special pillow and all the other things he usually doesn’t have the luxury of taking on a trip away on a miniscule and cramped sportsbike. Well, he will if my recent Nürburgring trip convinces him to let the BMW do the hard work while he gets on with enjoying the other stuff it does so well. I hope he packs the tenner he’ll owe me when he gets back, too... Eurotunnel booked, I packed the topbox full of more than I’d need (because I could), chucked a bumbag on (my leathers have zero pockets, not even…

SUSPENSION KTM’s ownership of WP means they’ll provide the springy bits. ENGINE Conventional 1000cc V4 will power the RC16. Reckoned current output is north of 250bhp. CHASSIS RC16 features a tubular steel trellis frame. KTM do like to plough their own furrow... WHEELBASE KTM say the gap between the wheels is just 1400mm – well shy of many current teams’ bikes. KTM HAVE REVEALED the technology inside the RC16 prototype with which they hope to achieve MotoGP success next year. The addition of the KTM RC16 to the grid, piloted by Brit Bradley Smith and Spaniard Pol Espargaro, will make the top class the most varied in terms of machinery since 2007, when six manufacturers contested the series (not counting the brief appearance and withdrawal of Ilmor). It is the…

2009 YAMAHA YZF-R1 CHRIS REA “THIS IS THE R1 I’ve been wanting to build for years now, and a lot of time, effort and daydreaming has gone into getting the build just right. The project is now almost finished and it sounds, handles and feels mint. I never get tired of hearing it popping and banging on the over-run. One thing’s for sure – it is certainly a lot more engaging than the sterile Fireblade I had before this. “The bike already had a few modifications fitted when I bought it, but it has now had its forks rebuilt by MCT Suspension and even an Öhlins shock from Ian Hutchinson’s Milwaukee Yamaha R1 added. The Akrapovic exhaust is a full titanium system but I have had 65mm taken off the…

HONDA CBR250RR NICK LAW “I BOUGHT THIS CBR250RR (MC22) as a complete basket case 12 years ago. It was advertised for £1500 and I drove four hours up from Sussex to see it. It was running, but badly. The downpipes had rotted through, the chain was touching the floor, the rear tyre was flat and it had been down the road. “I spent two and a half years restoring every nut, bolt, seal and bearing. I stripped and rebuilt the engine and ported the head myself. It took ages to lap in 16 tiny valves and set the clearances. I built the gearbox twice as I got one gear back in the wrong way round! I also built my own exhaust system using the best bits from two scrap systems.…

WHAT WOULD YOU do with an obscenely-large, six-figure lottery win? If you’re anything like us it would include buying at least one of these beauties. In a world of superbikes that demand superlatives, the Ducati Panigale leads the way, and in the four years since it was launched there have been more variants released than any other bike. Big ones, small ones, trick ones and super-trick ones. But our favourites have always been the fastest ones. Here at Cadwell Park, PB tester Michael Rutter tests the two fastest production Panis ever built and gets a rare go on Shakey Byrne’s factory BSB bike. It’s unheard of for a magazine to get a test on a championship-leading bike mid-season, but when your road tester has won 24 BSB races you find…

‘It’s so bloody fast! The start/ finish and Park straights disappear in a blink’ THE LAST TIME I raced a Ducati superbike was a 1098R in 2009, and the only Panigales I’ve ridden are roadbikes on my test days for PB. But I’ve ridden most of the roadbikes my racers have been developed from so you get a fair idea of what to expect. But PBM’s Corse-built Panigale Rs are almost nothing like the roadbikes. The 1199R and Superleggera are quite aggressive, hard-revving bikes that take a little while to get the best from and get under control. An ex-WSB bike with no traction control or rider aids (it doesn’t even have a proper autoblipper) could be a liability, but it’s one of the best bikes I’ve ridden. I can’t…

GETTING A CHANCE to ride these special bikes made for a really interesting afternoon, especially as with each new bike, performance was ramped up. There’s no escaping the fact that the Panigale R is a very special bike – and you’d expect that for £30,000... But, surprisingly, it actually feels a little ordinary when compared to the Superleggera. The Superleggera is quite simply the best road-legal bike I’ve ever ridden, from the way that it changes direction, its feel mid-corner and the way that its lack of weight helps it shed speed so easily. I think the fact that I was as fast through the Gooseneck on this very special roadbike as I was on a BSB racer says a lot about its ability. But you shouldn’t be surprised –…

EXHAUST POWERVALVE Poor materials and linkage design means it can start chattering and rattling, and sound like the camchain tensioner is about to let go (see 1). It’s not a massive problem, easily fixed. Ideally with a full system... CAMS A batch of cams on early 2010 bikes suffered severe lobe wear and pitting. It starts as a ticking noise which gets louder, turning into a rattle, at which point it’s advisable to stop riding the bike. It’s a known, acknowledged issue with early bikes and to start with BMW replaced either the cams or, in the early days,the entire engine,free of charge. If your bike picks up an issue now, it might take a bit of cajoling. And even current S1000RRs have suffered with DLC coatings coming off the…

THE STORY OF the 2016 MotoGP season revolves around one major factor: how riders and teams have adapted from Bridgestone’s front slick to Michelin’s front slick. Against all predictions, the man who has adapted best is Marc Marquez. And against all predictions, the man who has adapted worst is Jorge Lorenzo. Marquez is crashing no more than he didn’t last year, while Lorenzo’s crash rate has increased five-fold. Bridgestone’s front slick was an astonishing front tyre. Riders talked of its servo effect: the harder they braked into corners, the more the tyre gripped because the extra load expanded its contact patch, delivering more grip. No one who used that tyre has ridden anything like it. Michelin’s front is more like a normal front slick: if a rider overloads the tyre…

IT’S A CONVERTED SP-2 ROADBIKE, RIGHT? Er, no. In reality WSB is a ‘silhouette’ series and while the engine has the same bore and stroke as the roadbike, and the chassis looks the same, the whole bike is pure prototype racer. The only roadbike parts on the SPL that PB could find were the clutch master cylinder and lever, starter motor and clutch cover. Even the killswitch is an HRC unit – the roadbike has a black button while the racer’s is red. ENGINE This is a proper 996cc HRC engine with 165bhp at 11,000rpm (it revs to 12,000rpm where it should hit 175bhp). The cases are aluminum, the sump is deeper, finned and made from magnesium. The gearbox is shot-peened for strength and has different ratios to the roadbike.…

MACHINE SHOP ‘We manufacture as many parts as possible in-house in our machine shop, but what we can’t build we either source from the UK or the best place possible when it comes to quality. We have six CNC machines as well as two manual lathes. The two CNC lathes allow the chuck to spin and the bit to remain stationary while the two CNC mills work in the opposite way with the tool spinning. Our latest machine allows both of these functions, which is why it cost £70,000. Ideally we’d like to have more of these, but they are very expensive. We are in the process of applying for planning permission to extend the machine shop, so we may invest in some more equipment in the future.’ SPRINGS AND…

THIS SECTION OF Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground is a great indicator of a bike’s nimbleness. In 260 metres, a fast-ish right goes into a slightly slower left that goes into a slow right almost-hairpin. It requires a bike to change direction and brake at the same time. On fresh Contintentals and standard wheels the R1 feels good through here – better than a slightly-breathed-on 16-year-old superbike has any right to. But it is hard work; you feel the extra load through the bars as the bike changes direction and it takes a while to settle as you brake with left lean and flick right while still recording 0.6g of deceleration. Then, as you go into the hairpin, you’re weighting the inside bar, getting the bike to steer before pointing it in…

‘I’d been having a big problem with grip, then got a big slide which let Hutchy through’ 2016 BMW S1000RR MICHAEL RUTTER IT WAS ANOTHER exciting round of National Superstock at Brands Hatch and I went into it hoping for my first win of 2016. It all started well when I got pole position. We’ve been working a lot on the bike with K-Tech, experimenting with running the bike lower in the corners. We’ve also been mucking about with different fork internals to get more feel. The result is the bike’s the best it’s been all year – loads of feel, lovely steering and the tyres are lasting better than ever, too. So with all this in mind, I set out to put it on pole in first qualifying. And…

HOW LONG TWO YEARS COST AROUND £20 CONTACT ONLINE SHOPS MAGAZINE READERS ARE lovely people (usually) – there’s always a cup of tea and biscuit in the offing. Or, if you’re an international sales manager for a cleaning firm, workshop goodies like this. PB reader Nat Bennett gave me these disposable wipes to try – think of them as halfway between workshop tissue and a proper cloth. They’re tough enough to scrub chains and sprockets, don’t crumble if they’re wet and don’t dissolve in solvents. They don’t leave fluff and lint behind, either. Unless you get them really clagged in grease, they usually last a couple of jobs, too. A box of 80 for £20 sounds a lot, but I’m only halfway through, and they’ve been really useful. If you’re…

IF YOU LISTEN very carefully to a Honda Hornet 900 ticking over you can hear a small voice crying ‘let me out’ from within the motor. That’s the voice of excitement, cruelly restricted and neutered by Honda’s fun police, desperate to escape and show you what a great bike this could be... In standard form, the Hornet 900 perfectly displays everything that is wrong when a manufacturer fails to have the guts to build a proper naked bike. The expression ‘retuned for more midrange’ is used to justify the 919cc FireBlade engine’s drop from 130bhp in sportsbike guise to a paltry 108bhp in the naked bike. And what of this midrange boost? According to Honda, both bikes have the same peak torque, it’s just that the Hornet makes it earlier…