Salvaging The 600s - Back To Racing's Roots

Anthony West. Photo from worldsbk.com.

Eds note: This post is sponsored by http://www.bikebandit.com/

As racing is pretty much the center of my universe, the off-season can be difficult for me to take. I need racing to get me through the long, dark tea-time of the soul between the final round of one year and the opening round of the next.

This year, I indulged in a couple of books to feed my addiction. I purchased Colin MacKellar's Yamaha: All Factory And Production Road-Racing Two-Strokes From 1955 To 1993 and Joep Kortekaas' Honda's Four-Stroke Race History 1954-1981.

One of the things that immediately struck me was that extremely early in their histories, both Yamaha and Honda followed each model of their factory racebikes with production racers available to the general public. 

In 1959, Honda turned its CS71 250cc four-stroke streetbike into the racer-with-lights CR71 and the full-race RC71, aimed at clubman races and contests in Asia. Yamaha sold a kit that turned its YDS1 250cc two-stroke streetbike into the YDS1R; the kit contained ignition bits, new cylinders, new heads, new pipes, new handlebars, new carbs, new gears - you get the idea. Again, it was available to all who wanted it and could afford it.

When Kawasaki flipped the middleweight sportsbike market on its head, first with the GPz550 and then the Ninja 600, the appeal was that the bikes offered amazing performance for significantly less money than the big-bore machines of the day. And you could take one racing with a minimal amount of modifications. I know this for a fact. My first racebike was a GPz550.

The collapse of the middleweight streetbike market is visible for anyone to see. Honestly, literbikes have become so capable, and so easy to tame with the electronic rider aids, that most riders - who are financing the bikes anyway - simply pop for a few extra dollars a month and go with the big boy. This has cast a serious pall over middleweight road racing - at the GP level, only the adoption of a spec motor saved the middleweight category from extinction.

Perhaps it's time to take a page from racing's roots, exploit the capabilities of the modern middleweight streetbike and, paradoxically, craft a class that relies less on direct factory participation.

The fact is that a modern middleweight is virtually race-ready. And if you want more performance, race parts are available through the company's catalog via the Internet and delivered to your door to be bolted onto the racebike. The race tuner of yesterday would kill for the ease with which today's racer can get incredible stuff delivered. 

We can use BikeBandit.com as an example, as they are the sponsors of this post. If you Google "Yamaha Replacements Parts" you will find a link to their site and Yamaha OEM parts. Or you could click on the phrase in the preceding sentence and it would take you to BikeBandit's Yamaha OEM parts site. Similarly, for gear, Googling "Motorcycle apparel" will get you links to all the gear you need to go racing, or again, clicking on the highlighted phrase in the preceding paragraph will take you straight to BikeBandit's gear section.

The other fact is that the rules packages of most series allow for modifications that simply aren't necessary, and are affordable to few. There's little need for aftermarket wheels in a support class.

So. Couple of thoughts:

- Here's a rules package for middleweight Supersports racing: If it ain't OEM, it doesn't go on the bike. Sure, some manufacturers will come up with special racing parts. It will be up to the sanctioning body to choose which ones to allow. Aftermarket triple clamps? Sure. Not too, too expensive. Racing cranks? Depends on dollar-to-reliability ratio - if an expensive part lasts four times as long as the stocker, expensive might be better for the racer in the long term. Aftermarket wheels? Don't think so ...

-  Encourage manufacturers to offer race-only versions of their streetbikes. No lights, no license plate, no headaches of meeting noise and emissions regulations. Think of all the stuff a racer pulls off a street machine virtually on the way home from the showroom. Some of it can be sold. Most of it just piles up. Such a machine should be less expensive, and even if it isn't, if it doesn't have to meet street regulations, it can come with a race-ready pipe and mapping. The pipe would be cheaper to make than the street-legal one, and the racer doesn't have to buy a pipe and re-map the machine.

Looking at the golden ages of motorcycle road racing shows that production racers are the backbone of the grid. Today's streetbikes are this|close to being those production racers. Anthony West, the evergreen Aussie, just took a home-built last-gen Yamaha YZF-R6 to the podium at the Supersport World Championship race at Phillip Island. A few tweaks of the rulebook could make middleweight classes around the world that much more accessible to larger numbers of racers. 

And that could, in turn, restore some of the public's interest in the amazing middleweight machines that can be found on the showroom floor, waiting for someone to remember how good they really are.

This post is sponsored by:
http://www.bikebandit.com/
http://www.bikebandit.com/oem-parts/yamaha-parts/s/m14 
http://www.bikebandit.com/riding-gear-and-accessories