Images From WERA West, Round Two, April 2017

Images from the WERA West races at Auto Club Speedway in April 2017:

David "Aussie Dave" brought the big rig and the crew and won the Formula One and A Superbike races.

The team's other rider, Cameron Petersen, took the A Superstock win.

Van Palmer and the Honda CBR1000RR.

John James.

Images From the MotoAmerica Test at COTA, Part Two

A few more images from the MotoAmerica test at COTA ...

Moto West Grand Prix and MotoAmerica champion Bryce Prince.

 

 Roger Lee Hayden.

 Hayden Gillim.

 Toni Elias and Josh Hayes.

 Crashing sucks, even when it's not your fault. Maybe especially when it's not your fault.

Images From the MotoAmerica Test at COTA

As the MotoAmerica season gets set to kick off, here are some images from the official preseason test at the Circuit Of The Americas.

Nick McFadden (16) and Brandon Cleland (975) will be racing for Team Hammer on the Suzuki GSX-R600. 

J.D. Beach is on the new 2017 factory-backed Yamaha YZF-R6.

Toni Elias made the "old" Suzuki GSX-R1000 go fast; it will be fascinating to see what he does on the 2017 model.

Balancing Act

I logged on to live timing and scoring for the 24 Heures Motos in April and found exactly what I expected that I would see, although it wasn't really what I wanted to see. YART - the Yamaha Austria Racing Team - and GMT94 were in the lead, and by a margin. After four hours, the two YZF-R1s were the only bikes on the lead lap, and they would remain the only motorcycles on the lead lap for the rest of the 24-hour endurance classic at Le Mans.

It wasn't necessarily what I wanted to see, because I wanted Suzuki Endurance Racing Team to have a good race after the tragic loss of Anthony Delhalle. And after Honda's struggles on the old Fireblade, I wanted to see the new CBR1000RR perform well.

But there is little room in a racer's head for romance and wishes, and the ruthless, dispassionate analysis of racing already left me expecting to see the Yamahas in front. The reason? The latest iteration of the YZF-R1 is in the prime of its racing life, and endurance racing has proven to be a perfect fit for the combination of the machine's sublime balance of performance, reliability and rideability.

Balance. It's what makes race teams and racers successful, more often than not. When the machine, rider and race conditions are in alignment, it looks easy, because it is. The machine and rider's behaviors complement each other, and when they are driving the performance in a direction that suits the needs of that particular competitive event, it is hard for the competition to see which way they went.

Look at the last few Ducati MotoGP machines. Many, many riders have struggled to get them to work. No one can argue that Cal Crutchlow isn't talented, or that Jorge Lorenzo doesn't know how to get a racebike around a track. But Lorenzo lately looks like he's been hit with a dart tipped with thorazine, and Crutchlow - who wanted a factory bike more than anything else in his racing life - quickly found that you have to be careful of what you wish for.

Conversely, Andrea Dovisioso has made it his life's work to come to terms with the beast. He's Desmo Dovi, and he's not going anywhere else if he can help it. He's thrown in his lot with Ducati, for better or for worse. So he's spent more of his career trying to get the Ducati to work than Cal did or Lorenzo will. He's figured out ways to adapt to the evil machine - which, when conditions are right, suddenly becomes one of the fastest bikes on the track. In the rain, under heavy acceleration, the Ducati isn't wicked, it's wicked-fast. Bike, rider and conditions come together and they can suddenly make the best in the world look slow.

Racing machines have a life cycle, and there is a point in that cycle where they are fully-developed yet not obsolete. That is the point where you know how good the machine actually is. The current YZF-R1 is at that point. It's been around for a few years. Front-line teams in MotoAmerica, British Superbike, the Japanese JSB1000 series and the Endurance World Championship all have put countless miles on them. Yamaha has supported those efforts with factory involvement. There is a deep body of knowledge on how to make the machine work, and a solid foundation of aftermarket parts for building them. And the bike has proven to be, in most circumstances, really, really good - the sheer number of championships in a wide variety of specifications is persuasive evidence to support such a claim.

Contrast the R1 to the other ends of the racebike life cycle. 

SERT went racing in Le Mans with its 2016 GSX-R1000 because the all-new 2017 GSX-R1000 isn't far enough along its development cycle to be competitive. Teams in MotoAmerica - especially the Superstock 1000 teams - and in British Superbike are racing bikes that are remarkably stock. The fully-developed, last-generation GSX-R1000 is still fast, but there's nothing left to improve on. SERT was simply hoping to minimize the damage to its championship lead by bringing the old, slow charger out for points. The balance was off - the machine no longer had the characteristics of a front-runner, and nothing could be done. The new machine, even in Superstock trim, wasn't reliable enough to do a 24-hour race, with Junior Team Suzuki LMS falling to 35th and 168 laps down at the end after stopping multiple times on the track.

Honda went racing with its all-new 2017 Fireblade, and had exactly the experience that SERT wanted to avoid so badly. The leading squad had a chain adjuster malfunction on the starting line and was 55th and 11 laps down at the end of the first hour. That makes the next 23 hours of racing a very, very trying period. Team April Moto Motors Events broke a gearbox on its CBR1000RR. The balance was off - the machine simply hasn't had the time to be built into its prime.

You never really, honestly, know how good a racebike really can be. Yamaha's R1 is competitive everywhere, it seems, but in the Superbike World Championship. Well into the second year of a factory effort on the bike, it has exactly one podium to its credit. The team should be more than competent, and there's nothing wrong with an inline four-cylinder configuration - ask two-time and defending champion Jonathan Rea how well his Kawasaki ZX-10R works. Switching riders hasn't helped - Yamaha actually got rid of the rider who scored the podium.

Perhaps it is as simple as the fact that in EWC, MotoAmerica and JSB1000 specification, the R1 is balanced, meeting the needs of its riders and the racing environment. Pushed that little bit harder to try to get to the front in WorldSBK, the balance is thrown off, and the limitations of the machine and rider to meet the conditions are exposed.

And once the balance is lost, the fall can seem to go on forever, even if it's just a fall of one place off of the podium. Racing is binary at the factory level; there's successful, and there's not successful. Ironic how the harsh binary of win/lose is a function of a massive series of compromises, all seeking the elusive balance that takes you to the top.

"Give Up" Never Won A Race ...

It's easy to look back at racing's past nostalgically at the plight of the privateer, living in a van and prepping his or her own machines, racing without hope of a win, just racing for the lifestyle of being a racer at the International level.

 There are those still living that adventure.

Anthony West is one of them. The two-time Grand Prix winner's exploits just in 2017 are the stuff of novels, and remember that not all novels have a happy ending ...

West ended 2016 living out of a suitcase, having filled his fifth passport and having raced in his eighth international racing series. His Superbike World championship ride gone, West put together a 2017 season of racing the Supersport World Championship and the Asia Road Racing Championship. While the ARRC ride was guaranteed, the Supersport ride was self-funded, and depended on West putting together enough money - from sponsors and results - to make it from round to round.

In recent years, this hasn't been impossible from a privateer's point of view, thanks to the stability of the Yamaha YZF-R6 platform. The dominant middleweight, when Yamaha felt like trashing the competition in Supersport, it pulled the R6s out and were immediately competitive. Sam Lowes, Chaz Davies and Cal Crutchlow all have won the Supersport title on the R6 in the past decade. Last year, when Kallio Racing decided to enter Niki Tuuli for a few wild card rounds, they put together a privateer R6, and Tuuli scored three straight second places. The R6 was good, well-known, and made it possible for a privateer to enter the second-highest class in the WSBK arena and have a shot at a podium.

West knew this well. He entered the 2016 Phillip Island Supersport race in 2016 on a privateer R6 and put it on the box. But 2017 was going to be more difficult. Yamaha had introduced a new and upgraded R6 for 2017, and had put together a factory-backed Supersport team to race it. The going had just gotten that much tougher for the privateer. The "old" R6 would still be competitive at first, as it was so well-understood and refined. But with each passing round, the new R6 and the new factory team would be getting better, more refined, faster. West had to strike early in the season to make a statement that his team was worth sponsoring.

The life of the privateer means a lot of looking for money. West's Twitter feed has a picture of the bike, with portions of the fairing sectioned off with price tags on them. It's remarkable how little money it took to occupy a big section of the bike. The team showed up at Phillip Island and immediately blew up two engines. Only a loaner - and slow - engine from a National-level competitor got West into qualifying, where he started from 22nd, the eighth row.

Long story short - lots of chaos and drama among the front runners, a steady, quick ride by West and the Australian was fourth heading into the final lap. West got passed by two riders, two riders crashed out, another slowed and he wound up, impossibly, on the podium again.

In Hollywood, the factory reps come calling and West gets a full-factory ride for the rest of the season. It doesn't happen that way for 30-something privateers. West missed the next round in Thailand, but put together enough sponsorship to make Round Three at Aragon in Spain. The bike looked awesome, because West personally air-brushed it!

Aragon was a disaster. The bike threw a rod through the cases and burst into flames. West didn't run away from the flaming machine, but stood over it, frantically waving over the marshals with the fire extinguishers. You can always tell the racer who's also the machine's owner ...

More frantic negotiating landed a Dutch team to take a bike with them to their headquarters and rebuild it from the frame up while West headed for Thailand to race the ARRC round. The Asia series pays well, and West plows that money back into the Supersport program. And Yamaha has kicked in a couple of engines, which went straight to an engine builder in the U.K. for race prep.

West has money for the upcoming races at Assen and Imola. Assen is the site of his two greatest accomplishments - wins in the 250cc and Moto2 Grand Prix races. He's tenth in the Supersport championship, and with the front-runners all suffering various problems, he figures that he's still in the fight. 

"Still need to find the money to finish the other 7 rounds. I can still win this championship and I'm going keep trying to win it," West posted on his Instagram page.

Lots of people tattoo inspirational slogans onto their bodies. None may be more apt than the tattoo on West's arm, "Give Up Never Won A Race ..."

https://www.gofundme.com/ant-west-2017-race-season 

The Sadness Of The MotoGP Machine

Honda commissioned a limited-edition drawing of the CBR1100XX. There were 210 of these prints made. The small, 5x7 drawing shows the machine and the military aircraft that inspired its name, the Super Blackbird. It's a beautiful piece of art, but what is more significant are the signatures below. One is from the designer of the motorcycle, saying, "I hope you enjoy riding this bike as much as I enjoyed riding it."
The other is more poignant, to me. It says, simply, "This bike reflects the wishes of Honda's R&D."

A bit of background. Kawasaki had seized the title of performance king from Honda early on in the development of four-cylinder, four-stroke motorcycle, the Z1 eclipsing the CB750. In the mid-1990s, the Kawasaki ZX-10 and ZX-11 were jaw-dropping fast, the epitome of performance. Honda wanted to be known as the builder of the fastest production bike on the planet. It gave its designers a clean sheet to work from, and the result was a bike that, in the words of one British magazine, shook up and redefined an entire class of motorcycle.

But this post isn't about the Blackbird. It's about what the bike represented. The Blackbird was the end result of clean-sheet thinking, a relatively free hand given to the designer, and the result was something that 20 years later, still amazes.

I'm not about to tell you that I could even ride a modern RC213V. There's a reason that the teams don't do the year-end journo rides any more - most of us couldn't even get the tires up to operating temperatures, or learn in a reasonable amount of time the start and launch procedures for the bike.

But it's not the motorcycle HRC would want to build. It is hobbled by restrictions to electronics, limited by silly regulations about clutches, etc. With these lines of development (as opposed to refinement) essentially closed off, now HRC must spend its time in the wind tunnel, chasing gains in aerodynamics that will have absolutely zero value in the real world.

The RC213V is an amazing machine. But it does not reflect the wishes of Honda R&D. And that is just a little sad.