Yamaha's YZF-R6 - A TZ For The Masses

Jason Aguilar

When Yamaha introduced its new YZF-R6 in 2006, the advertising claims seemed too good to be true - and it turns out they were. The company's boast that the bike revved to 17,500 rpm was not quite so accurate, much complaining ensued, and Yamaha offered to buy back any R6 a new owner was unhappy with. 

You've got to cut Yamaha some slack here. The poor person who wrote the ad copy was probably being held by the throat of some overly enthusiastic engineer/racer who taken the new machine onto a track and found out how amazing the bike was. The engineer/racer probably was yelling, "NO! This bike is really, Really, REALLY GOOD! Make it sound amazing! No, even BETTER!" By the time the security guards got there and pried the engineer's fingers from the copywriter's throat, the damage had been done.

David Guerrero

The 2006 YZF-R6 was a watershed motorcycle, one that realistically defined the performance middleweight for a decade. In a market segment where dizzying technological revolution was the norm, the bike's core was so good that with upgrades to the bolted-on bits, it was winning races and finishing on the podium in International-level competition more than a decade after it was introduced. 

More than a decade after it was introduced.

Think about that. In a field of human endeavor where machine upgrades come - in some series - every race weekend, this thing stayed competitive for years and years.

Mookie Wilkerson

A few things came together to make this happen.

First, Yamaha has been a huge supporter of road racing throughout the world, and in the U.S. While the company wasn't involved in Superbike during the early years of this iteration of the YZF-R6 (and I'm referring to the bike from the 2006 through 2016 model years) it was heavily involved in the support classes. So the factory was developing the new model, finding out what worked and what didn't, with top-flight racers like Jamie Hacking pushing it to its limits. The bike quickly became a known quantity.

Harm Jansen

Second, as the economy started to tighten in 2007, club racers in particular started holding on to their machines for more and more seasons. The YZF-R6's core was so solid and performed so well that the bike could compete against later offerings from other manufacturers. And the slowing economy meant that there were fewer competing models, and the ones that were seen weren't as racer-friendly as the YZF-R6.

And the more people racing the R6, the bigger the knowledge base of the tribe. After a few seasons of racing the bike, there weren't a lot of secrets left. Most tuners could get a decent base setting out of one, and most riders could rip the thing around competently. It's a snowball effect. It gets to a point where a racer or tuner looks at a different machine and thinks, "I don't even know where to start setting the (insert obscure chassis geometry reference) here. But I can Google this for the YZF-R6 and get into the ballpark." That didn't appeal to the developers, the builders who wanted to forge their own path, create something new and unique. But for the warrior who just wanted to go race, it was like having Jeremy Burgess available at the tap of the screen on your smartphone. It was racing heaven.

Robert Pierce

For the club racer in the U.S., the YZF-R6 became standard-issue equipment. By 2008, more than half of the field in the WERA GNF C Superstock Expert class was racing on a YZF-R6. (WERA's C Superstock class is the home for 600cc fours, and allows the fewest modifications. It's the class where street bikes that are race-readiest from the showroom will be most attractive to the club racer.) It has been a trend repeated nearly every year since. It's fair to say that the YZF-R6 kept the grids healthy.

J.D. Beach/Photo from MotoAmerica

For pro racers who are not factory-backed, there really wasn't any other choice. At the last MotoAmerica Superstock 600 race of 2015, 22 of the 28 finishers were on YZF-R6s. Last year, at the same race, 17 of the 28 finishers were R6-mounted. And for the pro racers who are factory-backed, well, YZF-R6 riders have dominated the MotoAmerica 600 classes in recent seasons.

Chaz Davies/Photo by Yamaha

At the international-level, Cal Crutchlow took one to the Supersport World Championship in 2009. Then the factory sat out a season. When ParkinGO decided it wanted to sponsor a team, Yamaha dusted off the YZF-R6s and sent them back into battle with Chaz Davies aboard. He promptly won the championship.

Niki Tuuli/Photo by NikiTuuli.com

Last season, a Finnish rider named Niki Tuuli showed up as a wild card in the Supersport World Championship on a privately entered YZF-R6. He took three straight second places and set the fastest lap time in each of those races.

Finally, for 2017, Yamaha introduced a new model of YZF-R6 and went racing with it. It's kind of amusing to watch the World Supersport races, because not only are the factory racers on the 2017 R6 trying to beat the riders on other makes, they're also trying very, very hard to hold off the well-sorted and bloody fast last-generation R6s that now are in private hands! Racers like Sheridan Morais, Tuuli and Anthony West are frequently in the top 10 and giving the factory Yamaha riders fits, let alone riders of other makes.

Brian Morris

Inevitably, the 2017 YZF-R6 will start to regularly outpace the older model, and the gap will grow larger and larger. This is the cycle of racing, the inevitable turn of the wheel.

But before the last generation YZF-R6 slips into history, it is important to recognize its contributions to racing, especially here in the U.S. As the country's economy recovered over the past eight years, the R6 gave racers a solid, understandable and fast platform for a cost-effective racing program. Club racers took their club-level machines to National races and didn't embarrass themselves. The hours in the saddle on the fast, reliable bikes turned some club racers into pros and National championship winners.

They were as close to production racebikes as it got, and in one key respect they were better than pure production racebikes. When you were done racing one, you could put the lights back on it, have an awesome streetbike or sell it to finance your next racebike purchase. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that the 2006-2016 YZF-R6 kept middleweight racing in the U.S. alive and healthy.

Keir Leonhardt

Two things inspired me to write this.

When I photograph motorcycle road racing, I check for the clarity of the images by reading the VIN plate on the bike or bikes in the picture. I have shot photos of race-winning YZF-R6s this season that show a 2008 manufacture date on the VIN plate. That is a machine that is in its 10^th year of existence, winning a race. Excellent.

The other thing was a reference in a book I love, a comment about the final years of the TZ750, the iconic Yamaha four-cylinder racebike, in Colin MacKellar's stellar book, “Yamaha: All Factory And Production Road-Racing Two Strokes From 1955 to 1993.”

MacKellar wrote that in 1983, in the U.S. Formula 1 series race at Pocono:

“Gregg Smrz headed home Doug Brauneck and Miles Baldwin to give the Yamaha TZ750 a 1-2-3 in the race and a 1-2-3 in the championship points with three races to go. These were four-year old machines ridden by gifted privateers, armed solely with the accumulated knowledge gained from the tens of thousands of racing miles consumed by the TZ.”

Change the names, the dates and the name of the machine, and the sentiment fits the last generation YZF-R6 perfectly. And it serves as a fitting tribute to the YZF-R6. The TZ750 was a real production racebike, a top-level race winner anyone could purchase. Under the lights and turn signals of last generation's YZF-R6 beat the heart of a real production racebike.

John Knowles

Once A Racer, Always A Racer ... R.I.P., Nicky Hayden

Nicky Hayden's 2016 contract with Honda was going to be his last professional motorcycle road racing job. He was a brand ambassador in leathers, a racing representative of the company for which he'd won the MotoGP World Championship, the AMA Superbike Championship, countless races and the admiration of race fans around the world. It should have been a victory lap, so to speak. He'd done the hard work his entire career, and it was time to receive the accolades for a job well done.

Apparently, no one told Hayden he was supposed to take it easy.

The first inkling that Hayden wasn't mailing it in came in a wet-but-drying Superbike World Championship race in Sepang. As Hayden said afterward, he wasn't in title contention, so it was time to take some risks. Hayden pushed his way to the front in the tricky conditions, managed the gap and gave the aging CBR1000RR and Ten Kate Honda its first win in nearly two seasons.

I ran into Hayden at the 2016 Suzuka 8 Hours, where he was riding for the MuSASHi RT HARC-PRO factory-backed Honda squad. Hayden was racing royalty there. Honda executives took selfies with their family members and Hayden. An interview with Hayden was featured in the official program for the race. Hayden's schedule was packed, but he took a few moments for a brief interview with me on Saturday after practice and qualifying. We talked about the technology on the bike, the challenge of riding long stints in the brutal Japanese summer heat and humidity, and the team's chances in the race.

Sunday morning, I got up, got to the track and logged on to my email. And there was a text message from Hayden, sent to a senior Honda P.R. executive, who forwarded it to me. It read, verbatim:

Will you tell the guy I did the interview with the other hard part was being third rider with tire limit that I didn't didn't get new tires for qualifing.... Can u tell him? Thx

Hayden was battling a bike he was unfamiliar with, settings that were a compromise with two other riders, a huge fuel tank and the aforementioned suffocating heat and humidity. And he still wanted me to know that the real reason his teammates were faster than he was on Saturday afternoon was only because he didn't get a crack at a fast lap on fresh rubber.

Yeah, Hayden was a nice guy. But at his core, he was a racer, and the desire to be the best burned as brightly in him as it did - and does - in every champion. And it still burned at the very end of his career. Brand ambassador or whatever, when Hayden's face shield snapped down, he was a racer and he was in it to win it.

Bye, Nicky. Thank you for everything.

All images shot at the 2016 Suzuka 8 Hours by Michael Gougis. These are especially touching, in that Hayden is racing with a tribute to fallen racer Luis Salom on his leathers. Now it's Nicky's turn for his number to be on the leathers, helmets and racebikes of racers everywhere.

The Boxer Twin And The Fury Of Nakamoto

Beg, borrow or steal a BMW boxer twin, the bigger the displacement, the better. Start it up, then – with the bike in neutral, your feet on the floor and the tank wedged solidly between your knees – whip the throttle open. Really give it a solid blip. To avoid a catastrophe, here's what to expect: The motorcycle will rotate along its front-back centerline, at the height of the crankshaft, hard to the right.

In simple terms, the crankshaft on the bike spins one way, the bike – in an equal and opposite reaction – tries to spin the other way. If you have never experienced it, and you're not expecting it, it will freak you out. The phenomenon is somewhat less noticeable once under way, but if you're downshifting, pull in the clutch and blip the throttle hard, you definitely will feel the motorcycle engage in the same motion beneath you.

There are a lot of advantages to a boxer engine configuration. Low center of gravity, cylinder heads out in the breeze. But virtually all motorcycle manufacturers have abandoned the boxer, and it's hard to imagine that the counter-rotational effect had nothing to do with it.

After the wheel/tire/brake assemblies, the crankshaft is the single heaviest rotating item on the motorcycle. Experiments with counter-rotating front brake rotors on motorcycles – discs that spin in the opposite direction of the wheel – have demonstrated that such devices do, indeed make steering the bike easier, but the additional cost, complexity and relatively limited benefit have combined to dampen major research into putting them into production.

And for International-level racebikes, counter-rotating disc systems run into the same problem that non-telescopic forks run into. A racer who has been on “traditional” brake discs since they were four years old has developed a superhuman fluency in the language of the feedback that such brakes provide and the skills required to steer such a system. It's simply too big a challenge to learn a new language in just a couple of races before the factory starts asking questions about what happened to their formerly-winning bike.

Hypothetically, swingarm front ends provide significant benefits over telescopic forks. But Rossi, Marquez, et. al., have ridden telescopic forks their entire careers, and would have to spend time to learn to “speak” swingarm front end (or counter-rotating brake discs). Ask those professional racers how many races they're willing to throw away trying to unlearn the skills that have made them successful and famous, and to spend those races at the back of the grid learning new skill sets that may or may not be better.

Anyway …

The crankshaft is always there. Where “there” is varies according to design preference, but it is carefully thought-out and examined. Its motion always affects the behavior of the motorcycle. One key reason 1000s handle differently than 600s that weigh only slightly less in race trim is the difference in the weight of the crankshaft and the impact it has on the behavior of the bike. Dirt bike riders know that they can alter the attitude of the machine mid-air with the throttle and rear brake. Even when the rear wheel is nowhere near the ground, grabbing a handful of throttle or stabbing the rear brake lifts or lowers the front wheel. Altering the spinning motion of a big, heavy thing has an impact on the behavior of the bike.

Racebike engine manufacturers mostly have chosen to spin the crankshaft in the reverse direction of the wheels. One of the key reasons is wheelie reduction. A forward-spinning crank tries to lift the front wheel. This is usually not such a big deal on a streetbike – longer wheelbases, more weight and less horsepower mean the engine's contribution to wheelies is less significant. Shorten the wheelbase, lose nearly 100 pounds and add nearly 100 horsepower, and the crank effect on wheelies suddenly takes on a new urgency.

So – one answer is to spin the crankshaft in the other direction. But that means an additional rotation-reversing shaft inside the engine. And that eats a bunch of power. Bad on a racebike. But until recently, it was the best compromise, and designing a racebike is an exercise in compromises.

Enter Honda. An engine company at its core, the horsepower lost by that extra rotation-reversing shaft was a carrot hanging there for its engineers. The company opted to build a forward-rotating engine for MotoGP and count on its software engineers to craft an anti-wheelie system. If it could do this, not only would the bike accelerate harder, it would have more power on the top and would eat a little less gas to boot. A more efficient engine pays dividends in a myriad of ways.

The company had it right, really, really right, in the first half of the decade. The bike was a missile, and it really only struggled on courses with rapid changes of direction. Then dumbed-down electronics were introduced for MotoGP, and Honda joined the field, building a reverse-rotating engine.

Until the day he retired, ex-HRC Vice President of Racing Shuhei Nakamoto railed every chance he got about the spec software and electronics hardware for MotoGP machines. Intellectually, I understood. Those electronics, and the spectacular work the racing engineers had done on them, had allowed his engine design department to build a better engine. And learning to build better motorcycles is one of the reasons Honda goes racing.

I recently got to spend a few days aboard a Boxer twin for the first time in my riding career. The crankshaft effect described in the first few sentences was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. But more than anything else, I was able to understand on a visceral level exactly why Nakamoto was so angry.

I could feel the sheer force of the crankshaft effect, and I started to feel the power of the force that his engineers had tamed. It was an accomplishment, one of the many engineering miracles that racing engineers perform. And it was all thrown away in the pursuit of more entertaining racing, a better television show.

Not only do I understand, but I can feel and respect, the fury of Nakamoto.

WERA West @ Vegas - Images Now Available

Images from the races at the WERA West Sportsman Series Presented by Lucas Oil Products event at Las Vegas Motor Speedway Classic Course now available. $25 for four high-resolution, hand-edited images of you or your friends, emailed to you. Contact me with your race number at morbidelli17@yahoo.com.

 

The ChaChaCha Contingent - Images From WERA West, Round Two, April 2017 - Part Five

Terry Heard doesn't just race. He brings new racers into the sport and helps them through their early days on the track. A few of the riders who race under the ChaChaCha Motorsports umbrella:

Bryant Rosas.

 Gilbert Silva

 Wayne Gann.


 

 

Images From WERA West, Round Two, April 2017 - Part Four

More images from WERA West, Round Two, April 2017:

Mookie Wilkerson.

 Robert Pierce.

Brian Morris.

Moises Castaneda.

Edgar Zaragoza had a very special ride for this round. More on this bike to come ...

A Privateer's Life - Jake Gagne

Sometimes it's hard to remember how hard, how very hard, it is to make a living as a professional motorcycle road racer. And then you get a glimpse, just a peek behind the curtain, and you realize how close it is to not racing at all for some riders.

American Honda Racing is supporting Team Genuine Broaster Chicken, with team manager Danny Walker and rider Jake Gagne, in the Motul Superbike class in MotoAmerica competition in 2017. Honda says it is kicking in bikes and technical support. That's enough to give you something to race. But scraping together the rest of the program ...

This is an image of the team's bike at the Circuit Of The Americas pre-season test. Two things caught my eye as I walked past. The first was the swingarm, a massive aluminum alloy sculpture, beautiful, something from a MotoGP machine of not too long ago. It is completely stock.

The second was the rear stand. Yep, it's the $39.99 Pittsburgh low profile motorcycle spool stand from Harbor Freight. Sometimes making it to the grid means the team cuts costs wherever it can, and if that means buying rear stands from Harbor Freight, then you buy rear stands from Harbor Freight.

The rider makes compromises and cuts corners, too. Note the tearing Alpinestars undersuit worn by Gagne as he watches the team fettle the new CBR1000RR.

Gagne's proven himself. He's an AMA/DMG Daytona SportBike Champion, a MotoAmerica Superstock 1000 Champion, even a Red Bull AMA Rookies Cup champion. He's paid his dues, but even a rider with the credentials he brings to the table still scrapes and struggles to get to the grid.

It was deeply satisfying to see Gagne finish third of the Superbikes in Race Two at COTA. Here's hoping that all the struggles, all the sacrifice, pays off. Nothing but respect for the private teams, and especially the privateer racers.

Images From WERA West, Round Two, April 2017 - Part Three

More images from the WERA West event in April 2017 at Auto Club Speedway.

Gray Pham took three podiums, including the win in D Superstock. 

 

Justin Simons took a career-first podium in Formula One competition and moved into the points lead in the class.

Helmut Kohler Jr. on his Yamaha YZF-R1.

Ryan Arthur Davis and the sinister YZF-R1.

MotorBike RoadRacing - The Quarterly

The first issue is available, and it features interviews with WERA racers Terry Heard, Jerry Flores, all-around and veteran racer Jack Baker (on his life with a SuperSingle) , a pile of images of WERA West racers and race results from WERA West and CVMA.

It also has a few of my favorite blog posts from motorbikeroadracing.com, the ones on Marc Marquez and living on the edge of madness, the FIM Endurance World Championship title-decider, the re-emergence of World Champion Terry Rymer and the first of a regular feature called Best. Race. Ever. The first one of those is about the GEICO Superbike Shootout and Mr. Editor Ulrich saving U.S. road racing (again!), and has one of my favorite portraits that I've ever shot, an image of Martin Cardenas after winning the Superbike race.

The plan at the end of the season is to compile the best shots and stories into the yearbook. But this gives me a chance to get more racers into print, showcase some of my better writing and photos and tell a few stories about racers that might not otherwise ever get told.

The first issue is 40 pages, glossy stock, saddle stitched, $11, mailed to your home. Paypal to morbidelli17@yahoo.com. Thanks to WERA, Friction Racing Products, Caliphotography and a special thanks to Tony Serra for making this possible.