The Chronicles of Sled

Well I've done quite a bit of work to this bike over the years, I thought I'd put all my efforts in one place to make it easier to track the progress over the years.

To provide a little background to this, I started racing Buckets seriously at the end of 01 when I raced Super Moto around the Kart tracks and carparks at the bucket meetings.

I'd ridden a few buckets before then and they were all quite hard to get the best out because their chassis let them down. Then I rode an Aprilia RS50 in a 'swaps' race where all the SuperMoto riders drew a number out of a hat and that was the number of the bucket they were to ride. I won that race and the rest as they say is history.

I started with a CB125t that I brought from Bistards dad. The bike still had the cable operated front disk and run on (old) 18" slicks.
In the first race meeting I race this bike I crashed three times, losing the front at moderate lean angles, even at wide open throttle wtf?

So needless to say the 125T chassis quickly ended up in the rubbish and I purchased a complete RG50 rolling chassis, from Bistard himself this time.

Now anybody familiar with RG50's woud know that they're quite a small, narrow little machine. Shoehorning the 125T engine was going to require quite some engineering. And just because that wasn't enough of a challenge I decided 125cc weren't enough so also went about creating the 142cc capacity engine that I still run today.

This was all achieved within the month from the last meeting and I walked into work with a cylinder head and a bare frame on Monday morning. By Sunday morning the bike was ready. I managed to draw a front row grid spot for the first race, mint! The flag dropped and I made the holeshot and stayed in front to take my first ever bucket win! My how things had changed in the space of just one month!


The RG framed CB125T'Cube' in action at the Kaitoke 2 hour race

This bike was very fast compared to the rest of the F4 bikes around at the time, the power to weight ratio was very good and I usually had no problem getting past people on the straights, I used this speed to good effect to win a few more races that year (the highlight being a double race win at Kaitoke).

This machine was fun alright but it did have some funny handling characteristics leading one of the bucket sages to dub it the bucket version of the Aprilia Cube. Power understeer is not something usually associated with buckets but I was regularly exiting corners with the front wheel still pointing at the inside curb.

I wanted something more like the RS 50 I raced and that sublime feeling of peeling into the corners carrying what feels like way too much speed and getting to the apex with one's knee jammed between the side of the fairing and the ground all the while feeling like you could do this all day long around any corner.

The 'Cube' as successfull as it was had to go!

The beam frame trend was well underway by that time in Wellington, with Fi5hy, Bistard using ZXR250 chassis and a few others with GSXR and RGV frames. I was still in the trade back then working at Motorad so opportunities to obtain a better chassis were frequent. As It was Derek McAdam had a ZXR250c chassis under the his deck and not seeing himself using it in the near future donated it to me free of charge! Top bloke, top rider and top mechanic that Derek.

And so the Chronicles of Sled begin...