True Production Racing series

[Shaun]

I sure did. We struggled a bit this year in British Superstock600 just lucky we had a lot of outside help. The Yamaha's are definately the bike to beat at the moment. But we shall see what the new models bring.

so why did the TRIUMPH win then?

[Scoot_6R]

so why did the TRIUMPH win then?

That was Supersport not Superstock which my team was in. Good old Glen cleaned up in Supersport he was awesome to watch. He's got a good ride next year on a superbike for HM Plant with Josh Brookes

[Scoot_6R]

Really? You've probably never heard of me because I don't claim to be a 'somebody'...and when I was road racing...you were probably still sucking your mums tit. But I will tell you this much...I used to get around a race track alright. Still can. No track days required.

My point exactly

[Crasherfromwayback]

My point exactly

Yep...thought it was past your bed time.

[slowpoke]

But I would actually prefer to race a stock machine against other stock machines. Limited setup twiddling, limited power tuning, just motorcycles and riders, and the riders who really shine get to consider moving to the classes that involve more dedication and funding, while the others get a straightforward chance at participating in the best fun you can have with your pants on.

Pro twin fulfills those requirements. Cheaper than limited development 6 hundies or thou's too.

No. It's about who's a clever bastard wot can tweak the bejeezuz out of his bike AND herd it around the track better than everyone else. HIS bike.


Or it orta be.

That's why it's the best team that usually wins, not just the fastest bike or best rider. Just ask Kenny Roberts Jnr, or Jerry Burgess.

And if you can't at least handle the mech basics you've got no right being there, clear the grid for a real racer.

Dunno about that. D'ya reckon casey Stoner knows much about building a Ducati D16? Todays competition is all about specialised knowledge with specialists knowing all there is to know about their particular sphere of interest and feck all about anything else.

It's along time since World Championship riders got their hands dirty. With 16-17 year olds riding 125GP bikes in World Championships there's precious little time for learning the spannering side of things other than as an interested observer.

On the local stage it's a little different, by necessity rather than choice. But rebuilding an old Gold Star BSA, GS1000 or even an RGV250 is a bit different to rebuilding an R6. For example I had the cams reground on my old R1 and with hard-facing (which has to be ground off, cams reprofiled, then reapplied) along with 20 valves (8 of which were Titanium, how do you do a 3 or 5 angle valve job on those fuckers? Ti work hardens...) involved this is not a job for the faint hearted. Then there is the "you get what you pay for argument". With over $2000 just for the valves on the R1 (valve recession problem) I wouldn't be too keen on risking a backyard job and catastrophic failure at 270km/hr. Ya get what ya pay for unless you can guarantee a good job by doing it yourself which is increasingly difficult to do.

A completely open class is the only type of comp motorsport I'd have any chance of being vaguely competitive in.

F3 is pretty open for some "outside the box" thinking. Unfortunately we don't see that much of it.

In general times have changed and we demand excellence rather than the "have a go" attitude of old. "Jack of all trades master of none" just isn't good enough. Raising the needles in your carbs, and slipping a few coins in the fork legs before giving it a squirt up the road was standard practice, compared now to replacing the shim stack in your cartridges and tuning the Power Commander on the dyno. The skills/equipment to do that cost money.

Pops Yoshimura, Mr Moriwaki and co have got a lot to answer for.

[cowpoos]

Limited setup twiddling, limited power tuning, just motorcycles and riders, and the riders who really shine get to consider moving to the classes that involve more dedication and funding, while the others get a straightforward chance at participating in the best fun you can have with your pants on.

Because, in the end, isn't that what it's all about?

Your still a twit Dan...give yourself a few years in racing...and you will have a better formed opinion!!

[Ocean1]

That's why it's the best team that usually wins, not just the fastest bike or best rider. Just ask Kenny Roberts Jnr, or Jerry Burgess.

Yeah. Americas Cup’s a classic example, you can have the biggest budget and the best staff available and still fall well short. Team dynamics is a fascinating black art.

Dunno about that. D'ya reckon casey Stoner knows much about building a Ducati D16? Todays competition is all about specialised knowledge with specialists knowing all there is to know about their particular sphere of interest and feck all about anything else.

It's along time since World Championship riders got their hands dirty. With 16-17 year olds riding 125GP bikes in World Championships there's precious little time for learning the spannering side of things other than as an interested observer.

Amazing rider, right at the pointy end of the bell curve WRT that very esoteric set of physical motor skills. I'm jealous as fuck. So, given your above comment about teams how do you reconcile Stoner and Co’s effective remuneration and status compared with them other dudes? What’s the name of they guy that designed his frame, the one that dyno’s his engines?

See, yer impartial engineer might look on a very good rider as a good investment in much the same way any employer values highly skilled labour... a necessary component of a complex logistics puzzle. The marketing boys, now, they’re all about fiscal strategy, the team and technology is merely an overhead. To be optimized to be sure, but minimized nonetheless.

On the local stage it's a little different, by necessity rather than choice. But rebuilding an old Gold Star BSA, GS1000 or even an RGV250 is a bit different to rebuilding an R6. For example I had the cams reground on my old R1 and with hard-facing (which has to be ground off, cams reprofiled, then reapplied) along with 20 valves (8 of which were Titanium, how do you do a 3 or 5 angle valve job on those fuckers? Ti work hardens...) involved this is not a job for the faint hearted. Then there is the "you get what you pay for argument". With over $2000 just for the valves on the R1 (valve recession problem) I wouldn't be too keen on risking a backyard job and catastrophic failure at 270km/hr. Ya get what ya pay for unless you can guarantee a good job by doing it yourself which is increasingly difficult to do.

All true, the days are gone where you could near double the power available from yer average engine with a bit of nous and not much cash. However, the less rules there are the more room there is to innovate, minimize the cost/return thing. Why piss around with huge revs and the associated costs if there’s no capacity limit? No constraint on forced induction, fuel etc.

F3 is pretty open for some "outside the box" thinking. Unfortunately we don't see that much of it.

In general times have changed and we demand excellence rather than the "have a go" attitude of old. "Jack of all trades master of none" just isn't good enough. Raising the needles in your carbs, and slipping a few coins in the fork legs before giving it a squirt up the road was standard practice, compared now to replacing the shim stack in your cartridges and tuning the Power Commander on the dyno. The skills/equipment to do that cost money.

Pops Yoshimura, Mr Moriwaki and co have got a lot to answer for.

Yeah. I’m just an old coont wot misses the days when you did it yourself or you did without. There’s undeniable glory in a small bunch of enthusiasts achieving unlikely results using naught but imagination and long nights. Shame we can’t formulate a class that gives it life eh?

To a techie production bikes are boring, they’re designed by the simple expediency of using last year’s bike as a template, this year’s competition performance numbers as a target and adding bling. A fashion show. The narrow focused incremental improvements allowable in limited class racing of them is no better. Expensive, if highly skilled tuning to make them 1% better than the rest. Yawn.

Almost all of the big improvement steps in performance come from fundamental changes in design concepts, all such improvements are the result of one man or a very small team. That definitely doesn’t describe either modern production bikes, or the racing of ‘em.


AM I allowed to use peroxide in F3?

[cowpoos]

To a techie production bikes are boring, they’re designed by the simple expediency of using last year’s bike as a template, this year’s competition performance numbers as a target and adding bling. A fashion show. The narrow focused incremental improvements allowable in limited class racing of them is no better. Expensive, if highly skilled tuning to make them 1% better than the rest. Yawn.

Crap...How are they boring...they are the pinnicle of modern engineering!! fuck sake...I don't even know how you could state that???

Comments like that make you sound a bit daft dude!!

Flowing high volumes of air through a engine across the rev range is a mind boogling excersise of possibilities...you could still come up with something very uniqe...like rotary valve head on a ZXR400?? would make some healthy horsepower if set up well!! and reliable!!

[Ocean1]

Crap...How are they boring...they are the pinnicle of modern engineering!! fuck sake...I don't even know how you could state that???

Thought that'd get a bite. You're sorta right, they're the pinical of marketable quality, mass producable technology. Give the same design objective to a genuine blue-sky development team without those constraints and you'd get a bike that'd make a production sports bike look distinctly agricultural. Honest. It's what I do.

Flowing high volumes of air through a engine across the rev range is a mind boogling excersise of possibilities...you could still come up with something very uniqe...like rotary valve head on a ZXR400?? would make some healthy horsepower if set up well!! and reliable!!

Right again, extreme velocity flow dynamics is an excercise in pure applied physics and fucking hard experimental work. I've got no idea what the rules are dude, would a rotary valve be legal? Not a new idea, but every now and then old, marginal concepts merge with new materials, and magic happens.

[slowpoke]

Give the same design objective to a genuine blue-sky development team without those constraints and you'd get a bike that'd make a production sports bike look distinctly agricultural. Honest. It's what I do.

Hmmm, I reckon you'd get something like the Elf bike, or the upside down NSR (exhausts over the top, tank in the belly) that is theoretically better but practically doesn't quite work. As per the mega dollar MV's and Ducati's which also make mass produced stuff look agricultural they don't work any better than their common or garden variety cousins, despite all the lovely billet and carbon fibre bits

Bikes are where they are 'cos they have evolved incrementally over time, following the path that works, almost like nature. But if you'd told someone in 1970 that they would ride a bike that produced 160hp, weighed 170kg's and was a pussy cat to ride they would've laughed at you.

[Ocean1]

Hmmm, I reckon you'd get something like the Elf bike, or the upside down NSR (exhausts over the top, tank in the belly) that is theoretically better but practically doesn't quite work. As per the mega dollar MV's and Ducati's which also make mass produced stuff look agricultural they don't work any better than their common or garden variety cousins, despite all the lovely billet and carbon fibre bits.

Elf eh? will look. I agree, those mega dollar MVs and Ducatis aren't significantly better than the cookie-cutter Jap bikes. You're also right about the evolution aspect of production driven product development. One of the advantages of that type of top-down process is that you can eventually develop a feature you're extremely unlikely to get from any other method, the results can be very counter-intuitive.

Bikes are where they are 'cos they have evolved incrementally over time, following the path that works, almost like nature. But if you'd told someone in 1970 that they would ride a bike that produced 160hp, weighed 170kg's and was a pussy cat to ride they would've laughed at you.

Some of those changes came in fairly big lumps dude. Disk brakes, for example did not gradually morf from drums. You rarely see fundamental paradigm changes from evolutionary design, it usually takes some sort of radical conceptual departure from traditional thinking, and that’s simply not how manufacturing product development works. Disks again: several people thought about the advantages of full-rim-diameter disks before Mr Buell, but he turned the idea inside out, and the result works bloody well.

Many a privateer has embarrassed the factory offerings precisely because he’s less blinded by the sheer weight of historical data that drives incremental development protocols. They usually do that on a fraction of the budget, and I love it.

[Ozzy27]

Crap...How are they boring...they are the pinnicle of modern engineering!! fuck sake...I don't even know how you could state that???

Comments like that make you sound a bit daft dude!!

Flowing high volumes of air through a engine across the rev range is a mind boogling excersise of possibilities...you could still come up with something very uniqe...like rotary valve head on a ZXR400?? would make some healthy horsepower if set up well!! and reliable!!

Sorry Man prody classes are boring for a guy who lives and breathes bike tech stuff. I miss not having data recording to look over. I also like to try different stuff (ozzy 450) because if you just do the same as everyone else all you have is what everyone else has!!
Rotary Valves dont work!! Even though they theroatically flow more air than a poppet valve when they are fully open the fact is they are only in that state for about 0.1% of the time. If you map the flow through a poppet valve and a rotary valve through a full operation cycle the poppet is a long way better!
A lot of time has been spent looking into it and computer simulation. There are a few articles on it in some specalist motorsport magazines.


To the point of this thread. We can make up what ever rules we want. Unless they are enforceable they are a waste of time. I can think of bikes every year for at least the last 10 that have obvious breaches of the rules but very little has been done. Part of this is that the technology has out grown the rule enforcers.
And it wont be any better this year as the few people that have the knowledge that could enforce the rules are either directly involved or have no desire to get involved.

As to production classes. Almost all other 1st world countries have some sort of feeder class or Classes that are very close to stock normally at 2nd teir level and quite often single make. Off the top of my head most run revalved or std suspension and hard (sc2 front Sc3 rear) spec tyres. A lot have age or skill restrictions(c or d grade) to make sure they stay as feeder classes and keep burglars out.

The best outcome for NZ I believe is a superstock class run as a class with in the main Supersport class probally with a control tyre. And the top 3 place getters from the previous year or podium finshers from Supersport or superbike can not run in the class.(we are too small for age limits). Std shocks, Revalved forks, Muffler,520 chain.
Then we need to get a dyno to the tracks. It is the easiest way to check bikes.

[Ocean1]

Then we need to get a dyno to the tracks. It is the easiest way to check bikes.

How repeatable are dynos, results from one to another?

Why not just restrict fuel quantity, simpler?

[Shaun P]

To the point of this thread. We can make up what ever rules we want. Unless they are enforceable they are a waste of time. I can think of bikes every year for at least the last 10 that have obvious breaches of the rules but very little has been done. Part of this is that the technology has out grown the rule enforcers.
And it wont be any better this year as the few people that have the knowledge that could enforce the rules are either directly involved or have no desire to get involved.

As to production classes. Almost all other 1st world countries have some sort of feeder class or Classes that are very close to stock normally at 2nd teir level and quite often single make. Off the top of my head most run revalved or std suspension and hard (sc2 front Sc3 rear) spec tyres. A lot have age or skill restrictions(c or d grade) to make sure they stay as feeder classes and keep burglars out.

The best outcome for NZ I believe is a superstock class run as a class with in the main Supersport class probally with a control tyre. And the top 3 place getters from the previous year or podium finshers from Supersport or superbike can not run in the class.(we are too small for age limits). Std shocks, Revalved forks, Muffler,520 chain.
Then we need to get a dyno to the tracks. It is the easiest way to check bikes.

Well put - in a nutshell

[Shaun P]

How repeatable are dynos, results from one to another?

Why not just restrict fuel quantity, simpler?

1 Quite good on same dyno same day tyre etc

2 simpler?...no