MotorcycleUSA.com 600 shootout

MotorcycleUSA.com 600 shootout at Infineon Raceway 4/3/08

PART ONE: 2/20/08

I have seen Ken Hutchison of MotorcycleUSA for the last year and a half at many track days testing various bikes and occasionally we have chatted about tuning idisosyncracies with certain models. Ken thought it would be a good idea to get some help one afternoon with one of his test mules at some point in the future. Lo and behold, so it came to pass………

I spent time putting Ken Hutchison through my Suspension Boot Camp for 3 hours one afternoon late last Fall on the Buell Super TT. With his diligence, good feedback and my interpretive tuning we turned the bike around from a wallowing headshaking handful of a ride into a very competent track tool enabling Ken to hurtle around Thunderhill on Shinko tires (yes, he was flying on it bar to bar with one of Lance Keigwins instructors at full tilt boogie).

Read the first of two articles about this:
http://www.motorcycle-usa.com/Article_Page.aspx?ArticleID=5460

Based on that experience, Ken has invited me to come out to the Infineon event for the 600 shoot out, so this will be a great opportunity and experience.

Having witnessed and closely observed many of these tests over the years, I have been very interested to see how the Factory techs work with the journalists to make the changes they are looking for with the OEM stock suspension on OEM tires in the morning and then further changes due to sticky rubber being fitted for the afternoon sessions. There’s not much time for riders to meet the new bike, evaluate it at a reasonable pace, make suspension adjustments and chassis changes and then pick up the pace. More and more now it seems the stop watch is the deciding factor to many readers and so lap times are dutifully recorded and presented. Given that these bikes will be ridden 99% of the time on the street, the track evaluation might be considered to be crazy if seen as the “be all and end all” criteria as no-one will get to that pace without coming to the track. Fortunately, readers are very savvy and read the whole article to understand what the journalists thought about every aspect of the bike not only on the track, but also via performance reviews during commuting duty and weekend rides and long term test impressions.

In a most unusual step for the magazine world, I will be required to record the way the bike came to me in every aspect and then carefully log the riders weight and all changes made in sequence for that rider to get the bike to handle correctly so that they could really relax, become one with the bike and get a good lap time. I would ultimately translate that into a table and provide that to Ken as an article for MotorcycleUSA, for whom I will be writing this year on a monthly basis.

Who knows what state the bike will come to me? It may have been pulled from the Press Pool, so all manner of riders may have changed the bike around on multiple occasions in search of riding zen/nirvana, so I have no idea what to expect. Mileage, fork oil condition, uncrashed, bolt head condition, brake pad wear, chain and sprocket condition?