December 2001

After thinking a great deal about what to do for the 2002 season my first priority was to work out a budget and then find a bike. Despite a few problems with my bank balance I needed to cut my racing budget for the year. With this in mind I decided to buy an ex-Junior SuperStock GSXR600K1. The GSXR600K1 seemed to be the bike of choice in 2001 and even allowing for the restrictive Junior SuperStock regulations, i.e. an end can and not much else, many bikes were already putting out 102 bhp.

Not only were the bikes fairly cheap but I could be sure of the condition as the engines had to be standard. On top of that they would already be fully Ohlins equipped and have all the other race gear you could need, e.g. clip ons, rear sets, steering dampers, etc. I then started thinking about the cost of a mild tune, i.e. a full race system and a Power Commander. This should be good for 107 bhp but then my imagination started getting ahead of me. A quick call to Paul Denning who runs the Crescent Suzuki race team showed that for a bit more money I could get some nice Yoshimura engine internals and a blue print.

At this point I started looking at my budget again. I also kept having this nagging doubts about reliability and usability with such a tune. Normally I wouldn't have been too worried about such things but I had agreed to do some instructing for the Motorcycle Folly in 2002 and wanted a bike that could cope with being in use all day without worrying about whether the battery needed charging or the amount of load I was putting on the engine.

As my budget was well and truly blown I figured I might as well take it one step further. A number of the friends who initially talked me in to racing and had supported me at the start had decided to race in the Super Twins championship, a couple on Aprilia Mille RSV-Rs and another on a Ducati 916. I decided that my budget couldn't stretch to a recent 996 and my mechanical knowledge certainly couldn't cope with an older 916 so I started looking at the Aprilia Mille.

I guess I got carried away with all the nice gold Ohlins bits and the blue aluminium OZ wheels so I set about tracking one down. Aprilia do some great deals if you are running in the MRO Aprilia Mille Challenge but I couldn't stretch to the cost of a new bike. I finally managed to track down a second hand 2001 race bike in Northern Ireland. Turned out to be the very machine that won the 2001 Challenge championship so, to cut a long story short, I bought it!

January 2002

Now that I had secured a bike I needed to work out which championships I was going to run it in and also where I was going to get a spare set of wheels from. Bemsee have decided to run a Nationwide and a Southern Championship for 2002. As I really like some of the circuits in Northern England and they also race on the Brands Hatch GP circuit I decided that the Nationwide Championship was the one to go for. I also decided to enter a few of the MRO Aprilia Mille Challenge rounds where they coincide with some of the other rounds I am doing.

That was the easy part. It turns out the blue OZ wheels are as rare as a very rare thing and after several weeks of phone calls I eventually managed to source some from a breakers. Having to pay eleven hundred quid for a pair of wheels with disks has really killed my budget but if you are going to out you may as well do it in style ;-)

Eventually collected the bike on a windswept Saturday at the end of January and took it straight down to Cambridge Motorcycles who are going to a good service, stick some crash bobbins on and generally tidy things up. Spike who does most of the spannering and runs the dyno knows a things or two about bikes as he runs his own drag bike as well as doing the tuning on his own Mille RSV-R. Shame I can't tune much due to the Aprilia Challenge rules ;-(

What's Next?

Need to buy a few bits and pieces for the bike, such as paddock stands, tyres, etc. Hopefully I get these at the Alexandra Palace Bike show. Will also get to pick the bike up and see how the dyno chart compares to my old CBR600 ;-) I suspect it will actually make about the same peak power at the back wheel but the curves should be significantly different.

As I've only ever ridden, or raced for that matter, Honda CBR600s I'm off to do some testing at Nogaro in February. It will be my first introduction to riding a twin cylinder bike and also give me a chance to get used to a road pattern gear shift again - It's rather difficult, and expensive, to convert the Aprilia shift to the race pattern that I got used to last year.