Been a while guys. Still our SDR is in shambles, still we are racing the RC8R. Competition is amped up now though, no way could we compete on our old SDR today. Word has it Shmrz's Ducati world superbike engine builder from 2011 now builds motors for our competition. Can you say 16/1 compression ratio? Must take a steam roller to start that thing. Anyway we just had round 3, it was an exciting race. Normally I wouldn't share a link to the story but this time we have video as well, so maybe you'd enjoy it. I'm sorry we only had one camera, mounted backwards, but I edited in the live feed that Axial Video now broadcasts over the internet, so it's a lot more interesting. We missed most of our Saturday practice sessions due to our clutch, so Sunday we had to race with basically no knowledge about the Suter clutch that we installed Saturday night. To be safe I started last on the grid, instead of from our proper position. Didn't want to stall it and get piled into. This threw off the race commentators for the first lap but they caught on eventually. As you will see we are out-gunned pretty heavy out there, our RC8R is basically stock. We tried to order superbike parts from KTM but they had none. Still we are working on plan-b solutions but we've got nothing yet. So it's ride your ass off or die. Scroll down the page to go directly to the video if you prefer.

Enjoy brothers

Good to hear you are still out there GoGo. Good luck with the rest of the season

nice to see you are still at it

Interesting post race event!

Yea the post race event - what a way to add insult to injury right? Guy almost cried when he came by to apologize. I told him we're all good, shit happens.

Missed the race reports.

As always the underdog

Good luck and keep us posted please.

Always good to hear from you GoGo. Please do keep us posted and all the best eh.

That was close at the end.

How much quicker are you on this than you were on the SD?

mid 1:54s on the SDR, flat 1:51s on the RC8R. We're off so far this year though. Setup, tuning, and far too little track time. My goal on this bike this year is 49s, with the motor stock. Like playstation, they'll have to be perfect laps. Especially through the super fast stuff. 49s are possible on a superbike kitted RC8R, I've seen it done. Closest we've come yet is a 50.4, with a thin head gasket and adjusted cam timing.

That's interesting and illustrates diminishing returns really well. You are clearly a talented rider so if we are assuming that you're squeezing most of the juice out of both then a more or less dedicated track bike with at least 30+ HP and a much more modern design than the SDR is just 3% faster at the edge of the envelope. I know tiny fractions count in a race but if just goes to show how hard those last few seconds on a lap time are to find!

Mind you for most people most of the time the limiting factor is the wobbly tosser perched on top and not the bike. Certainly is in my case anyway

Good luck gogo

That's an interesting point. I like it. Here's another that boggles my mind regularly. Sometimes I come in bitching about how the dam bike is complete crap. Worst bike ever. Can't turn, wobbles everywhere, runs wide, no confidence, rear spins, front pushes, etc. etc. etc. The guys look up at me from the time sheets like I am crazy. Maybe we're 1.5 off the pace. "How can the bike be a complete pile of crap and still be that close?" I've thought about this for ages and finally I get it. One bike is actually two I think. The first bike is the one you ride all the way up to the end of total traction. The second bike is the one you ride after that. Think of it like a car with under-steer. Slow in the dry and it's just like any car. Faster in the rain and you drive straight off a cliff. Racing, to me anyway, is like driving in the rain. That zone you get to, where there is no more edge - everything gets blurry, is where you work so hard to get to, and try so hard to maintain. All that triple clamp/ride height/valving work/swingarm bracing development we went through on our SDR was to get the bike working better in the blurry zone. Straight up and down, slowed down a bit, who knows maybe we made the bike worse. I don't think so, but I didn't ride it there so I don't really know. In the beginning I rode that thing past the edge and crashed it all over the place. After the work it loved being there.

The last race we ran at Thunderhill on the SDR we actually took the hole-shot in Formula 1, and led the first lap for a bit. Must have been 30 capable 600 and 750s behind us. Some were dominantly fast with multi-time champs on them. Didn't matter, we were all in the same zone. Then in Open Twins, after 90% of the first lap, our SDR's front tyre was just half a wheel off two of the lead bikes in Formula Pacific that year. Then of course we hit the straights and it all went to hell but whatever. Point is at full lean, going in on the brakes, the initial drive out of turns - our SDR was one proud bike to ride. Just went to shit straight up and down, and you're not really straight up and down that much. So 3%, that makes complete sense to me. And you are right, the last seconds are the hardest. It's just like Richter Scale in how it multiplies itself more and more the higher you go. The faster you go, the harder it gets to improve. The littlest things get really big.