Thursday 7 March 2019

Guilty as charged

It feels like I've abandoned my poor old blog in favor of Facebook, but the 2 things are completely different creatures and Facebook is rubbish unless your already on there yourself.
So ..... I've decided to do an update seeing as how a great deal has been going on and the 2019 race season is just over the horizon.
The big 2v engine turned out to be a pain to get the valve timing right, and i wasted a couple of meetings not having it right and it wasn't until the National finals in September that i finally made it down the track. It ran ok too with a very soft setup it managed a couple of messy 7's, the problem with both runs was tagging the rev limiter hard in each gear. The old engine ran out of steam at 10,500rpm, and i set the limiter at 10,800, but this engine just want to rev so i kept turning it up, but still tagging the limiter which unloads the bike and makes it horrid to ride.
And that's how the season ended really, just scratched the surface ....

Over the winter i did a lot of work on the back half Suzuki Hayabusa Project i started for Kev Osman 2 years ago. Finished all the Bronze wending and fixed tabs and brackets on wherever they were needed, made the sprocket support plate and air shifter mounts and basically got it ready for Kev to take it away and do the finishing touches. The end result looks pretty good, and Kev has got it ready for testing in a couple of weeks time, and it'll be interesting to see how it goes.

Back in January our plans for the 2019 season changed quite radically, when received an offer I couldn't refuse - to ride something rather special in the form of the quickest and fastest blown methanol bike in the world - Bob Brooks', beautifully engineered Yellow metal racing bike. Bob has had his very unique bike for sale for a while now and rather than leave it parked up any longer he very kindly asked me if I'd like to run it this season, and of course I jumped at the chance!
The bike will still be for sale throughout the season and hopefully someone will see it run and fancy the experience themselves.
Bob and the Yellow metal team will be helping us run the bike for part of the season as there will be a lot for our team to take in before we can go it alone. The only similarity between our bike and Bob's is the number of wheels! I really fancy the challenge too, we have run a nitrous GSX for a long time now and this is just something completely different so it'll be fun learning something new.

I didn't want my own bike to sit being unused either, so i decided to ask my friend Dave Batcheler if he would ride it alongside me in Funnybike. Dave jumped at the chance and has now been and collected my bike, as I've no room for 2 bikes in the van, or in my shed either as Bob's bike is massive. It does mean that at some point I'll more than likely end up racing against my own bike - an interesting concept!

Bob is bringing the bike up to me this weekend and going over all the various bits and pieces. I may need to take a lot of notes!



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