Unfinished Business
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
UP FRONT
EDITOR'S LETTER
RETURNING TO RACE AT PIKES PEAK
In a career full of career highs, I have to say working on Project 156 last year with Victory and Roland Sands Design to get Don Canet on an American bike to race on America’s mountain ranks among the highest.
Even if we didn’t make the summit at the finish after the bike quit in the final miles, it was, as Canet liked to say, a peak experience.
But there is definitely unfinished business here. So when we talked to Victory about going back to Pikes Peak and making the summit for the 100th anniversary of the race this June 20-26, we were excited to hear the company was interested.
We were even more excited that it would be on a new version of the Victory electric prototype racer used by Lee Johnston to place third in the 2015 Isle of Man TT Zero race.
I got to test Johnston’s bike at a local Colorado racetrack during the Pikes Peak weekend last year and was mighty impressed with the power and handling of the this pure-bred racebike. It showed the kind of stability you’d want at Pikes Peak; suspension was supple and controlled, and a dragstrip run by others later in the week showed the TT bike could run right at 10 seconds and 140-plus mph in the quarter-mile. That’s wicked quick for a bike designed to run at the TT, complete with TT gearing on its single-speed final drive.
Perhaps the best attribute is that, unlike a non-boosted internal-combustion engine, an electric powertrain suffers no power loss as you climb toward the 14,114-foot summit.
The “handlebar rule” at Pikes Peak this year stated that clip-ons were not to be run. Recent deaths during race week occurred with factory-equipped clipon-style motorcycles, and in an effort to continue to have bikes race at the event, organizers brought back the “handlebar” restriction. The Victory electric prototype is set up like a muscle standard, so we are set.
In Canet’s debut year on the mountain in 2014, a tubular handlebar did him right: Third place overall on a Ducati Multistrada 1200 is mighty impressive on a treacherous mountain course with 156 turns he’d never seen before that effort.
In fact, I’ve always been impressed with our road test editor’s skills on a motorcycle, but perhaps the finest emblem of the kind of precise thinker and racer mind-set I’ve ever seen was when he came in to my office with a track map of the Pikes Peak race course after his first encounter with the full course. Many corners are named already, but he’d given names to every single one of them.
He handed me the map.
“Go ahead,” he said, with a mildly challenging tone. “What?”
“Ask me about any corner.”
So I picked one randomly.
He described the previous corners, the pavement surface, camber, where he should apex and why, which gear he’d be in, what the exit was like, and how it related to the next corner.
He did this for every corner I asked him about. So I just kept asking. The level of detail was shocking, but it is this kind of vision, memory, and thinking that separates riders from real racers.
Brammo’s Brian Wissman is the director of product development and the man who oversaw the design of the bike and the successful 2015 TT effort. “I’m truly excited for June to come,” Wissman said. “I think it’s going to be something that is really fun and something I’m going to remember for the rest of my life.”
That holds true for all of us. Visit cycleworld.com to check out the testing and development video and stories.
MARK HOYER
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
THIS MONTH'S STATS
0.01 SECOND SEPARATING THE YZF-R1S AND R1M QUARTER-MILE TIMES
PRICE DIFFERENCE FOR ABOVE BIKES
priceless PERFORMANCE OF THE ELECTRONIC ÖHLINS SUSPENSION OFFERED ON THE R1M
