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27-03-10, 02:50 PM

Quote:

Ian Newton, Jeremy McWilliams and seven
former Aprilia Superteens (well actually six
ex-teenies plus “Will Simoncelli”) took a pair
of the new RRV450s to the Spanish circuit of
Almeria with one mission in mind; to destroy
as many tyres in the allocated time as
possible. Tyre consumption is one of the
biggest costs involved in modern racing and
the ability to keep some sort of lid on the
number of tyres used in the course of a
season could make the difference between
being able to finish a championship and
having to quit your championship assault early.
Of course, the other point of the exercise for the 7 young hopefuls (Will Hodgson, Ben Gautrey, Connor Tagg, Liam Shellcock, Acea Webb, Phil Canessa and Danny Murphy) was to see just how good this stunning little bike really was. Everyone who has seen it in the flesh agrees that it is an absolutely gorgeous piece of kit, but unless it could actually cut the mustard on track it would be no more than a beautiful ornament.

With just two bikes and seven riders, an “Open Pit Lane” policy was adopted exclusively for the RRVs. As soon as one rider pulled into pit lane another was ready to jump aboard and resume testing. Quick tyre, fuel and safety checks took less than 3 minutes and the, still hot, bikes shot out of pit lane to carry on taking whatever punishment was being dished out to them.
By mid-afternoon on the first day Ian was getting concerned “The tyres just aren’t wearing like we should be expecting them to” he said to me on the phone from the circuit. The whole project had been going so well right since we first started it a year ago that we’d been waiting for something bad to crop up and I feared the worst. Was this going to be that problem?
Well no actually. “There just isn’t any sign of wear on them at all and the bikes have already done over 100 laps each!” my surprise must have been evident from my silence, as we’d been warned by Pat Walsh & Phil Plater at Dunlop that Almeria just eats tyres. Maybe they just aren’t going fast enough, I thought. However, it transpired that 4 of the riders were lapping faster than a very well known motorcycle journalist/racer (name deleted to protect the guilty!) on a top notch Superstock specification Fireblade at the same test! At the end of day one, the bikes had done 128 & 124 laps respectively and still not worn out their first set of tyres.

Thinking that it was best not to push his luck too much, Ian put new tyres on for day 2 anyway and testing resumed. Tyre wear was just as good as on day 1 with all riders improving their times and getting quicker with each session. Then, late on in the day, the inevitable happened. Young Liam Shellcock was following Eugene Laverty and had just gone 0.8 seconds under his own personal best time and was really pushing on, when he missed his braking point and down he went. The damage looked to be just cosmetic at first, but upon re-starting the engine it became clear that there was something amiss. Not being able to discover anything physically wrong, Ben took the bike out again to test it. After 20 minutes or so (mechanical sympathy anyone?) it became obvious that the bike was losing power. Further investigation revealed that an oil seal had gone and allowed the engine and gearbox oils to mix. With no spares available at the track it was game over for bike #1 on this test. On the bright side, they’d clocked up another 119 laps for one bike and 93 (and a half) for the other and still the tyres weren’t really due for change.

Day 3 was going to be a tough day for the remaining bike, a straight 8 hours of abuse was heading swiftly in its direction and with Jeremy McWilliams, Gino Rea and Scott Redding all queuing up to give it a thrashing, it was in for a really hard time. Given that the donor bike for this machine already had over 4,000 miles on the clock, the chances of it making it to sunset were looking slim. The boys were difficult to prise off the bike though and our star riders were all hanging around waiting for their chance to sneak a ride on it, like a bunch of college lads lurking outside the local nurses dormitory.
Eventually Jeremy got to try it and (when Newt had eventually managed to get him off the track and back into the pit lane) everyone gathered around for his verdict….. “That, is the best handling bike I’ve ridden in the whole test and that includes all of the new Moto 2 GP bikes. It’s absolutely awesome, can you sort me out with a race on one?” was his breathless comment. So, £100,000.- Moto2-GP bike or converted ‘motard at less than 8% of that?
Does the concept work………… Nuff said?

http://www.apriliachallenge.moonfrui...0gp/4538882001

I suppose all that 125/250 knowledge had to go somewhere!!! Wow, I got a feeling this is what the Moto2 class "should" have been? Maybe the 125 replacement?