450 Spec Class - Super Singles

[sky_blue]

These are sweet--like dirtbikes disguised as roadracers.

(Am I stupid to never have noticed these before?)

http://www.450moto.com/


**thanks Ryan at Fort Collins Motorsports for pointing them out to me!

[Bueller]

It is fairly new concept, IIRC WERA is starting this class next year. There has been talk of it on the MRA Board for the last month or so.

[lovinCO]

Jen--Colorado Class bike! Bart was talking about these when we were down at Faster. :)

[dillinger09]

i think they took em out on laguna as an intermission type show during the motogp round. looks like a ton of fun and cheap to boot:hump:

[Bueller]

i think they took em out on laguna as an intermission type show during the motogp round. looks like a ton of fun and cheap to boot:hump:
I wouldn't say cheap just yet, you can find a nicely prepped supersport 600 cheaper than what it will take to build one of these.

[dillinger09]

i think the class itself will be far more restricted on what can be done, so you dont have to spend your life savings in order to compete. as for converting the bikes into roadracers, your right, that will be a bit pricey..................i still want one. think, you could just throw some plastics on your sumo and tear up pueblo, strip it down and head to IMI

[dillinger09]

http://www.roadracerx.com/article.php?article_id=454 (http://www.roadracerx.com/article.php?article_id=454)

Between the Races: Gavin Trippe
August 1, 2007
By CJ

At the recent Red Bull USGP, one of the biggest underground hits was a trio of minimalist road race machines on display in the Yamaha Marketplace. The bikes looked similar to 250cc two-stroke racers, but were actually based on 450cc single-cylinder four-stroke dirt bikes—both motocrossers and off-roaders. The man behind the experimental motorcycles is none other than Gavin Trippe—the inventor of Supermoto and a respected race promoter—and we talked with him last week to find out what he has planned.


RRX: Tell me what this project is all about.
Gavin Trippe: The 450 is really the workhorse engine of everything—motocross, off-road, Supermoto, and the rest of it. At Troy Lee’s shop one day, we had a bare frame sitting on a block. We tilted the whole thing forward and realized that you could actually turn it into a road racer, but the challenge was to see how many standard parts you could use. The Honda has been track-tested. It has high corner speed, and it really handles like a road racer, yet there’s no cutting, no welding, and it uses a standard CRF450X frame, sub-frame and swingarm. Even what looks like a road race gas tank is actually a cover—the motocross gas tank is underneath. The idea is to create something that has a lot of parts available, and that’s not brand-specific. Because of where these motocross bikes started life, they’ve been hammered and tested, and all the pivot points are all within half an inch of each other [from brand to brand].

But you also had other brands at Laguna.
We built the prototype and then we put together a Kawasaki, which is a motocross bike. Then we built the Yamaha, which is a WR450F with an electric starter, like the Honda. We’ve run it pretty much across the board and build them as road racers. At Laguna, the idea was to break cover on these and gauge the interest, and it was pretty much overwhelming. Guys were saying they wanted to take one to a track day, and they wanted to know how much it costs to build one. The idea is that it was a proof of concept, and before the Jeannie gets out of the bottle, we want to write a set of hard-parameter rules, because you don’t need a guy buying an RS250 road racer for 50 grand, throwing away the engine, and putting a 450 motor in it. That would be like with dirt track; everyone loved the idea of 450 dirt trackers, but they left the frame option, so now they’re having to buy $12,000 frames.

Who did the actual work?
I came up with the idea, Troy loved it and came up with a bike, and then Roland Sands did the design and fabrication as we worked through it. We track-tested it out on the Streets of Willow, and it works. Obviously, there’s some fine-tuning, but it actually runs like a road racer. People worry about the fact that it wasn’t designed for road racing, but a lot of stuff wasn’t made to do what it ended up doing [laughs]. My read on that was, If Johnny Campbell can go from one end of Baja to the other in 24 hours—pinned on a 450—then it can survive this. The gear ratios aren’t perfect, and the engines weren’t built to road race, but Supermoto bikes put out about 60 horsepower. Actually, the first time I sort of thought about it was when I saw two guys on KTMs at Mid-Ohio Vintage Days, running around there. God, they were up in the first five! Mitch Hansen, who runs KTM’s Supermoto team, said, “Yeah, a couple guys in my shop are using their Supermoto bikes in road racing, and they have thirty hours in their motors.

What all do you change on the bike?
We changed the triple clamps. The Yamaha has R6 forks on it, with Ohlins inserts. The KX has Kawasaki 600 forks, and the Honda actually has road race Ohlins forks on it. The trick is to make it [mandatory] to keep the standard swingarm, because then it’s the same for everybody. Ohlins built us a spec shock with about four inches of travel, and it really works well—that’s on all three of them. Obviously, we had to build all the fairings, the brackets, and the rear-sets. It’s sort of like we’ve developed a kit for it, and really, if there’s a good healthy class for this, you could buy a used WR for four grand and probably build yourself a bike for under ten. Obviously, if you used a brand-new bike and all the trick stuff, it’s ten to fifteen, but even if you spend all the money you can, we’re going to have a weight limit of about 240 pounds, so that gets rid of all the titanium axels and carbon fiber. Ultimately, we want to have a black-box control for rpm, so that people don’t just build hand-grenade engines. It could be a perfect dyno class of about 58 horsepower. You could deliver a series of black boxes to people, and that takes care of just about everything. The purpose is, instead of seeing who can build the fastest motorcycle, to create a test of rider. You can’t buy the right wrist. We’ve got Supermoto wheels and Brembo Supermoto brakes, but that’s another thing: we may just limit it to a single disc on the front.

So mods are very limited.
There’s enough wiggle-room to make it interesting to build a bike, and ultimately, my idea is this could be a huge contingency class, because it’s not manufacturer-specific. I’d like to see—if it evolves to where I have a vision of it—where we even spec the fairing as to where the numbers go, the sort of color scheme, where the manufacturer logo goes, but still leave enough space to put their individual sponsors on.

How do you see this class developing?
I think it would be a club-day bike, but I think there’s definitely a national series that could be developed out of it. I’m a strong proponent of going back to capacity-class racing—125s, 450, 600, 1000—where they’re different speeds, different styles. The good news is the Red Bull AMA Rookies Cup. When we started doing this, people thought we were trying to derail the 125s, and I said, “No, 125s are great if you’re 13 and 5-foot-2, but the average American kid can’t fit on them.” Frankie Garcia, ran in the X Games last year when he was 15, and he’s now WERA racing. They had to build him a 600, and he really doesn’t belong on a 600. Not to demean 600s, but a 16-year-old really shouldn’t be starting life on one. And because of the reciprocal weight, a 600 self-destructs in a crash. A class like this would get the basics down; it’s perfect. I think it’s got a lot of validity, purely because it helps you learn to road race—sorting out corner speed, braking and exits. It isn’t going to blow past a 250 pure road racer, but it’s going to be highly competitive; it gets the basics down, and it’s probably an easier jump to four-cylinder racing.

What’s the next step?
We put a little blog at www.450moto.com (http://www.450moto.com/), just to gauge response. The AMA and WERA, they’re all very aware of this, but like most things in this world, now that there’s a distinct level of interest, it will definitely go somewhere if we put together the right package and rules. The Europeans are over there looking at the same sort of thing. there’s all these discussions—“Do we do 650 twins? What do we do?” These aren’t totally the answer, but I think single-cylinder 450 racing—as a capacity class—is an idea across the board that has a lot of recognition and sales connections and all the rest of it. it becomes a sort of de-facto class. I already know that somebody’s building a 450 single racing-spec engine, based on MotoGP technology, without any electronics. A single-cylinder 450 with a cassette-type gearbox—a pure road race engine that’s fuel-injected—is about 80 to 85 horsepower. You put that in a MotoGP frame, and it would be the absolute answer to the issues they’re having with 125s and 250s. It would be almost as fast as a 250, and it would be a lot faster than a 125—and it would have more connectivity to four-stroke racing, whether it’s Superbike or MotoGP. I think 450 single racing—whether its pure road racing or spec-class—is a sort of de facto capacity.

[BlueDevil]

If this came to be here in MRA think Id have to sell off the R6

[jsears1864]

Before you get too hyped, these engines are going to need frequent rebuilds and 450cc 4-stroke singles aren't that cheap to rebuild. just my 2 cents.

[Clarkie]

A lot of people know abotu the 4 versions that ran at Laguna, not many people heard about how bad the bikes ran or teh other issues they had, oh well

[N1KSS1KS1x]

Before you get too hyped, these engines are going to need frequent rebuilds and 450cc 4-stroke singles aren't that cheap to rebuild. just my 2 cents.

How frequent and around how much you think.

[krod]

Depends on a lot of things. 4 stroke single cylinder engines are pretty simple to build but the parts are not cheep. Most last around 40 hours befors they need gone through.

[N1KSS1KS1x]

thats it? 40 hours doesnt seem like much to me at all. It may be better to run my 600

[Bueller]

For Dana

[Devaclis]

haha dude, that looks like you when you get off the 'tard lol.

[Bueller]

haha dude, that looks like you when you get off the 'tard lol.
The helmet head or the "I'm gonna kill every MF'er up in this place" look?