Team-TRS test at Barber
- From: TRS Media | Published: April 17th, 2008 - 11:16 am
to say that i was grinning ear to ear inside my helmet would be a drastic understatement. i was literally laughing out loud and couldn’t stop…more on that later.
this past weekend james and i made the trek to barber motorsports park for the first test of our new 2008 yamaha r6. we picked barber due to the challenging layout of the course. with several elevation changes, barber puts your suspension through a very good workout. there is no time to rest on this course, and this is exactly what we were looking for. this was our first time working at the track together. we were fortunate to have former wera national champion, bryan nelson, come out for the day to lend a hand. having someone who i’m familiar communicating with, in addition to james was very beneficial.
back to the helmet laughter…the grin started as i came out of the carosel and powered up the hill at turn 4 and eventually turned to laughter after the bike sliced through the kink in the back straight. this is by far and away the most amazing motorcycle that i’ve ever been on. handling under power requires very little rider input. it’s almost as if the machine reacts to how you are thinking. having only raced a cbr 600 f3, the r6 is light years beyond the old honda. i’m used to quite a bit of chassis and fork flex with the f3. the yamaha feels more like a precise knife in comparison.
as the day went on, james threw different suspension changes at me and we’d make adjustments after each session. after feeling a bit more comfortable, i picked up the pace near the end of the day. the harder i pushed this bike, the better it felt and the more it asked for. we’ll be using michelins this year, and i couldn’t be happier. the front end feedback was good and the rear gripped like glue, only breaking away when i was too abrupt with my right hand.
brakes are far better than i’ve ever experienced. quite often i found myself overbraking, therefore having a much slower corner entry speed. where i’m used to a light tug to scrub some speed after downshifting, now that same tug results in my helmet quickly approaching the windscreen…the modulation of the apex levers is amazing.
being that this is the highest revving engine that i’ve used, i was worried about abrupt delivery. however, power is very linear, and the exhaust note of the kr-tuned is music to my ears. the bike pulls hard all the way to redline without any dips or dives. the motor didn’t feel peaky at all and had very useable torque.
all in all, we were very happy with the first test. i was able to get a feel for the new bike as well as working with a new team. the future looks bright…
kevin callaway
team-trs
