Lucky Phil

Not sure about the exact change over date but post 2001 I think. My images don't have the exact date ranges. I came across a couple of new manual taps in the spares locker the other day and got them on the bench for when I return from holidays. Now that I have a mill I can do the valve bobbin slotting modification with greater accuracy and appearance. Won't work any better than the current mod but will look more professional if someone ever has it apart. Phil

Sorry forgot to mention that. Phil

It's only applicable for the early bikes not the later ones that used the ignition switch to provide switching power to the start relay. The early bikes as shown the start relay always has direct switching power from fuse 4 but the later bikes it's switched through the ignition switch. Phil

He has battled CFS for quite a few yeas apparently. I used to follow him on Twitter but as usual with ex stars of anything that turns into a self promotional/endorsement freebee seeking thing so I don't bother anymore. Super talented rider but the assentation to Motogp used up all the emotion energy I think. The longest racing careers are usually the riders that have had the most support getting to the top, like Rossi, Hailwood, and a lot of the Spanish riders. As Kenny Roberts pointed out years ago racing uses up something inside you eventually. I think it's emotional energy and the less of it you consume on the road to the top the better your chances of staying there for a lot longer. People like Rossi and Hailwood never used any emotional energy sleeping in the back of a car at the track, worrying about finances or working on their own bikes or even riding a sub par bike. That sort of thing didn't drag the emotional reserves out of them over the long term. Nor did they have the pressure of families that had basically given up their lives and gone on the road to support their kids racing. That stuff takes a toll on you and shortens your career I think. Same as American riders have as a general statement found the GP scene harder I think. Being away from your home, family and culture for extended periods uses up some of that emotional energy.

You seem to forget Stoner finished 4th in 2009 by 86 points to Rossi and left 100 points on the table 75 of which were due to missing 3 races due to illness. On top of that his illness had hampered him for a few races before that with him being physically ill on the podium and even during races. So I don't think it's a stretch to say his shot at the title without missing 3 races due to illness and being affected for a few more would have been pretty strong if not almost unbeatable. All this on a bike with a brand new chassis from the ground up. I know a lot of manufacturers that would take 4 wins in the first season with not only brand new bike but with a ground breaking avant garde chassis design in the class. The carbon Ducati wasn't a trellis evolved design. The carbon bike was a Monocoque derivative and owes it's heritage to the Vincent and the Britten among others. The carbon Ducati frame concept was later adopted albeit in aluminium and magnesium form in the 1199 Panigale and the Suppaleggera.

I saw that test and that particular engine an old school design 2 valve pushrod made a whole 1.6% more average power. An engine that needs all the help it can get with regards to combustion chamber surface area V heat. Virtually all down to E85's slightly better cooling benefit. And that's squeezing the lemon to eek out every ounce of extra benefit with AFR and ignition. Overall the E85 in an old design engine with pretty low comp is a backward step when you consider the afore mentioned much worse fuel economy, hydroscopic nature which is hard on the whole fuel system and murder on the fuel tank. So not worth it on a V11 specifically and not anything else I can think of in reality unless you're boosted or willing to bump the comp to take advantage of the extra knock resistance. At the end of the day we all know pretty much that these fuels were and are more about propping up US corn growing industry than anything else. You'd make far more gains with a cheap and simple water meth injection kit and bypass all the Ethanol issues. Phil

Because you don't ride it even remotely close enough to the frames dynamic limits to tell. Thats the province of the elite riders and their massively refined sense of feel for the bike. It's not the frame is unpredictable it's that there was too much variation in the characteristics between one frame and another. So jumping from your #1 bike to your #2 bike would require too much adjustment for the rider and also meant that the settings on one wouldn't necessarily work as well or at all on the other. It's important the rider can swap from the #1 and #2 bike during practice and apply a change on one that will also work on the other by and large instead of having to adjust each bike individually to get the best out of it. There will always be a slight preference by the rider one over the other before the race but it shouldn't be too significant in his mind. You also want as close to total replication when the frame is replaced after the rider inevitively wads one from time to time. Ideally you should be able to assemble a whole bike out of spares and use the same settings as the previous bike and it will be 99% identical to the previous one in feel. For superbikes the bike is such a flexiflyer compared to a Motogp bike the rider just needs to and is used to adapting and any difference in frame flex characteristics is somewhat masked by the production nature of the whole bike and suspension anyway.

Very retro and quaint. Those are the sort of pegs I used to make 30 years ago and felt they were very cool. Then CNC machining arrived and it all changed. No longer could we spend a several hours at the lathe, mill, bandsaw and linisher and come up with "cool" and special, the world moved on. Here's a set of pegs from my 1198 that are about 14 years old. This is how fast it all changed in around 8 years. These cost far less than the bespoke ones we made manually back in the late 90's and early 2000's as well. I wish someone would make this level of beauty these days for the V11. It takes CNC. I could spend the rest of my life at the mill and never be able to achieve this.

You download the map with the Guzzidiag "reader" and save the map to your computer. The first time you read the original map takes about 10 minutes and doesn't actually remove the map just reads and then you save the copy to your computer. You then download off the web The Tunerpro software and then take your original ecu map you copied and saved to your computer known as a .bin file and upload it onto Tunerpro. Tunerpro is a programme that makes the .bin file you downloaded with the "reader" programme human readable and also allows you to modify the maps. Once you have taken your original map copy and adjusted it you can save it to your computer using a different name and also make notes on what was changed and then use the Guzzidia "writer" programme to install the modified map. It sounds complex but in practice it's very easy. i'm a computer muppet and even I find it easy after the first time. After that you can change maps in literally under 1 minute with a laptop sitting next to the bike. Here's what a map looks like in Tunerpro. In this case the ignition map and a main fuel map. You can change anything you see here, save it and upload to the bike with the "writer" programme.

Yep same logic we use investigating an air crash. Just bits of busted aeroplane nothing to see here

Well Stoner had a total of 7 wins and another 10 podiums on the carbon bike and finished 4th in the championship in it's first year including missing 3 rounds due to illness and a DNS at the last round when he crashed on the warmup lap. Looks like a promising start to a brand new concept to me. The advantage of the carbon construction is it's also a lot cheaper to make a carbon frame than an aluminium one and much easier to tailor to specific needs. The aero and the ride height devices need to go entirely and to put more of the emphasis back on the rider and less on the tech and the tyres. If you are going to spend big money on anything in racing make it the electronics that can be easily and quickly translated onto road bike products to not only benefit them but spread the development costs onto things that bring an income. Motogp worry about rising costs which is a bit laughable when you consider what they spend on hospitality and pointless things like custom painted headsets and helmets for crew etc. When "the show" becomes more important than the actual racing then you're on a downward slope. Take it back to basics a bit so the elite wannabees don't turn it into F1. Sometimes simple is better and new entrants can be a lot closer to the front right from the start.

Let me know if you ever want to sell the aftermarket exhaust. Phil

Rebuild is pretty straight forward and cheap to do. Phil

Don't know if this story fits this thread but back in the early 70's when I was a kid my parents had a cobbled together stereo system. Decent turntable and speakers but the amp was a home made valve unit made by my father who was an electrician by trade. I was very familiar with it's sound because it got played quite a bit. Anyway my fathers best friend was a Flight engineer for Qantas and travelled overseas a lot so on one of his trips he bought the old man a brand new latest transistorised Sony amp. I was there for the exciting hook up and first play. Result? Disappointment from me I can remember. Gone was the soft mellow full sound replaced by some sort of tinny scratchy sound. Not sure how to explain it better than that but I've never forgotten it. Phil

Good luck with that. In years to come the evening news won't be about busting some suburban meth lab but busting me in some suburban petrol lab. Phil

How are the conditions of the roads out your way at the moment? Around here they are totally appalling. So bad I'm reluctant to take the Supra out driving and I'm dodging everywhere avoiding potholes that will swallow a basketball in the other cars with higher profile tyres. Plenty of money being spent on useless endeavours like mowing grass 2 inches high on the sides of the roads but zero interest it seems on fixing the suspension killing roads after the wettest coldest winter here in years. Phil

A couple of points. E85 is not readily available in Australia. I've never seen it at any petrol station and I live in almost the largest city in the country by population. Google tells me it's available at selected United outlets but I never use that outlet as they traditionally sell shite fuel so maybe they do but they are a small player outlet wise. The other issue with E85 conversion is less MPG and the plastic fuel tanks on a V11 swell bad enough on E10 let alone E85. Also unless the engine is optimised for E85 then there's little to no performance benefit and if you know me then you know how concerned I am with the "climate emergency" and domestic motor vehicle pollution. The gains from E85 in performance terms are with the turbo engines. Running E85 has significant power gains due to being able to turn the boost up safely with a "tune". Unless you pull the engine down and bump the comp to utilise the added nock resistance then there's not much to gain on a v11 engine. A little better cooling maybe but as I said worse fuel economy which isn't particularly attractive for most. Like Guzzler I go out of my way to avoid ethanol fuels. If you are environmentally concerned about the future of ICE engines the way forward is synthetic fuel. Carbon neutral and zero mechanical or tuning requirements. 4 times the cost at present but this will come down as mass production increases. Porsche has a facility producing it now in Chile and MotoGP will run it exclusively in a year or two. Phil

The only issue I ever had riding on the right was when doing u turns. Always defaulted to a right U turn which was interesting. I've told the wife to act instantly and yell at me if I revert to left driving on our Italian trip. I had no issues driving in the States but that was 10 years ago now. Phil

Yes all correct. The perennial issue these days is adapting your chassis to the latest tyres. Back in the pre spec tyre days the tyre manufacturers would build you a tyre to suit your chassis which was faster cheaper and easier for the bike manufacturers. They would even make them overnight and ship them to the race for certain riders at close by tracks. The other KTM issue is WP suspension. Not saying it's better or worse than Ohlins but when every other single bike is running Ohlins until you are as well you never know just how much advantage or disadvantage the WP suspension is giving you. In times when you are literally chasing 10th's of a second you can't afford any disadvantage if there is one. The CF chassis in the current KTM is a red herring/blind alley anyway. Tubular trellis is not a design that lends itself to CF material. Think of bicycles 30 years ago that started using tubular CF construction, basically a round carbon tube traditional construction bike and look at the shape they use now in CF. It took them many years to understand that the carbon material required a totally different profile and shape to offer any advantage. It's like building a tube trellis frame in aluminium. It can be done but it's the wrong design/cross sectional shape for the material characteristics. Ducati made a big mistake back when Rossi was riding for them ditching the CF chassis to try and appease Rossi's lack of ability to adapt to the CF chassis. They had a great medium to long term engineering plan to move chassis design forward but caved under the Rossi can't adapt and "must win now" pressure and leverage he had with Ducati via the sponsors. He realised what a brilliant rider Stoner was after riding that Ducati. Stoner liked the CF chassis. He said the issue with the trellis chassis was no two ever felt the same due to the many and varied pieces that go into it and the many welded joints. The CF chassies were all the same feel no matter what apparently. Until that is you decided to lay the carbon slightly differently to change the flex characteristic. That was the forward plan, a fast, cheap, efficient and easy way to tailor a chassis characteristics to changing tyre and rider requirements. Scuppered by an ego at the end of the day.

Yep you're correct on all counts. CBF to move the bonnet release for the opposite drive countries. I'm always hitting the wipers to make turns in the Supra and just when I get used to it I start doing the same thing in the other two cars when I get back in them. I wonder aloud if there is any sort of advantage driving on the left or the right side of the road. Phil

There's 2 of the latest Corvettes in our area and we saw one driving around a few months ago and my wife asked me why we didn't buy one of those instead of the Supra. The black one looks good but the lime green one doesn't. Unusual car whos look changes dramatically depending on the colour which probably means it's fundamentally not that nice aesthetically. Phil

Yea I also like and looked at a Jag F series. Great looking car but it's a Jag, and well, it's a Jag. When I was researching a new DD 18 months ago I saw stats for the Range Rover Evoke with regards to reliability and the reviewer mentioned that they were considered to be quite problematic in that regard but people were still buying them Phil

Got news for you Mick my previous DD the Ford Kuga ( Escape to the US) the hood release was also on the pax side and so was the Focus RS. The Supra has the hood release on the drivers side but with the BMW specific double pull release. So you don't release the hood and then feel under it for the secondary safety latch to operate you pull the hood release and it pops up then you pull it again to release the secondary latch. Quirky. The Supra being a BMW mechanically has the indicator stork on the left side of the column which in an auto is no problem but a bit of a pain in a manual because your left hand is usually busy shifting gears to operate the indicators. So you need to hit the indicators very early. The Astons are a beautiful car and I considered buying a SH one but at the end of the day too much hassle on quite a few levels. An old Guzzi's enough hassle

I watched the race and don't remember seeing anything I thought was questionable with regards to bike performance between the Ducati boys. Guzzimoto is correct in that speed on the straight is a combination of many things including the drive you get onto it at some tracks like Phillip Island and Portimao for example. Add to that fuel saving strategies and aero these days and it's even more complex. I always laughed back in the 500 days about the "big advantage" the Hondas had in top speed over the Yamahas which was true but the problem was they made it all at the end of the straight which was a problem. The Yamaha would accelerate out of the corner onto the straight and pull a gap on a Honda only to get passed again with ease esp with the draft. Problem was this all happened just before the braking point so now the Honda guys were carrying more speed and needed to pull it up at which point the Yamaha guys would be up the inside with less speed to wash off. Top speed is as much about where you attain it as the actual number. In WSB this year the Yamahas are the slowest bikes and have a big issue with that as the last race demonstrated with a very long straight. I was hoping Remy would be able to negate that as he's shown in the past he's very very good at getting drive onto the straight at Portimao but he didn't have an advantage on the R1 this time. Fuel consumption dictates power these days and if one rider goes to a fuel saving/tyre conservation map a lap before the other rider then you'll probably see a disparity on the straight. Didn't Pecco run out of fuel on the warm down lap? or was that in warm-up/qualifying?