Dancing With Bears
Dancing with Bears
RACE WATCH
that, perhaps because it's so far away from the motorcycling mainstream, seems to encourage original thought. New Zealand has remained closer to its European roots than its Aussie
neighbor, and that close Euro-connection was the basis for the creation of BEARS a decade ago. Five years later BEARS spread to Australia, where it's proved almost as successful, with a class at the prestigious Australian TT at Bathurst the highlight of a packed season of races. Now BEARS has come to Europe, where it’s been eagerly seized by organizers anxious to promote races for bikes that stand out from the mainly Japanese-built crowd.
A nine-race national BEARS series is being held in Britain, while there are a half-dozen major international events each year in the rest of Europe, including one at the Dutch fourstroke meeting at Assen in August, as well as at Austria’s Zeltweg track in July. Grids are full, too, with 36 racers for the recent British BEARS races, and 54 in Holland. After the success of the Monza event in April, where 31 starters took the green flag, other promoters are already inking in dates for 1995.
BEARS’ appeal is the technical diversity it encourages. The main rule is
that neither engine nor chassis may be of Japanese manufacture.
“There’s nothing racist in this,” says Lindsay Williamson, a Kiwi who is co-founder of BEARS, “only a desire to encourage people to use the products of manufacturers in other countries that aren’t a product of the Japanese corporate steamroller. BEARS bikes speak more of the craft of motorcycle development, less of the business. This is an art form, not so much a science.” Williamson’s annual Sound of Thunder event, held in Christchurch,
combines bikes as diverse as a Tri umph 1200 Daytona Four and a 125 MBA two-stroke GP racer of the mid `80s, but in Europe it's been necessary to refine the concept. Apart from the non-Japanese rule, Euro-BEARS prohibits two-strokes, allows a maximum of three cylinders, and does not allow motorcycles fitted with four-valve desmodromic cylinder heads. Otherwise, anything goes.
The result is a profusion of technical diversity that delights spectators, especially those who nurture soft spots for particular racing marques. It also provides a feast for technofreaks. Moto Guzzi is the most popular make at present, but that doesn’t mean that any two Guzzi BEARS racers are at all alike. German Jens Hoffmann’s monster 1192cc fuel-injected eight-valve Daytona-third on the grid at Monza, second in the race, which was run in the rain-is a leading contender. But until he slid off the wet track, Dutchman Eric Willemse was pressuring Hoffmann for the lead aboard his Swallower Guzzi, powered by a two-valve LeMans motor tuned by Charles Rice’s Santa Barbara, California-based Rennsport shop. The Swallower is a radical assault on conventional Guzzi technology, with a Fior-Hossack-type wishbone front suspension and the pushrod V-Twin’s trademark shaft drive converted to chain via a transfer box bolted to the back of the engine.
“My 1105cc engine doesn’t produce enough power to stay with the 888 Ducatis in Battle of the Twins racing,” says Willemse, “but even with the pushrod engine, we’re right on the pace in the BEARS class and can develop the chassis in competition, which was the point of building it originally.”
Also pushrod-engined with radical front-suspension technology, but retaining its original shaft final drive, is German Ulli Volkel’s W-BMW, raced by current works 250 Honda GP pilot Ralf Waldman at Daytona in ’89. It is without doubt the best-handling Boxer
Twin ever to blitz a chicane, with its ELF-type front end and outstanding braking. There's almost as big a variety of BMW-based BEARS racers as Guzzis, but Boxer fans are strangely taking their time to come to terms with the new fuel-injected Ri 100RS. No body has started racing one yet, though surely it's only a matter of time. There are lots of Harleys, though, and the news that the Japanese Sundance team plans to come to Europe to contest the Assen race this summer with its beau tiful Over-framed, Sportster 1200based bike is bound to stimulate interest in the Hog herd. BEARS is tailor-made for the new Triumph Triples. The Saxon-framed 12-valve Triumph racer that debuted at Monza, and a standard-framed Tri umph Superbike, built by the Italian Triumph importer and ridden by for mer GP racer Bruno Scatola, are the picks of the neo-Triumph litter at pre sent. Both deliver just over 130 horse power at the rear wheel. In fact, the development path of the Saxon-Triumph serves as an illustra tion of how a BEARS bike is born. Paul Taylor, who built and developed the Saxon-framed Motodd-Laverda, designer Nigel Hill and I were drown ing our sorrows with a round of Aus trian beer in the open-air cafe at Zeltweg's scenic Osterreichring last summer after I'd DNFed in the Twins and Triples race with a blown motor in the Saxon-Laverda.
We were on the verge of admitting that with its 20-year-old engine, the bike was outclassed and not competi tive. But it was too good a bike to just retire. The SaxTrak front end works-BMW obviously thinks so, or it wouldn’t have fitted something just like it to the new RI 100RS. It’d be really interesting to see if it worked on a faster bike, something driven by an engine more powerful than the 108horsepower Laverda Triple. So, what else has a three-cylinder motor these days? No contest: It’s a Triumph.
Heading the list of corporate dictums since Triumph was reborn five years ago was this one: “No Racing!” Still, if you don’t ask, you’ll never know. As it turned out, Triumph was more than enthusiastic about our proposal, and agreed to supply an engine, as well as parts and engineering help.
The Saxon-Triumph seen here is the result. The culmination of some extremely interesting and innovative ideas, it's a natural for BEARS. The bike is based around Triumph's Super III crankcases. These are built by Cos worth Engineering, and are stronger and lighter than the cases used for Tri umph's more mundane Triples. The Super III also gets a different cylinder head than the rest of Triumph's Triples, and this was sent out for port ing before the engine pieces were as sembled. This was done without the heavy counterbalance shaft, and with a revised crank that accommodates for the balance shaft's absence. The result ing engine weighs 42 pounds less than the stocker, and makes 133 rear-wheel horsepower at 10,200 rpm, with valves, cams, pistons and rods all coming from the stock engine.
Designer Nigel Hill drew an opencradle chassis that uses the engine as a stressed member. The frame is built from aluminum tubing with an alloy swingarm and rising-rate rear suspension linkage. Up front, what looks like a fork is really the SaxTrak slider. This runs on linear bearings and serves only to locate the front wheel. The actual suspension unit, a Saxon shock, is mounted just behind the steering head, with the bottom attached to a steel wishbone bolted to the top of the slider casting. This pivots on eccentrics incorporated into the chassis downtubes.
The result is a chassis with inherent and adjustable antidive, and with a steering-head angle that can be varied, via an eccentric, between 22 and 26 degrees. The structure, which runs on a 56.5-inch wheelbase, is very rigid, and the bike is extremely stable in corners and under braking. The radiator location is also worthy of mention. It’s just in front of the rear wheel, fed by air pulled through the center of the bike by the low pressure created behind it.
At 362 pounds without fuel, the Saxon-Triumph should be competitive once it’s fully developed. My qualifying time at Monza for this spring’s BEARS race, in which the bike finished third, would have put me mid-field in the last Superbike race held there.
Not nearly as competitive as the Saxon-Triumph, but almost as interesting, is the 1200cc Motodd-Laverda from which the Saxon-Triumph was derived. It’s an earlier breed of Triple that delivers around 25 horsepower less but is still capable, as are the several other Laverda-based three-cylinder specials that populate BEARS grids all over Europe.
And of course, in a class whose freedom encourages experimentation in chassis design, you’d expect to find something as outrageous as the Britten VI000. In fact, the first of the customer V-1000 racers to be delivered by John Britten belongs to Italian Roberto Crepaldi, who enters it in BEARS and Italian Open races.
The ban on four-valve desmo cylinder heads eliminates only the Ducati 851/888 and derivatives like the Bimota Tesi. Two-valve desmo-Ducatis continue to pack BEARS grids, both in modern belt-drive 900SS/Pantah guise-German Valker Klett has punched the Ducati engine in his Bimota DB1 special out to 992cc with the aid of special cylinders, and reduced weight to 298 pounds-and in older bevel-drive mode. Australian Brook Henry’s Perth, Australia-based Vee Two company offers an elaborate array of performance parts for twovalve Ducati motors. His Vee Two parts are widely used in Europe, including his lightweight Alchemy chassis kit derived from his own RV-1 racer. Ridden by Aussie Superbike rider Owen Coles, the RV-1 finished fourth in the Daytona BoTT race in ’91 and has competed with crushing success in Australian and European BEARS events, combining two eras of Ducati engine development, thanks to its 905cc bevel-drive Twin motor converted to belt camshaft drive to produce more than 110 horsepower.
Against these meaty, big-engined BEARS racers, the smaller Euro-engined single-cylinder SoS racers provide an exciting underdog appeal. On tighter tracks they’re quite capable of challenging for a podium finish, as Austrian SoS ace (and German champion) Helmut Helten has proved on his 660cc dohc OKM-Rotax. The works KTM Single racer is equally competitive. Now producing over 80 bhp from the 609cc engine, the 220pound KTM’s exceptional power-toweight ratio and good handling make it a serious competitor in the hands of works rider Josef Frauenschuh.
Even countries remote from the mainstream of European motorcycle racing have discovered the attractions of the free-and-easy BEARS rules. Sweden’s tiny Folan Engineering has made its own BEARS racer with a specially built 954cc liquid-cooled four-stroke V-Twin engine, complete with five-speed transmission. This weighs an amazing 80 pounds and uses a wide range of Husaberg parts. It is slotted into a Honda RS250 GP race chassis, approved for BEARS because it is not a production item, to produce an amazingly compact and lightweight roadracer for rider Ulf Backsstrom. For good measure, Folan has now also produced an equally featherweight SoS racer with one-half of its V-Twin engine mounted in a British Tigcraft chassis.
If you’re an enthusiast of interesting and off-the-wall motorcycles, this all amounts to a pretty good deal. In a world of increasing conformity, BEARS offers a freedom of regulation that has inspired some truly innovative and interesting engineering. With a little luck, its message will spread beyond Europe into the USA. And wouldn’t it be the ultimate act of irony if BEARS made it to Japan? U
