The 2004 Suzuki SV650 Project Motorcycle - Cup Fever

The big race
It's always important to have a decent crew at a major event, and I managed to trick one of my former Suzuki Canada buddies, Jamie Barkley, into helping out at Road Atlanta. With lots of experience dealing with horsepower- and weight-constrained classes (Canadian national races have been run that way for some time now), Barkley would hopefully make up for any deficiencies in my riding and the still mostly stock SV.

The Suzuki Cup finals are run the same weekend as WERA's Grand National Final, and WERA crowns its champions based on this single event. As you can imagine, that makes for a huge turnout (more than 500 riders this year), as the GNF is a big deal in its own right. To fit all the classes in (five Suzuki Cup races and 35 national finals, as well as a four-hour endurance race) requires spreading the races and practice out over a five-day period, and things kick off with a practice day on Wednesday.Barkley and I arrived Tuesday evening, and by the time we rescued the SV and its related paraphernalia from the Suzuki truck on Wednesday morning, the paddock was so packed we had to pit on the outskirts, seemingly miles away from everything. We spent part of the morning mounting the bike's freshly painted Sharkskinz bodywork and Zero Gravity windscreen, and then I had my first practice. I'm no stranger to Road Atlanta, as I have raced there many times on my 250, and earlier in the year I had been a guest instructor at the Kevin Schwantz Suzuki School, logging 600 track miles in three days. However, I had never ridden the new chicane added for this year, and it took me most of the day to find my way through the blind, four-apex bus stop.

The first couple of practices went well, with the 650 working fine with settings straight from the last Willow race. At the cooler East Coast temperatures, we had to switch to a much thinner fork oil and, unbelievably, the bike had to be geared taller than at super-fast Willow as the last part of the back straight is downhill and arcs to the right a bit, effectively shortening the gearing as you lean over on the side of the tire. It was apparent right away that my racecraft had deteriorated from being unused for so long--while the grids at Willow were not all that full, I was intimidated and had difficulty dealing with other riders in the packed sessions.

At the end of the day, I was disappointed with my 1:40.3 lap time, which was quite a bit off my goal of getting into the 1:35s--that's what won the race last year and surely what would be required to get on the box this time around. While Barkley swapped fork oil and gearing (the third time for both changes that day) and slipped a new set of Pirellis on, we discussed a strategy to make the most out of the crowded practices and get my racecraft up to speed. We decided that in the remaining practices I would get on the track first, which would have two advantages: I'd get a clear track for at least a couple of laps, and I'd get towed along by the faster riders that came by, forcing myself up to speed quicker.

For Thursday's practice, the strategy worked and I picked up a bit of speed. I wasn't making friends with the faster riders who had to work their way by me, but, well...they probably weren't there to make friends either. Following practice, we put the Suzuki on the official dyno, and found it was making only 72 horsepower--quite a bit less than the 76 I read on our dyno, and significantly under the maximum allowed of 79. Our Superflow dyno may be optimistic, or the official dyno may have been pessimistic, but most likely the difference was a combination of both. In any event, we'd have to find some steam, and quick. We were limited to five runs over the course of the weekend, so there was little time for experimentation or trial and error.

Switching from petroleum-based oil to synthetic and replacing the 100-octane track fuel with some of VP's Ultimate 4 (average retail price of $9 per gallon) boosted the dyno reading to 75.0. Barkley used one of his tricks from home and hogged out the stock air filter for another 0.7 ponies. While Barkley whittled away at boosting the SV's power, I thought about what I'd have to do to get into the 1:39s--and then drop four seconds more--over the next couple of days. Barkley was trying to help by constantly reminding me how much I sucked, but I was thinking more along the lines of hunting down a rocket pack and strapping it to my butt. It wasn't all that bad; times in general seemed to be down from last year with the cool temperatures and the added chicane, and I was losing less ground in each practice to what looked to be the fast group of SVs.

The changes to the bike made a big difference for Friday's practice, as it felt decidedly peppier, and I dipped into the '39s for the first time. Top-end speed felt about the same, but Barkley had a remedy for that--his Factory Pro Teka unit. I had been using a Dynojet Power Commander with good results, both on the dyno and at the track. But I didn't have a Windows 98 laptop with a USB port to remap the Power Commander at the track and account for the VP fuel. As well as giving us the ability to tune the fuel injection, Barkley claimed that the Teka, which reprograms the stock ECU rather than being an add-on unit that modifies the stock injection signal, would improve on-track performance without making a big difference on the dyno reading.