Although Mladin (left) wasn’t...
Although Mladin (left) wasn’t too keen on the latest GSX-R, teammate Tommy Hayden (right) liked the GSX-R1000 K9’s overall performance. Nonetheless, the team was forced to run the ’08 model when production issues delayed the ’09 model’s release.
The first question was simple: Where to get the ’08 models? American Suzuki would take a day to sort through a procedural problem to get them out of the warehouse. Instead, Yoshimura phoned Chaparral Motorsports, who had six GSX-R1000 K8s gathering dust. The team sent a truck, and the bikes were delivered on Wednesday at lunchtime. Now there were 20 days to go.
“In a couple of hours with Don and myself, we made a bit of a plan of what we were going to do,” Doyle said. “Got with all the crews and discussed it a bit further…then off we went.”
The K9 and K8 are completely different machines, so there’s very little that’s interchangeable. There wouldn’t be enough time to build six complete machines. Instead they made a plan to build three race bikes, with three spare race motors, and two full sets of bodywork.
The engines were immediately removed and sent to the engine builders, who did all the work in-house. They caught a small break because the ‘09 rules don’t allow for much modification. The team’s two engine builders modified the intake and exhaust ports and raised the compression ratio by decking the heads.
Early pre-season testing with...
Early pre-season testing with the ’09 version of the GSX-R1000 yielded mixed reviews from the riders, with Mladin feeling that the latest GSX-R was “too soft” and didn’t suit his aggressive riding style.
“Obviously, we were basically going with no testing, with new fuel in this engine,” Doyle said. They’d tested the new unleaded, non-oxygenated Sunoco spec fuel in one of their 2008 engines, but the results weren’t very encouraging. Detonation was followed by engine failure. “So we decided what compression ratio we’d get and went conservative. Daytona [has] sustained wide open throttle [and] with no fuel testing, we decided what to cut off the cylinder heads to get the compression ratio.” The team would be down on top speed, but they had to finish the race.
A Yoshimura Japan race kit camshaft was fitted—the rules allow the cams to change duration but not lift—but from the head down, everything was nearly stock, including the pistons. The clutch was stock, but fitted with kit clutch plates, and a kit generator was added. The exhaust system was an off-the-shelf Yoshimura R-77 carbon/titanium unit that retails for $1799. Horsepower-wise, the initial numbers were very close to the pre-production K9s, though with a slightly different character. Once the engine is developed, “I think the ’09 will offer a little more top speed,” Sakakura said.