ASBK 2015, it's back !

**chubb** · 20-10-2014, 10:21 AM

Originally Posted by Marshy

Lack of numbers. The deal used to be a 10 bike minimum to run SS in FOz. But the numbers kept dropping. Including me and everyone I was riding with, who slowly dropped out of the class. The last time I raced a 600 in Oz, there were two of us (out of a field of 40-odd bikes).

There were two main reasons I stopped racing a 600 in FOz:

1. Extreme danger. A guy on an R1 had a massive crash going into turn 1 when he misjudged the speed difference between my 600 on corner entry and his 1000. He narrowly avoided skittling me - just brushed my outside leg - but ended up over the tyre wall all the way over to the left of the start of the old drag strip. Hospital, broken bones etc. Scared me, and put that rider out of racing (I think) permanently. The speed difference between a 1000 and a 600 at the end of the straight is 30-50kms per hour. At those speeds, you are covering 75 metres PER SECOND!! That's nearly the length of a football field per second. Think about that for a second..... ("ONE-football field length-TWO-football field length-THREE-football field length"). It's very easy to slightly misjudge closing speeds and have a massive accident. There's a reason (besides parity) that 600s and 1000s don't normally share the track.

2. It just sucks balls big-time to spend the whole lap lining up and passing a 1000cc bike with a slower rider, only to have them barrel straight past you again down the straight!! I tell ya, lap after lap, race after race of the same slower guys on 1000s doing the same damn thing and stuffing up your overall lap times and finishing position gets really, really old. I mean, really old. I used to get soooo frustrated I was really really angry at the end of a race meeting, which meant it wasn't fun, and there's no point in spending a fortune on something that isn't fun.

So why not just race FX600, I hear you ask? Because the rules are stoopid! Most 600cc track bikes set up by punters before thinking of racing aren't eligible for FX (although they are for ASBK and every other race meet in Australia); eg NO: aftermarket rear shocks, titanium exhausts, quickshifters, quick throttles. And the control tyre was so bad it was incredibly dangerous. There was a serious controversy in Dunlop issuing competitors with different compound front tyres on the day of the race, but not actually telling anyone (except YRT, who had been testing on the new front tyre for weeks), resulting in a huge number of accidents in turn 8. Also, a set of tyres would last roughly 5 laps, so you needed the full $2k worth of tyres for a weekend (and more), because they were so rubbish. I think that has been largely resolved in the last year or two, and the new control tyres are much better. But it was a problem for quite a few years with the early GPAs.

Yeah I hear you.. Well depending on what we are doing or rather where we are going (location wise).. I plan to spend one more year on the 600 then move to a 1000. Either Kawasaki or the Honda.

Itching to jump but I think one more year on the 600 will do me good as I still have lots to learn on the smaller bike!

On a side note.. What the bloody hell is wrong with the SS rules set out by MA that you have to create your own FX600 rules.
Just makes it harder for riders that want to do both series (if money was unlimited.) it just forces riders to pick one series. And why we don't just have one premier series is still mind boggling.