BRUCE SLAM MSR 160
THIS MONTH I HAVE MOSTLY BEEN… “Learning how painful pitbikes can be”
I’d love to tell you I’m getting used to this pitbike gig, but twelve crashes in two hours suggests otherwise. How the hell do people ride these bikes so fast? I’ve got a lot to learn, and so’s my brother Brod. Since last month a cunning plan’s been hatched; to race the Slam in the British Mini Bike endurance championship. And Brod’s my wingman for the seven round series’ three-hour races. We’ve already missed the first meeting, but that’s probably not a bad thing if last night’s riding’s anything to go by.
We took the MSR over to Gridline Racing and spent most of the evening rolling around on the floor like a third-rate breakdance act. It wasn’t our finest hour, but no matter what we did to alter the Slam’s setup, nothing found us the elusive grip which was causing us to fold the front or lose the rear as soon as we even looked at a corner. As crash followed crash, the mind was left to boggle until one of the other guys testing took pity on us and pointed out our problem; our new tyres. We’d fitted some of Bridgestone’s new BT601SS rubber to the Slam, which looked the dog’s and packed a specification that promised more grip than a chokehold. That was once they were scrubbed in. Being the newbs that we are, we had no idea how stupid it was to try and take off their shine on the mirror-surfaced go-kart track, with the more advisable option to go a bit GTA and scrub them in on a car park or road – but don’t tell the Feds I said that.
Around an hour into the night, having taken it in turns to self-harm during the bedding in process, the grip started to come good and we were managing a lap or so without launching ourselves. We weren’t completely out of the woods, but it became possible to catch the inevitable slides on the throttle, and power round a bend sideways if a knee was firmly planted on the deck.
In reality, our massive cock-up morphed into the perfect testing session and taught us a shedload about the Slam’s ability to slide and how we needed to adapt our body positions and throttle finesse to keep things from going tits up. It was a bloody painful lesson, but an essential one to learn. More laps is still the order of the day, but I’m confident things will start going alright once we’re more familiar with this lark. It can’t go much worse.