RACING TO SUCCESS
The SP1, or RC51, had a decent (but brief) pedigree when it came to racing and, indeed, won the Y2k World Superbike Championship in the hands of American Colin Edwards – during the bike’s first competitive season. However, that was the proper factory machine Edwards rode alongside team-mate Aaron Slight, direct from the might of HRC. The SP-1 was created to combat the extra capacity ‘advantage’ Ducati had traditionally held over Honda, in a kind of can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, approach.
Not the usual Japanese way of doing things, but it did teach them a bit of a lesson. And this was, that making a litre V-twin compete against factory inline-fours wasn’t the cakewalk they thought it may be. This was borne out by any non-factory team running an SP-1. While the available HRC kit was decent, in both WSB and national series, if it didn’t have Castrol on the fairings it was woefully under par and under-powered compared to the competition. It wasn’t until the SP-2 came along just two years later that Honda began to distribute factory kit to the national series seeing, for example, Nicky Hayden win the AMA title on an SP. So, yes, WSB champion in its first year, but only with the big H fully supporting it.
Anyone out there who’s owned an SP-1 will know how tricky they can be to get decent power gains from, and when it came to racing it was doubly difficult as the struggles of James Toseland in BSB on the Vimto SP-1 during Y2k made all too clear…