Track bike builder
How to create the ultimate track weapon.
How was your winter break? Fattening? I think we’re all in the same boat, but I’m not too worried. Most of the mail that comes through my door is suggestive of some form of fat camp, or special slimming drink that’ll burn off your man-boobs while you watch Corrie. Of course, not everyone wants to lose weight, but when it comes to riding bikes, there are quite a few benefits to slimming down your bra size. For starters, you might find yourself fit enough to tick off a whole session of a trackday. And then there’s the physics of the matter; the heavier you are, the more your motor will struggle. Losing weight is an essential ingredient when looking to up your performance and it’s as dependent on your mass as it is your bike’s. You’re in it together, and considering most modern litre sportsbikes weigh around the 200kg mark, you’re looking at around 300kg per rider and motorcycle by the time you’ve got your leathers on and you’ve scoffed that extra donut to keep your sugar levels up. That’s a lot of weight to haul around, regardless of what bike you’ve got, so it makes sense to try and shed as much of it as you can. Take this stock Gixer, for example, which weighed in at 202kg on the scales and kicked out a genuine 186bhp on the dyno. That’s no bad starting place, with a power-to-weight ratio of 0.92bhp-per-kilo. But that’s a figure that could get better. Of course, by upping the engine’s performance we could find extra poke and improve the ratio, but that’s not going to help us in the handling department, or improve the bike’s stop-ability. So a strict diet is the answer, and in order to get this standard machine a little more trim and ready for the track, we asked Hawk Racing to get stuck in.
No one knows the latest iteration Suzuki like the Buildbase-backed BSB team. For three years now they’ve championed the model, achieving BSB wins, superstock wins and, probably even more impressively, a senior TT win just months after it arrived on the market. Rolling this road-clad street bike into their Mallory Park set-up didn’t even make them blink – it was business as usual.
It goes against the grain to dismantle a perfect functioning, aesthetically impeccable, six-month-old motorcycle with just 1300 miles on the clock, but that’s exactly what we were doing, under the guidance of the team’s superstar racer and top technician, Leon Jeacock (he asked me to write that). Within seconds of the bike finding a home on one of the workshop benches, the orders were flowing, with the first task being to remove the stock fairings and panels. Like one of those geeks that complete rubik’s cubes while reciting the alphabet backwards, Leon had the bike stripped to its bare bones in no time, revealing the skeleton and components that made up the Suzuki’s core.
‘Never see the road again’
There was a lot under the skin and a lot to get rid of but by this point, with the bodywork gone, the GSX-R was already 9.6kg lighter. This bike will never see the road again, unless some tea-leaf takes it for a joyride, with the plan being to use it on trackdays and for racing. That meant we had no need for a number of units, like the AIS (Air Injection System) that, in conjunction with the purge valve pump, dampens the harshness of the emissions. We binned them both off, shedding another 800grams from the mix, but for every bit removed, there was often a price to pay. You don’t go to the dentist to have a bad tooth drilled and leave without a filling, and this case was no different. Blanks and plug-ins were the order