BRIDGESTONE BATTLAX RACING R11
For the first time in seven years, Bridgestone have given us a brand new road legal track-attacker. It’s been dubbed a new era for the grooved racing tyre segment, but are the brand’s MotoGP derived hoops worth the wait?
Taking the fight straight to the opposition, Bridgestone have pulled out all the stops in order to replace the much loved (but aged) R10 hypersports product. Since its introduction in 2010, following which it benefited from a minor update in 2014, the R10 road tyre has proven to be a popular and dependable choice for fast road riders, trackday addicts and racers alike. And it’s also made for the perfect sparring partner in the world’s toughest sportsbike shootout; our very own Sports Bike of the Year (SBOTY).
Its durability, predictability and outright performance has kept us coming back for more for seven years on the trot, over which time we at Fast Bikes have become nothing short of smitten with the R10. But that relationship’s now ended as next year we’ll be putting its successor, the R11, to test. For this reason above all else, we were absolutely gagging to see how the all new tyre cut it on a sun drenched, and frankly too hot, Monteblanco race circuit in southern Spain.
Tech central
Having sat through a techno-crammed presentation there was absolutely nothing left to question about the orientation and target focus of these new tyres. Street legal they may well be, but behind the camouflage of a legislative stamp, the R11s are very much purebred race tyres that have been homologated to race in FIM championships, and will need the usual warmers and heat priming treatment (85 ˚ C, just in case you were wondering about the optimum working temp) to achieve the best grip.
Bridgestone say that they’ve developed the tyre purely on rider feedback, with the main criticism of the old R10 being its lack of feedback. To counter that, the R11’s been produced with confidence-inspiring technologies at its heart, with a broader contact patch in particular offering more grip, feel and support when under load. They’ve achieved the larger footprint by means of something they call the mono spiral belt
design, which is in place to give the maximum amounts of feel regardless of lean angle. It works by staggering the supportive core according to its distance from the centre of the tyre, with larger gaps increasing towards the edge of the tyre to enable the carcass to deform more and provide a wider and grippier footprint. Both the front and rear carry this feature, but the rear also benefits from a second layer of felt that Bridgestone calls the GP Belt. It’s also used in the brand’s V02 slick, and basically consists of an additional carcass layer that provides additional support and precision when you’re giving your bike the berries and asking your rubber to perform unimaginable feats.
On show for all to see is a new tread pattern that’s also been crafted to bring additional stability to the party, and thanks to their time gained as the official tyre supplier to MotoGP, the compound the tread’s cut into has really moved the gain on as far as performance is concerned, thanks to a new formula and mixing process. There are two compounds on the cards (soft and medium), with the softer of the two being aimed at lower track temperatures and less coarse surfaces, while the medium caters for the opposite on both counts. Lucky for us, we were set to try out both options across a huge array of litre sportsbikes and smaller 600cc options. The big question was whether the tyres would live up to the hype and deliver the 1.3% lap time improvement Bridgestone was purporting they offered.
Copping a feel
With an air temperature of about 22 degrees and the R11s that had been lovingly roasted on warmers, I kicked things off on familiar territory with some laps on a Ducati 959 Panigale. The first thing I noticed about the rubber, even on my outlap, was how effortlessly the bike wanted to pitch into a corner and murder an apex.
The rubber was hot from the get-go, so there was no delay in searching for elusive tenths as I got a bit ham-fisted with the R11s
and started cranking hard on the throttle at big levels of big lean. If you’ve never been to Monteblanco then you should know it’s a fast, bumpy and technical track. The perfect proving ground for any bike, or tyre, as it happens. It was my first time at the place, which meant my early laps were scatty to say the least and meant I was often slightly off-line and having to depend heavily on the super supportive front gomme to carry me through what would have been sketchy moments on lesser tyres.
As much as I like the old R10s, the R11s seemed much more forgiving in this respect, and more manageable too. You could throw excessive load at them and not have to worry about the front end going walkies mid-corner, with stability and precision being showcased by the bucket load. Better still, the tyres proved just as stable on the straights as they were in the bends. Monteblanco is blessed with a massively long sixth gear straight that you can really haul some speed on. You fire onto it from a first gear hairpin, and just hold on for dear life as you work your way through your gearbox, gaining masses of speed in the process. On some rubber, such levels of high speed would be causing all kinds of problems, but the Duc and I stayed planted and fixed as we worked our way up to prison-time speeds, before braking stupidly hard to meet the 180 ˚ first gear corner.
The Ducati was kitted with soft tyres, and so too was the R6 I went out on next to get a different perspective of how things worked. If anything, the stability was amplified even further; the rear coped incredibly well with the power, but even more impressively so with the demands thrown the hoops’ way from some high corner speed action. Fair play to Bridgestone, I felt genuinely comfortable at all times on the little bikes, to the extent that I found myself questioning why Bridgestone hadn’t nabbed Theresa May’s ‘strong and stable’ calling card. There’s still time…
Hotting up
With the air temperature cranking up to a scorchio 34 degrees, I thought the time had come to really put these new tyres under pressure by razzing them around on a litre bike. My first weapon of choice was a Yamaha R1M which had already seen its tyres stomach 40 minutes of track abuse at someone else’s hands, but they still looked surprisingly fresh and up for some more of the same.
Having learned which way the track went, and with a general grasp of what to expect from the R11s, I was in a good place to start cranking the pace up and, erm, burning some rubber. Despite not being box fresh, the tyres were working as impressively as they had done on the less exuberant machines I’d tried them on first. The dash was showing about 280km/h as I jumped on the anchors into turn one, yet no matter how hard I hit them and cranked down the box, the R11s remained firm and planted. Sometimes you can feel a front tyre squat as you squeeze the brakes on hard, but there was no obvious feeling to write home about. They just felt secure and ready to do business as I pitched the bike on its ear and launched it into the corner. This was without a doubt the rubber’s best quality; the way they allowed you to take the piss on the brakes into a turn and trail the brake hard into an apex without ever making you feel like you were out on a limb. Even when you were running in deep, it proved effortless to get the R1 to where I wanted it to be. I couldn’t feel the tyre alter as I cranked it over further and further, but that’s not to say the mono spiral belt wasn’t doing its thing; The support on tap was unquestionable, even on a heavy(ish) old girl like the R1M.
But the best thing about that ride was the way the rear tyre dug itself into the tarmac and kicked off unbelievable amounts of traction. I was trying my derriere off to get the back end stepping out, but the only place the tyres threw in the towel was out of the tighter, slower bends, where you were asking unholy things of the Bridgestones. And even then it was only marginal how much they’d slide, despite the track temperature being hot enough to cook an egg. Maybe even bacon too. I clocked a total of thirty laps on that stint, really getting to grips with the new rubber and realising first-hand how brilliant
THE BEST THING ABOUT THAT RIDE WAS HOW THE REAR TYRE DUG ITSELF INTO THE TARMAC.
the R11s were. It wasn’t just the outright grip that blew me away, but the brilliance of the entire package. How they handled. How they fed back danger. How they gripped. Hard.
All out
After lunch we were gifted with a new set of rubber, so I grabbed a Superstock-esque R1M complete with rearsets, stiffer suspension and a rear end jacked up beyond all belief.
This was do or die territory, and I was hell-bent on seeing the true depth of the products. For 23 minutes, I rode the hardest I could, pushing the bike to my maximum in and out of corners, braking hard, driving even harder and having a right old laugh. It was genuinely hard to fault the R11s. I had no soiled pants moments, just bucket loads of fun. Throughout the course of the day I tried the tyres out on a broad range of bikes, including the new Gixer and a 1299 Panigale. They worked well on everything, offering that same inspiring feel and performance, which was bloody lovely to sample.
I wasn’t the only one buzzing about them, as all the other journos (and racers) were shouting about how much confidence they had from the R11s and how they’d been blown away by the grip and feel on tap. The only one common complaint was that the day had come to an end all too soon, as we all wanted to play on well into the night. The bike’s had headlights, after all.