Bol countdown
With this year’s Bol d’or Classic fast approaching we would expect nothing more, or less, from Team Bike than parts strewn across the workshop and focused activity…
THE BOL D’OR CLASSIC race at Paul Ricard is a pilgrimage for Team Bike. We’ve got nostalgic memories of racing in the main event, the 24-hour race, back in the eighties and nineties, so to go back to Ricard and do the four-hour, two-leg classic race with the same bikes and some of the same crew from back in the day is magical. We’re no better organised than we used to be though, so although the race is now only a few weeks away our race bike is still in a thousand pieces, strewn around the workshop. It’s time to get busy.
To try and keep the Honda RC30 competitive we built an 840cc engine last year, but when we ran it in practice at the Bol in 2018 it vibrated and didn’t produce much extra power. So in last year’s race we went back to using the 750. This year we’ve altered the big engine’s crankshaft balance factor to smooth out the vibration, and we’re upping the compression to get some more power. Well, that’s the theory, but at the moment the engine’s all over the workshop. Hopefully the crankshaft will come back this week, and then it can all be reassembled.
We’re using 929 Fireblade pistons and modified RC24 Honda VFR engine cases to up the capacity, but we have to use a genuine RC30 crankshaft. Once you’ve altered the balance factor there’s no going back, and genuine RC30 bits are getting really hard to find, so you need to get someone really good to do the engineering work. All of ours is being done by GT Motorcycles Engineering, Plymouth. They’re brilliant.
Modifying bikes creates loads of knock-on problems. The bigger bore means that the head gaskets need to be modified. We’ve had a perspex jig made so that the job can be done accurately.
Our riders this year will be former Endurance champion Stephane Mertens, who’s done the Classic Bol with us for the last few years, and also Alex Sinclair who’s a regular CRMC and Classic TT rider.
The main event still makes a great spectacle, the ride down to the south of France along Route Napoleon is great and it’s just lovely being in the south of France. It’d be really good to see some Bike readers down there for the race. Come and find us in the classic paddock, and buy a souvenir T-shirt. And we’ll be at the Classic TT and Castle Coombe before then too.
‘It’d be really good to see some Bike readers down there for the race. Come and find us in the classic paddock’