Tight club
If you like riding bikes fast, there comes a time in your life where only track days will scratch that itch. And old bikes make great track day bikes...
Let’s face it, speeding – proper speeding – has become about as socially acceptable as drink driving. Get caught and you’re not going to just get a ticking off and you’re not going to hear the phrase, ‘oo d’you think you are, Barry Sheene?’ any more. Nope, get caught speeding properly and you’re going to prison. And on modern sportsbikes, you don’t have to be trying particularly hard before you get your collar felt. Short shift through the gears of a Kawasaki ZZ-R1400 – and even on part throttle you’re deep into three figure speeds quicker than you can deliver your mitigating circumstances. There’s a bunch of us who have had enough of this risk. Well, a bunch of us with little or no willpower who find it impossible to ride at legal speeds on the roads who have all taken the track day plunge and bought (old) bikes just for this purpose. People treat track days very differently. We’re just in it for a good time with minimal fuss, bother and spannering on the day. We just want to put fuel in and ride. We don’t want to be fannying around with tyre warmers, paddock stands, generators, Gopros, transponders and laptops. We want to be drinking tea, taking the piss out of each other and having a laugh. But doing it all as cheaply as possible has turned out to be more competitive and nearly as much fun as being out on track. A mate and myself started the ball rolling three or four years ago on our road bikes. He (Adam) had never done a track day before so we both booked in to a Donington Park event (£100 each). Adam owns a fairly new ZX-10 Kawasaki and is a rapid road rider. Seven 20-minute sessions was enough for the bug to bite. Honestly, if you’ve never done it before it’s hard to explain. But imagine the best road you know and imagine it as one-way, with marshals sweeping any little bit of debris off the racing line. Imagine no side roads, no spilled diesel, no speed cameras and no unmarked cop cars. The screaming high rev drop down Hollywood through Craner Curves on hot, sticky tyres is a feeling that’s as close to euphoria as I presume is possible. Adam, well and truly hooked, ended up buying a 2004 CBR600RR for £1700 that came with wets on wheels, a V5, a few sprockets and some paddock stands. Bargain. So I didn’t have to sacrifice my mint, original SP-1 Honda, I went crazy and bought an old steel framed CBR600F2 for the princely sum of £500 – a quarter of the value of my helmet, leathers, boots and gloves. This less than cosmetically perfect munter had previously been owned by a scaffolder so every nut and bolt was tightened to 150Nm. Nothing fell off it. Not even me. Another mate – who also happens to be a British Superbike crew chief – went mad and spent a whole £1000 on a really, really sorted, ex-race CBR600 Steelie. Mick, having heard our tales of track action also wanted to join our track day party but – quite rightly – didn’t want to risk his very tidy Aprilia Tuono. Refreshed by a few glasses of Budgens’ finest Rose, he hit the Bay in earnest. And this is what he turned up. For £800 (including delivery from Darlington) his (1997, we think) Kawasaki ZX-6R was something of a bargain: wets on wheels with discs – even a paddock stand. Not satisfied by beating us all to pole position for the hallowed tight-arse title, he then scored a very rubbish diesel Peugeot van for £120 that cost him
£30 to get through its MOT. Bosh: a full track day package for under a grand, but an £800 track day bike can’t be any good can it? That’s C90 money, after all. To be honest, we were all pretty gutted at just how good Mick’s new bike was. My ’orrible ’onda wouldn’t even get a sniff of it along Cadwell Park’s long bottom straight. After my bike rodded itself in the first afternoon session (that’s a tale for another day), I flipped through Cadwell’s woodland section in my flops to watch everyone else through this notoriously tricky section. Mick’s ZX-6R sounded disgustingly crisp with a real high-compression crack to the exhaust note under load and sharp, finely metered fuelling on pick up. There’s no doubt about it, he’d won. Pleasingly (for us) not everything was perfect. His exhaust bracket snapped (quickly fixed with a battery drill and a new M6 Allen bolt) and the seat unit only appeared to be held on by cosmic guidance, boasting several inches of movement in three different astral planes. True to tight-arse form, this was fixed by a piece of roofing batten and two self-tappers. Cost: zero. The late, great John Robinson, the author of some of the best technical writing motorcycle journalism I’m ever likely to see, once said to me: “All you need is 100bhp to enjoy yourself.” His rhetorical argument was that if you were getting overtaken you weren’t riding well enough. And here, late 90s/early Noughties 600 supersport bikes come into their own. Light and nimble with rims the right sizes to run modern rubber and brakes powerful enough to easily lock a front if you’re being ham-fisted, they offer the tight-fisted track-dayer unrivalled value for money. For the sort of money some track day riders would normally spend on a shock or a pair of wheels, we’ve all got bikes capable of lapping Brands Indy in 50 dead. Well, the bikes are capable of that… I got a chance to ride Mick’s ZX-6R at Rockingham: it’s massive compared to modern 600s with a huge amount of distance between the seat and wide-spaced handlebars, and the seat and footrests, making it perfect for the larger framed, bigger-boned chap that he is. The engine is pretty astonishing with really strong mid-range pull and a wide, and readily accessible powerband. Fuelling is near-perfect, as too is the gearbox. Not quite so perfect was the front end on Mick’s steed. With minimal initial bite, the front brake lever needed all four digits (and possibly help from the left hand, too) to haul the bike up into turns. This issue was also hampered by the road-drill effect caused, not by warped front discs, but by massively worn out front fork bushes. A man in Louth, Lincolnshire is currently fixing this issue for a mere £130 all in. The chain run needs a bit of attention too, as it’s acting as a greasy buzz saw on the near side of the rear tyre. But frankly, as a proud and self-proclaimed Cumbrian tight-arse, I have to concede Mick’s victory. His ZX-6R might be over two decades old but it’s still fast enough to claim the position of third or fourth quickest bike in the ‘Fast Group’ at that Rockingham bash. And for £800, I reckon that warrants some kind of special award. In fact, I have just such a prize in mind: Mick, it’s your round.