Beyond the Blade – Engineering
[MUSIC PLAYING] 2024 for Honda Racing UK is a busy, busy year. We start the season off with assisting HME with the PR launch of the Fireblade at Portimao, running into Andalusia with our roads specific test for the team. Coming back to the UK for the first BSB test at Donington
Park, then moving on to Navarra for a test pre-round one at Navarra, rolling into 11 rounds of the British Superbike Championship with Superbike and Supersport. Then we have the roads program with Northwest and the TT running in classes in Supersport, Superstock, Superbike. Big campaign. Over the course of the season, each BSB rider
Will do over 2,000 laps. That’s over 8,000 KM. Our roads team will do a further 3,500 KM each. So as a team, that’s 40,000 KM. Consisting of 80 oil changes, over 320 litres of oil, we’ll do 20 engine refreshes, and we’re going to use over 6,500 litres of race fuel.
Each BSB rider will make over 24,000 gear changes. Our roads riders will do another 9,000 gear shifts. We’re going to do 22 pit stops at the TT. And so far this year, we have machined just over three tonne of aluminium into bespoke parts for our machines.
And before we turn a wheel, we have to prepare our machines to hit the ground running. So you remove all the obsolete road gear, like indicators, lights, a lot of plastic that’s under the fairings, and stuff like that. And replace that with carbon fairings, carbon seat units, so you’re not building up weight.
Race fairings, so with a Superbike, you’ve got some leeway to make it slightly different from standard. So you can have it slightly wider, a little bit taller, and stuff like that. So you have a specific screen, and you take advantage of those regulations for a little bit more rider protection,
And to make it a little bit more slippery as well, if you can, to give you a little bit more top speed. So the standard gearbox ratios tend to be very wide ratios, so like a big gap or a big RPM drop between each shift. So we fit a Nova racing gearbox that
Has neutral at the top. So it’s neutral one, two, three, four, five, six, as opposed to road gearbox, one neutral, second, et cetera. This avoids the problem of selecting neutral accidentally on the track, and also the ratios are much closer. So once you build RPM out of a corner and shift,
The RPM doesn’t drop as much, and the acceleration is better. The exhaust system is full titanium, it’s much lighter than a standard one, because you don’t have the catalytic converter in it or anything like that. Because it’s a straight through racing system, and it’s designed specifically by Akrapovic for our bike, it’s massively
Superior to a standard system in terms of performance, and weight saving, of course. I’m Colin Peabody from Performance Parts Limited, co-owner and director of the company. We’ve been the importer for Akrapovic for 25 years. We’re heavily involved in promoting the brand through racing and supporting race teams, and probably our longest standing
Partner is Honda UK. We have a three-way relationship, really, between the Akrapovic factory, who do the development, the team, and ourselves, who provide all the logistics support, and we actually provide the material to them directly. Anybody who follows racing will know that there’s no given number of crashes in a year.
It can be a bad weekend, it can be a good weekend, and that rolls out throughout the season. And we need to ensure that Honda Racing have enough spare parts on site so that nobody runs out of anything on a race weekend. You can imagine how it would be if a
Rider couldn’t make the grid because he didn’t have a silencer on the bike. One of the things that Akrapovic pride themselves on is they don’t rely on any third-party manufacturing. They even have their own carbon fibre kilns. They have a titanium foundry, which is a very rare thing to have.
Hydroforming processes, so they can change the shape and form of any tubes. They do everything in-house. They even make their own fasteners. Racing is a cornerstone of a Akrapovic’s development anyway, but Honda UK Racing have been a development partner for a Akrapovic for over 25 years. In fact, Honda delivered
Akrapovic first world championship with Colin Edwards, and that was a milestone moment for a Akrapovic. So the data received back from the teams is critical to ongoing development of the products. It feeds into production, further development, and that comes out in production exhausts that are available to all customers.
This year we’re getting support from STM with the clutches. We replaced the standard clutch with an STM slipper clutch. [MUSIC PLAYING] Nowadays, this is essentially to take the shock out of the gearshift, particularly on back shifting. You want a nice controlled close, so you can get it back engaged on the braking cycle,
So you can control the engine braking with the ECU. The clutch is a lot more robust than the standard clutch. So for practice starts and things like that, it would stand like six in a row if you need to, which is good. Normally, racing clutches can be fragile. The team’s been extremely busy.
The last couple of months have been hectic, to say the least. The next time you’re going to see us is at our road test in Andalusia. [MUSIC PLAYING]
In this second episode of the season, we return to Honda Racing’s Louth facility to witness the ‘engineering’ process as the team transforms road-going production machines into racing thoroughbreds. Pre-season preparations are in full flow and the research and development phase is well underway.
All new machinery for 2024 has meant that the team and its technical partners have been working hard to design, engineer and develop new parts to maximise performance in all areas. Join us as the team prepares the fleet of race bikes required for what promises to be a big season for Honda. We also touch on the relationship between Akrapovic exhausts and Honda by way of Performance Parts Ltd.
Tune in to episode two – Engineering.
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