Superduke R that (almost) could

Hey we've done a shit load of development work on our Superduke Standard, and Superduke R. As some of you know through our race reports, it's been a long road getting here. But we are definitely HERE.

In our last round at Thunderhill, our Superduke R lapped in the low 1:53s. To put that into perspective for you, some of Northern California's fastest riders, on the fastest open class bikes around, get around Thunderhill in the mid to high 49s. Thunderhill is a horsepower track - top gear in sixth saw our fastest riders hit 180mph. There are two other straits as well at Thunderhill, so we are giving up HUGE amounts of time just based on horsepower. And all we're down is 3.5 seconds? Trust me, our Superduke is THE best setup bike (setup to access a given bike's potential) that I have ever ridden.

To back that claim up, we just ran at Laguna Seca in a support race this past MGP weekend. The class structure was open - run what you brung style (grid was full of 1000cc inline fours). Out of 35 entries, our Superduke finished 9th. If not for a mistake on our last lap (my missed shift coming out of the corkscrew), we had a very good shot at 7th.

During that race, "The Monterey Challenge" the leader walked away with the race doing 1:29s. Our Superduke circulated Laguna Seca at 1:32:7s. That's three seconds off a 200hp BMW S1000RR ridden by Jeremy Toye - who later in the weekend finished very respectfully in the AMA Superbike race.

Why I am posting this is to offer anyone here help with their Superduke. I had our bike measured, have numbers of the R stock, and after we've done our work to it. I will be more than happy to share our setup, and anything we have done to get our Superduke working the way it is today. It is fantastic.


We leave tomorrow night to go battle it out again at Infineon. This bike is barely holding on to some great championship points races. Please think fast thoughts for us this coming Sunday.

FYI, we are making tee shirts as I type this. Pretty cool design I think. Sales of the shirts will go 100% to funding our struggling effort. We are all broke, but still have a lot of heart. Stay tuned for our next Superduke VS the world race report.

Good luck to all of you on your Superdukes!

GoGo

Keeping up with the monster inlines is damned impressive...
Good Luck and great work!

Do you have pics of the T-shirts? I am definitely interested..

Great work fella.

Get those T shirst done, I will sell as many as I can to keep you racing

sort out the international shipping to UK and you have at least 1 customer mate

Yer awesome 2 tee's for me

Another here please

+1

Good luck, God speed!

Joe

Good look for Sunday.....and i'll buy a T shirt

yep i'll have a T shirt too..but 10 sizes smaller than Ginges!!1

I'll have one - like Pig's but smaller towards the bottom.

GODD LUCK for the coming weekend

And anutha UK customer T-Shirt here please dude

This is the graphic that'll be on the back, about ten inches wide. There will be the standard KTM logo on the upper left chest area. Then there will be two very expensive stripes starting from the left collar and extending downward over the left sleeve, broken up near the bicep area with the tag name "GoGo!" then the stripes continue to sleeve bottom another inch or so. Also, below the big Duke logo on the back will be our website name, I just have to pick a decent font (now) so they can start printing (now).

I will get our numbers together for you this evening. They are substantially different than stock. We have improved ground clearance, rake, trail, swingarm angle, spring rates, air intake, weight distribution, bar height, swingarm rigidity, and of course personality

Thanks very much for support with the tee shirts. The guy I am using is under strict instruction to spare no expense in print quality, or shirt quality. Best of everything, because this is after all a Superduke right?

GoGo

Great video. I especially liked how you used the whole track - and then some - in true the spirit of the true KTM dirt rider heritage.

Put me down for a couple of shirts.

I don't actually know about the Superdukes previous to 08. But I do know about post. Yes, both bikes, the R and the standard, have similarly "steep" rake and therefore short trail. The R is worse, but they both benefit greatly from the Nichols clamp. Or, like it's been mentioned here previously, extending the forks with machined "caps". Either way, push the forks down - the bike gets better. MUCH better.

As for revving the motor up compared to lugging it, oddest thing. Don't mean lug it too much. Stick around 8-9k works best for us. You can hear it in the video, any time we rev real high the motor basically slows. Strongest surge comes in down low. Winding it out really just wasts time. We have the Tune-boy set to let us rev another thousand rpm. It's great to have, for times between turns when you just can't shift (maybe the bike's leaned over too far, maybe it just doesn't make sense to shift. Maybe, like Laguna for us, the bike is geared real well, just in one spot it bounces off the limiter - for us that was the front straight last year. Really sucked losiing our drive over that crest. But now that we can rev higher, we kept driving over that same crest).


So it's real great to have the rpm to use, but only in particular places. Setting the bike up to rev there all the time, with short gearing, is actually keeping you wway from this bike's most potent zone - the torque zone.

At least that's what we've found, and what the stop watch told us..

By the way I'm typing this from the track. First day of practice is in the books. We're going quick. We're in fourth in the championship. One world superbike spec 1198R, one KTM RC8R, and an 1198s are in front of us. The RC8R is blown up though, and it's rider is on the disabled list. So maybe second place in the championship is now open. We need to beat the 1198s tomorrow. No way around it. We HAVE to beat it. Gonna be tough. Those bikes leave us for dead on the straights..

Think fast Superduke thoughts tomrrow. Please..