Simon Green, Rizla Suzuki's Team Coordinator, recently held a technical lecture for the students of Kingston University's Motorcycle Engineering Design course, covering all behind-the-scene aspects of top level Superbike racing.
In the second instalment of a series from the lecture, Simon details the work that goes into making a 207bhp British Superbike engine...
Most of the work that goes into turning a road bike into a race bike is to make it go faster, pure and simple. The engine in the 2004 Rizla Suzuki produces around 207-208 BHP at the rear wheel. For a normally aspirated, 1000cc four cylinder engine I think that is something quite special.
There are no super-chargers or turbo-chargers, no nitrous, nothing. The engine has to run on 98 Ron gasoline (equivalent to Super-Unleaded), which is a control fuel from the organisers, we are not allowed to put anything special in the tank, in fact you could put normal unleaded in it and it wouldn’t produce much less power. It is all about efficient engine design and very damn good engine management, which mostly comes from experience.
I’m sure you are aware as students the way to make an engine make horse power is to make it more efficient. The person doing our engine development now, probably has nearly 25 years of developing four-stroke engines. Now, you can work out a lot of the things using computers to get the basics right, but in my opinion, there isn’t really any substitute for experience in the sense that someone can look down the port of an engine and say whether something will work or not, and that can save a lot of time.
Computer models are very useful to design the original motorcycle but in terms of what we have to do in the time-span we have to do it in and the amount of financial resources available to us within our budget, because we are not talking
F1 money here, we have to have a quick and simple solution available to us.
