This is one of our strengths at Crescent, the people working for us probably combined have near enough 100 years experience of working in the motorcycle industry, whether it be electronics, hardware, exhaust design etc. Every person that works in the team probably has on average eight or nine years racing experience. If you pool all that together you have an enormous amount of knowledge you can draw on when you have a problem.
Although with the human side of things you are restricted to a selected number of proven routes you can try. If it still doesn’t work then for sure you have to speak to someone like Ricardo or Cosworth. If you are familiar with the TT600 Triumph, then you may know that the engine was fundamentally wrong, in terms of racing it was very difficult to make the engine produce enough power because the basic design was not capable of doing so.
The basic design of our new bike, the K5 2005 Suzuki is obviously fundamentally right. Straight out of the crate, a bog-standard big makes 165BHP at the rear wheel, for a 1000cc road bike in standard trimmings that is phenomenal. That gives us a nice head-start, it produces 15BHP more than a standard K4 and as such we hope to expect around 220BHP for next year, which would be a good
MotoGP bike.
In terms of what we actually do to the engine, we keep the crank cases, because we have to due to the rules, but even they are fettled. They are sent off to be blue-printed, i.e. we give an engineering company the cases, and the measurements the cases are meant to fit to in the original designs. The company then checks them, and if they are not right, they make them right.
