BALLISTIC ON A BUDGET PART FOUR
Many, many moons ago I rocked up at a Yamaha dealership, loaded a bog-stock R1 in my van and cleared off before they had chance to charge my credit card with the year-old bike’s £14k asking price. It was the deal of the century – and it was the start of a project like no other, where we’d get the chance to transform a great bike into an absolute weapon. The plan was pretty simple; see how affordably and quickly we could transform the Euro5 street machine into a track tool, and work out which bits we fitted that actually made a difference. If you’ve been following the build, you’ll know the story so far. For those fresh to our foray, it will probably pay to recap on the progress that started off with simple changes to the Yamaha’s gearing, tyres and brakes pads. A 7kg weight loss came next, along with pieing off the ABS, stock mastercylinder and base-model suspension. In essence, we’d created a bike that not only handled but stopped, accelerated, and rewarded us with a potency that stood out credibly on the circuit…with little more than £6k spent. The question was this: where next should we invest more cash, time and effort, and what gains could we hope to achieve?
It’s not difficult to throw cash at track bikes and I, for one, didn’t want to succumb to
