This past weekend I went racing with WMRRA at Pacific Raceways. With the help of my team I was able to qualify on pole position, and come home with 4 out of 4 race wins in the 600 classes. It was my most successful race weekend to date. In the spirit of Open Source Racing, I’m sharing all of my setup sheets, data, rider notes, and footage from the weekend.

Setup

You can download a copy of the setup sheet here. We missed recording a few changes over the three days but all of the important stuff was captured. I am typically running a stiffer front fork spring, but with the more aggressive C6 valving we felt we could back off the spring rate down to a 95 and get the feel we were looking for. We tried some adjustments to the rear to get the bike to be a bit more stable on the brakes over some of the bumps, but I didn’t like how it made the bike harder to rotate mid corner so we went back to the original setup, and ended pretty close to where we started.

Here you can see the rear lifting on the brakes, which was something I was struggling with all weekend. Ultimately we decided to not over-index on this problem since we didn’t need more brake stability to be competitive.

Race Footage

I’ve uploaded my footage to YouTube. I battled with Steve Campbell #10 all weekend. His bike had a bit of power on us so I was doing my best to stay in his draft, and cover any passing opportunities on the straightaways when leading. Super fun stuff. Looking forward to racing you again Steve!

Data

You can find data from Sunday qualifying and races below. Simply unzip and import the files to AiM Race Studio 3.

Download: JO92 Pacific AiM Data

Notes and Observations

• We tried something a little different when building this R6 motor after snapping a crank at The Ridge prior to this event. The new motor didn’t quite turn out the way we expected it to and we look to have a little less power than expected. We were down 6-8 mph off the front straight compared to last time we raced here in 2022 with a stronger motor.
• We raced exclusively on the Dunlop R3 front, and mostly used the Dunlop R5 rear. We tried an R3 rear but it didn’t feel like it would hook up quite as well.
• I was worried about not having enough braking stability, but after seeing how we stacked up to the competition we realized we were very strong on the brakes and I just had to deal with what I was feeling as best I could, because setting up to make that better would compromise our bike in other ways.
• My bike felt a bit slow coming out of the corners, so we tried a taller gearing and using 1st gear (instead of 2nd). Ultimately this didn’t lead to any faster trap speeds or lap times, and was more busy. My slow points were over-slowed because I was having to manage the over-rev of 1st which meant the drives suffered. We ended up going back to a shorter gearing where I wouldn’t have to use 1st gear anywhere.
• The track has gotten a lot bumpier in the last few years. It was important to stand up on the pegs to absorb some of the bumps with my legs. I had to ensure that I was holding the throttle wide open when going over bumps, and if I had to roll out to make sure I could get back to WOT as quickly as possible. Next time there I would like to try to find a way to help the bike handle the bumps a bit better, as I think it would yield a faster lap time if I didn’t have to roll out for some of them.
• My reference going into T2 is usually where the hot pit blend line goes from solid to spotted. It was so dirty/degraded that I was having a hard time catching this at speed, and will need to find a different reference next time we race there.

Thanks for reading!