The 2010 Lucas Oil AMA Pro Motocross Championship is less than a month away. I'm embedded with the Geico Powersports Honda team, and they have nine testing days to get the all-new 2010 Honda CRF250R ready for its motocross debut. Oh, and they're still racing supercross every weekend. Welcome to the pressure cooker.
In addition to finalizing engine, suspension, chassis and component specifications for five riders, this team, like many of America's elite racing squads, is at the mercy of Mother Nature, available daylight and the inevitable human error. And if a short two-week concentration window between the final supercross checkered flag and the first motocross gate drop wasn't enough of a challenge, consider that the team riders are spread across the U.S., competing in three different series, on bikes that share little other than the color with the previous year's model.
As I learned in my days with the Geico Honda team, motocross racing isn't just building a fast bike with expensive suspension and putting a fast kid on it. It's about unrelenting research and development, attention to detail and lots and lots of hard work. From rider to suspension tech to engine builder to team owner, this is definitely a team sport.
The current AMA Pro Motocross rulebook puts heavy modification restrictions on each bike on the line, but race teams push pretty hard and close against those restrictions to develop a bike to its ultimate capabilities. A group of techs with names like Ziggy, Kibby, Scrappy, Schnikey and Kranz don't sound like a serious bunch, but they are some of the key engineers and mechanics behind big-name racers Trey Canard, Justin Barcia, Brett Metcalfe, Blake Wharton, Kevin Windham and newcomer Eli Tomac. Along with race team co-managers-Darren Borcherding and former motocross and supercross champion Mike LaRocco-they were tasked with getting the new-from-the-ground-up Honda CRF250R ready to do battle at the highest level, on some of the world's toughest tracks, against the fastest racers on the planet.
New Kid On The Block
Honda's 2010 CRF250R shares almost zero parts with its predecessor. After renegotiating their racing contract details, the Factory Connection boys didn't get their new bikes until October of 2009, months after the public was texting photos of their new purchases to friends.
The team uncrated the bikes, looked on their shelves and realized-nothing fits. Factory Connection would have to start from scratch. The team got in one week of initial outdoor testing to take advantage of the racers being fresh off the 2009 motocross series. MX tracks are also a better place to determine a bike's general character (for both MX and SX setup) rather than between timing jumps and sweeping bowl turns on a supercross track. But then the team launched into setting the new models up for supercross. That testing, the improvements the team discovered racing under the stadium lights, and the things learned racing the similar 2009 450R did help get a handle on the outdoor bikes' needs. But as far as a proven outdoor race weapon, they were really starting from zero.