P
.. RMED O F S N RR TRA TOOL S1000 ’S WSBK
MW ..INTO B
LIRJB PPRB B@BJ?BO
HONDA’S RADICAL SPORTS TOURER
VFR1200F
RIDDEN! TER 5 S PO 12 T KTMNCEP CO
25000KM IN 175 DAYS
ON A HERO HONDA KARIZMA
NEW SCOOTERS TESTED PUBLISHING
MAHINDRA’S 125CC RODEO & DURO
HONDA AVIATOR 110
royal thump RE has finally given fans what they have been longing for aeons now – the Classic 500 and 350
T
he ClassiC 500 was launChed in the european market in March 2008 and soon after that, there was a growing demand for the same here in india. hence the company decided to bring in the bike along with a bonus in the form of the Classic 350 to meet the needs of the indian consumer. The bikes were launched in the capital in a royal setting at the Taj Mahal hotel. The styling of the 500 and the 350 may be retro, however, these two hardcore bikes are feature packed with modern
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technology. The 500 gets a new generation air cooled engine that is fed via a fuel injection system and develops a whopping 41.3nm of torque and 27.2Ps of power, whereas the 350 features the twin-spark engine that develops 19.8Ps of power and 28nm of torque. The flowing upward swept exhaust, a single seat and a completely rounded rear fender coupled with the old style handlebar, headlamp unit and front forks remind you of a bygone era - exactly what this bike is built to do.
Royal Enfield thumps in with the retro-modern Classic 350 and 500
The sTyling of The 500 and The 350 may be reTro, however, These Two hardcore bikes are feaTure packed wiTh modern Technology
Classic 500
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road test mahIndra rodeo
GEAR CHECK Rider: Adhish Alawani Helmet Jacket Gloves Boots
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@78 9H< CZgd He^Y^ HigVYV He^Y^ ME9 ME*"<E
Fun-ster
Mahindraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s second offering, the Rodeo is a funky little machine with a powerful heart Words: Ravi Chandnani Photography: Sanjay Raikar
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ROAD TEST MAHINDRA DURO
B
ahindra and Mahindra are well known for their tractors and commercial vehicles that roam desi roads. They are also famous for their SUVs, however, the two-wheeled segment is an entirely new field for the firm. In their initial innings, the company has launched two new scoots – the rodeo and the duro. The first offering is for the fun loving rider whereas the latter scoot is for the serious and no-nonsense types. What is Duro? Well, the duro is a scooter with an attitude that commands respect on the road. it is aimed at men and women who prefer to ride around the city doing some serious stuff like going to the office, dropping kids to school, grocery shopping and similar tasks. in today’s world we notice a lot of scooters with
similar designs and specifications, however, the duro is not like the ordinary models. it features a 125cc engine with a comfortable seat, an easy to read console, ample storage capacity and enough power to leave the 100cc scoots behind. This scoot retails at around rs 43,477 (OTr, Pune) making it cheaper than the competition. Underneath the contemporary design, the duro is powered by a 125cc mill with quite a good amount of power. Taking a closer look at the details you realize that the proportions are well in order and nothing seems to be out of place. The neat front end with vertically mounted blinkers appears quite decent. The subtle layout of the front is evidence of the no-nonsense image of the scooter. This subtleness is also quite evident in the analogue console that features a speedometer and a fuel gauge. Continuing towards the
Sensible City Knight Mahindra’s debutant scooter in the market, the Duro is an ideal vehicle for city riding Words: Ravi Chandnani Photography Sanjay Raikar
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FIRST RIDE HONDA VFR1200F
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mass effect
Has Hondaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s much anticipated revision of its VFR sports tourer made the bike any better? Roland brown has the answer Photography: Zep Gori and Francesc Montero December 2009
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Road test avIatoR dLX
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Heart transplant
Honda plays it safe with a new powerplant for the Aviator. Adhish Alawani answers the questions ‘why’ and ‘how’
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he IndIan automobIle market has some peculiar characteristics. When honda entered the Indian market more than two decades ago (along with Kinetic), the company’s intention was to study the customer, his requirements, his mentality and the market behaviour apart from making a name for themselves. the Japanese manufacturer did its job flawlessly and got out of the venture to set up their unit. The first independent wing badged product to roll out in India was the activa. I clearly remember that the scooter market was almost dead at the time of activa’s launch way back in 2001. Would you believe it if I said that a leading two-wheeler manufacturer in India had actually ridiculed honda for entering India with just an activa on offer when the market for scooters was rapidly fading? honda proved the critics wrong and how! not only did the company run down the competition with a
mere activa, but they also came up with products like the dio and the aviator which featured the same function in different forms. the honda scooters ruled the segment for years before facing some competition. now when there are products in the market that can challenge honda’s prowess, the company is on its way to upgrade its line-up. a few months ago, honda reintroduced the new activa with restyled bodywork and more importantly, a new 110cc engine. What follows as the next step in their current market strategy is the introduction of the same 110cc engine in the aviator. Why? Simple. the Indian consumer believes in one major factor – brand name. the honda tag has come to be associated with reliability. Plus, the Indian consumer wants something unique that is not very common on the road. So, the aviator is kind of an answer to this situation. honda is providing the same reliability, performance and efficiency as
The front end of the new Aviator sports chrome in place of the more elegant matte finish panel - a change less welcome The grab rails on the new Aviator now come in the body paint scheme unlike the silver ones on the earlier version
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tbr race exhaust yamaha yzf-r15
Free Flow per
CaNISTER TBR is offering an option of three canisters out of which we have the aluminium one on test. This one definitely carries an upmarket feel
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Formance Full SySTEm The kit will include the pipe as well as the canister along with all the nuts and bolts and accessories for fitment
The leading performance parts maker from U.S.A, Two Brothers Racing introduce a special exhaust system designed specifically for the Yamaha R15. Adhish Alawani finds out just how good it is
Photography: Sanjay Raikar
I
he YZF-R15 was launched in the indian market more than a year ago and it raised the standard of sport biking in the country to a new level. The country’s performance motorcycle scene has been scaling new heights ever since. an appreciable change that is currently being witnessed in the indian biker is that he has started preferring performance upgrades to the cosmetic ones these days. as a result, various options along these lines are being explored today. after testing the performance kit from daytona and a locally made exhaust system for the R15 in our previous issues, what we have here is the latest offering from Two Brothers Racing (TBR), usa. specially designed for the YZF-R15, this exhaust system comes from the us manufacturer who has been making high performance racing canisters and full exhaust systems across the global range of street motorcycles, motocrossers and aTVs. The end can of the exhaust system offered by TBR features their patented lightweight, thin wall die-cast aluminum inlets and outlets. The vertical oval canister from the M-2 series comes with the V.a.l.e. (Variable axis locking exhaust) system - a method in which the muffler canister is attached to the exhaust
tube without the use of welding. with the V.A.L.E. systems, the muffler assembly – the exhaust tube and canister – can be positioned perfectly on the bike before all the mounting hardware is fully tightened. Once the canister and exhaust tubes are properly aligned, the V. A.L.E. assembly locks the muffler canister to the exhaust tube assuring a perfect, leak free fit. A lot of technical science, is it? Okay, let’s talk the language a biker understands. Performance. with the data logging equipment mounted on the R15, we decided to do 0-100km/h runs on the stock bike as well as the one with the TBR system. Very frankly, we didn’t need the data logger to tell us that there was a noticeable rise in the performance of the Yammie. The R15 started pulling pretty strongly right from 5000rpm unlike the stock model which does the job from around 7000rpm. The midrange of the bike feels much stronger than the stock one making it a more tractable machine for city use. if one has to speak in terms of accurate timings then with the TBR exhaust system, the R15 managed 060km/h in 4.15 seconds as against 4.9 seconds of the stock bike. The R15 crossed the three digit mark in a mere 11.76 seconds with TBR which is much quicker as compared to 13.04
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marathon rIde karIzma trIp
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marathon rIde karIzma trIp East coast
Gedu, Bhutan Bum La, Arunachal Pradesh
Chennai-Bengaluru road Samdruptse, Sikkim
Barak, Manipur
Ladakh
Marsimek La, Ladakh
Diamond Harbour, W.B.
Back at home, Bengaluru
Bengaluru based Praveen KM braved challenging roads, changing weathers and tumultuous political scenarios to traverse more than a quarter lakh kilometre across three countries that took almost half a year December 2009
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SPORT
bmw wSbK
How to make a World Superbike challenger from nothing BMWâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s return to world championship racing was a huge risk for the Bavarian factory. How did they get the S1000RR so competitive so soon? Story: Mat Oxley
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wSbK
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MW had a lot of catching up to do when they returned to world-class motorcycle road racing in 2009. the last time the factory won anything big was back in 1939 when georg Meier ruled the Senior tt aboard a supercharged boxer twin. Meier wore a swastika on his leathers and raised a nazi salute on the podium; three months later World War two broke out. after the war BMW slowly but surely became purveyors of fuddy-duddy motorcycles to fuddyduddy riders. all that changed four years ago when some big cheese in Munich told BMW’s engineers to stop talking about heated handlebar grips and panniers and start talking about 14,000rpm ride-bywire engines and traction control. The decision to create the company’s first WSB bike posed a big question: how do you make up for half a century out of world championship racing when you’re competing against factories that have been at it sin ce the 1950s? it’s a bit like asking a gurgling toddler to outwit a 50-year-old engineer on the subject of motorcycle road race engineering. While the S1000RR streetbike designers got on with engineering the base machine, the not inconsiderable task of forging a crack WSB team out of nothing fell to BMW Motorrad motorsport manager Berti hauser. “We started doing the dakar 12 years ago, so we understand the spirit of racing, but road racing at World Superbike level is completely new for BMW,” says hauser, who’s been with the company for 29 years, working on everything from aBS development to the dakar and endurance racing teams. “first we did two years of endurance with the boxer twin, this was more or less to show that we want to race. But World Superbike is a completely different level. that’s okay though, we didn’t come to play in a kindergarten, we came to race in a world championship.” hauser had three options for building his team: headhunt engineers from rival WSB or MotogP outfits, create an all-BMW squad totally new to toplevel racing or do something in between. he took the third way, outsourcing much of the WSB effort to an experienced road racing squad, so BMW could hit
the ground running. the 44 staff who look after riders troy corser and Ruben Xaus are 25 percent BMW engineers and 75 percent alpha Racing mechanics and crew. Twenty five staff attend each race including eight BMW engineers. alpha are the people who guided Jörg teuchert to the World Supersport title a few years back. they also look after Werner daemen who rode a S1000RR to third in the 2009 german Superbike series. the crew go about their business with a quiet professionalism and aren’t so earnest that they can’t sit down behind the pits and have a beer on Sunday evening. “the basic idea was to go racing with a partner experienced in all racing issues,” adds hauser. “We combined internal BMW engineering staff with management people and experts from the racing community. Working with an external partner like Alpha allows us to be more flexible and more reactive. With this combination of people we surpassed our target of several top ten finishes in 2009. In fact, we got 17 top tens and one top five. Of course, without the brilliant work done by BMW engineers on the production bike, we would not have been able to achieve such results.” Hauser isn’t flattering to deceive – at some tracks, BMW were within half a second a lap of the winner. that’s a remarkable achievement for a group of rookie road race engineers, especially when WSB got a lot faster in 2009, thanks to Ben Spies and nori haga pushing the pace like never before. “last season the lap times were so quick and so close, there’s never been a season like it,” says twice WSB champ corser, who was 2008 runner-up with Yamaha before signing to BMW. “Every race we did last season, i beat the 2008 race times i did on the R1.” at some tracks the S1000RR was very much on the pace, at others it was quite a way off it. the wide open spaces of Phillip island and Brno suited the bike best of all, Corser finishing less than 15 seconds behind the winner at both venues. Magny-cours was perhaps BMW’s worst track, corser half a minute down, even though his race time would have won the 2008 event! “We have problems when we come to tracks
BMW’S WSB EFFORT WILL HAVE A BIG EFFECT ON THE 2011 STREETBIKE It will be 2011 before the S1000RR streetbike really benefits from the first fruits of BMW’s WSB adventure. Parts preproduction began at the start of 2009 when the team was making its first foray into WSB, so there will only be minimal input into the 2010 model from the race team. And then there’s the irony of World Superbike development – major machine revisions must be incorporated into the production bike before they can be used on the track, the opposite of what you might expect. “Throughout 2009 we gave feedback to the guys working on the streetbike but little of that can be put into the 2010 bike because preproduction had already started,” says BMW race boss Berti Hauser. “The cooperation between the race team and the streetbike team is very close, so they will have a lot of information from the race bike on the next ‘facelift’ of the streetbike. For the S1000RR we sell in 2010, only a few things may come from the 2009 race bike: the molecular structure of the chassis, which we changed midseason to revise the stiffness character, the swingarm, which we also changed for more traction and feedback feeling for the rider and the air intake.”
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