If you’re planning to attend Daytona Bike Week, you’ll be pleased to know that there are some interesting stories heading into the March 11 Daytona 200. Yamaha’s move to the Formula Xtreme class is one, and of course Honda will be fielding both their in-house team and Erion Racing. But another development that has been lighting up the internet lately is Buell’s announcement that they’ve got a new model—the XBRR—that’s specifically intended for the Formula Xtreme class. We spoke with the man himself—Erik Buell—yesterday, and he confirmed that they’ll have four bikes entered in the race (including one piloted by British GP racer Jeremy McWilliams).
By CJ
Photos courtesy of Buell

RRX: Hi, Erik. Can you summarize the concept behind the XBRR?
Erik Buell: What we wanted to do is provide a privateer with a way of going racing by modifying the XB to fit in the Formula Xtreme class. It’s the only class that exists that our bikes can run in, and it’s set up so that the bikes are allowed a lot of modifications. One of the problems is always for a private guy to do that—I was a privateer myself—so we said, “Why don’t we modify them at the factory?” That way the privateer can get them and get parts from us instead of chasing around to this company to get a piston, this company for a valve guide, and this company for brake pads—all those things that kill you when you’re a privateer. You don’t have a staff of team mechanics doing that work for you. It kind of fell back to my old, original thing that I started Buell to do back in ’83, which was to build privateer race bikes. At that time, there wasn’t a good choice for Formula One guys to buy, and I saw this as an opportunity to do something similar, although it’s based on a street bike and not a pure racer—thinking about what racers need to make their life easy.

So Formula Xtreme was the focus.
Again, Formula Xtreme is an interesting class. All the other classes are basically for inline four-cylinders. The rules are written for them, and while the Ducati floats in maybe in Superbike, they’re pretty much all written around that. When the AMA changed the Formula Xtreme class a couple of years ago, they had canceled the Pro Thunder class because they had too many classes, and they got a huge amount of complaints from spectators, as well as riders and stuff, saying, “Now your classes are all for four cylinders; there’s no class for anything else, and that’s crazy. There’s nothing for BMWs or Triumphs or anything else—what are you thinking?”

They said, “Well, we’ve got three classes for 1,000cc inline fours—between Superstock, Superbike and Formula Xtreme—and that doesn’t make any sense. Let’s just change Formula Xtreme.” It was already called “Formula,” so they set out some basic engine specifications based on what the power of certain engine types are. I know they got some help with that from some people like Kevin Cameron—guys who are real experts in this area. Because there are formulas that will tell you what the power capability is with certain engine configurations.

You guys get quite a displacement advantage.
An air-cooled twin is as different at producing power per cc as a multi-cylinder four-stroke is to a two-stroke. People were going, “Oh, how come they get a bigger motor?” Well, Kenny Roberts was actually winning with a three-cylinder Proton 500 [two-stroke]—he won a GP with Jeremy McWilliams on it—and somehow or another, Honda was allowed twice the displacement, plus two more cylinders [on their RC211V four-stroke]. And nobody bitched about that. So there was a formula, and two-strokes bailed out, but it’s very similar, and the differences are that dramatic. And so that’s the way the formula’s written, to allow Moto Guzzis or BMWs or any of the other types of engines that are big-displacement twins, have relatively long strokes, and are air-cooled. [ These engines] do other things well—they get great fuel economy and have great emissions, which is also kind of like the difference between four-strokes and two-strokes. It’s just another kind of engine.

That part was very interesting to us. What we’ve basically done is increase the displacement of the engine to meet the class regulations. The rules say you start with a street bike, but you’re allowed to do unlimited modifications to the engines. You could do crazy things like set the cams way up high on the engine and make the push rods one-inch long so you could spin the engine at 9,800 rpm. But what we wanted to do is say, “We’re going to build this thing to the letter of the rule and to the intent of the rule.” We spent a lot of time talking to the AMA, saying, “What’s the goal here?” They said, “Really what we’re trying to do is make an interesting class that has fair competition between different-sounding kinds of bikes and stuff, but we also want it to be affordable, and we don’t want works, unobtanium bikes in there. We want guys on private teams to be able to buy bikes and run them.”

So then you had to prepare a bike.
We said, “Okay, that’s your intent, and we’ve also read the letter of your rules.” So we [knew] that to make a 1350, we needed to make the crank stronger, and we needed to make a better oiling system on it—do some of those things. It required us to modify the cases and a number of other parts, but again, it’s still an XB. Now the frame is a standard XB except the fuel capacity is increased a little bit, which is allowed by the rules. The swingarm is a stock swingarm with pieces added on the back to allow chain adjustment, because you have to change gearing at different tracks. If I could run a belt, I would—they use less power and they weigh less—but you just can’t change gearing. We’re still running the single [perimeter] disc…. We just changed the things that we needed to change. We gave the guys top-level suspension and lightweight wheels and all the things that you normally do. We really went out and looked and investigated what it costs to take a CBR600 or a 749 Ducati and prep it for the class. What are the things that, if you want to run well, you have to put on the bike ? We wanted to have our bike be a really affordable choice that makes a lot of sense, and try to build it to be very reliable.

It’s a one-stop shop. Instead of selling kits, we build the bikes at the plant and convert them at the plant, and sell them as race-ready from here. That way, we know they’re put together right. The guy doesn’t have to throw away a bunch of parts that you’d have to with a kit. And all the parts are available from us with a part number. Yeah, the pistons come from Wiseco and the rings from here, but you don’t have to go chasing them around, which is a real pain when you’re a privateer. Most privateers are racing on the weekend and have a day job. They come home at night and work on their race bike. They’ll come home at night and go, “Oh, I forgot to order such-and-such; that company’s not open!” You’ve got to order parts from 50 different companies; your rearsets come from Graves, your forks come from WP, your shock came from Penske. It’s what we call a purchasing-engineering job. It’s a full-time job for somebody. Having been there as a privateer, that sucks!

We have a good setup here that we built over supporting the Lightning series and then the Thunderbike. We have a little team of guys who are really good at supporting privateers and getting parts to them. We answer the phone, and everyone knows who we are. That’s all set up the same way. We’ll actually bring trucks to the track and have spares there, plus all the stuff will be available in one day. If you call in, we can ship it out the next day. That will help privateers too.

You’ve mentioned a couple of times that the XBRR is based on the XB. Some have questioned the bike’s eligibility for FX, since the press release said it was designed “exclusively for closed course competition,” and the rules say the class is supposed to be based on street-legal machinery.
We just called it a name because we did, but it is a modified bike, and it meets the rules. It seems silly to call it the bike that it’s based off when it’s changed.

Does the AMA still have to make a ruling on that?
No, that was done a long time ago, so it’s definitely approved. We have a letter from them saying it’s approved.

Part 2 >>