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AGV Backmarker: Leaving Las Vegas
July 9, 2009 by Mark Gardiner
Filed under Backmarker
It took about an hour for our busload of journalists to get from Henderson to Pahrump, NV. I’m not sure when the road course at Spring Mountain Motorsport Ranch was built, but if it wasn’t for the track, the town would be best known for the fact that it’s the nearest place to ‘Vegas with legal brothels. A couple of ‘em put the ‘rump’ in Pahrump.
The twisting, technical little Spring Mountain Motorsport Ranch track ensured that the literbikes were a real handful. Dunlop told us that the new Sportmax Q2 had an 'Intuitive Response Profile' that made mid-corner corrections easier. Unlike the better riders at the test, I actually had to make a few such corrections. Courtesy of Dunlop/Brian J. Nelson
Anyway, we were there to test a different kind of rubber. Although it would be a wild track to actually race on, Spring Mountain’s a great training track and a pretty good tire testing layout. Turns 1 & 2 provide long, long constant-radius opportunities to test edge grip. We weren’t using the ‘Radical Loop’ portion of the course. Instead we turned right at Turn 3, which was the only spot on the track that I found any noticeable bumps. It lacked a cresting, leaned-over acceleration zone (which I would have liked for the purposes of evaluating the stability of the tires) but the last turn before the back straightaway provided a good chance to brake hard while finishing a fast left and trail-braking into a tight right-hander. Considering how dusty the environment was, the track was pretty clean and felt grippy and abrasive.
For the purposes of evaluating tires, condition were almost too good. I would have liked to start the day on cold-to-the-touch asphalt, in order to have a better sense of how the new Q2s perform while getting up to temperature. More bumps, elevation changes, and a crappier surface would have better simulated the real roads where 95% of the tires will actually be used.
David Watkins, who's sort of the U.K.'s Jim Allen, was over for this launch. He told me that since Pirelli had become the spec tire in BSB, Dunlop was focusing on winning in the European national championships that were still 'open competition' among tire suppliers, like Holland and France, and on real roads racing. Dunlop recently won every solo race on the Isle of Man, and won ever class at the epic NW200 race this spring, too. Those races are a far better test of sport bike tires (or should I say 'tyres'?) than any short circuit race anyway. David Watkins, who's sort of the U.K.'s Jim Allen, was over for this launch. He told me that since Pirelli had become the spec tire in BSB, Dunlop was focusing on winning in the European national championships that were still 'open competition' among tire suppliers, like Holland and France, and on real roads racing. Dunlop recently won every solo race on the Isle of Man, and won ever class at the epic NW200 race this spring, too. Those races are a far better test of sport bike tires (or should I say 'tyres'?) than any short circuit race anyway. MG photo
That said, the tires didn’t seem to need any warming up early in the Nevada morning. The edge grip was pretty much race quality, pretty much instantly. Even the fastest testers on hand seemed baffled by the tires’ ability simply grip and rail through corners. I heard lots of almost awestruck comments to the effect of, “I couldn’t make them slide.”
Despite the racy compound and profile of the tires, they provided a great balance of confidence-inspiring stability and easy turn-in. Dunlop bragged to us about the new profile’s ‘intuitive response.’ I suppose that means that the amount of turn-in or lean you get is what you expect, for any given steering effort. I’d say that was true in my case. (It’s not always true; I’ve ridden on bike/tire combos that took a big counter-steering effort to initiate lean but then wanted to fall into too tight of a turn.) The Q2s really were intuitive.
The tight and in places tricky and technical Pahrump course is no place for a literbike. The fleet of test bikes included a few GSX-R600s and (until it was crashed) a ZX-6R. The journos practically fought over those. At one point, I purposely took out an R1. That’s a machine that clearly isn’t hampering Ben Spies or Josh Hayes this year, but I don’t get along with it. That made it a very good test of the Q2 tires’ willingness to correct lines in mid-corner. They were great at that.
The Dunlop crew were changing out the tires pretty much every session. Even guys who can hold their own in AMA Superbike races were coming in after half-hour sessions in the heat of mid-day with tires looking fresh. Jason Pridmore told me that when the Qualifier tires came out, four years ago, he was asked to put in a few really hard laps on them before the press launch. He went out and did a race simulation and found them so grippy and yet so durable that he decided to use them, instead of DOT race tires, for his STAR school. I believe the engineers who told me that the Q2 meets or exceeds Qualifier performance in every area, including durability, so I feel confident in saying that most riders on most bikes would get a summer’s riding including a few track days out of these tires. I imagine Pridmore’s school will just switch to Q2s as they come available.
With 600 and 1000cc crotch rockets at my disposal, the unthreatening Suzuki Gladius was there as a whipping-boy. The thing is, despite a suspension that was occasionally overwhelmed (or perhaps because of it) it was the most entertaining bike of the day. With very little tweaking, it would make a low-operating-cost track day bike. Courtesy of Dunlop/Brian J. Nelson
Dunlop told us that they’d hoped to have a Kawasaki ZX-14 or a Hayabusa for us to test the tires on, too. Frankly, either of those bikes would have been wretched excess on that track we had at our disposal (although I might have taken one out to a deserted stretch of Nevada highway to test high speed stability.) At the other end of the spectrum, the most fun I had all day was riding a Suzuki Gladius. Although the stock suspension was a little overwhelmed by the high level of grip and the twisty track, it once again proved that it’s more fun to ride a slow bike fast than a fast bike slow. The relatively low power and wide bars providing lots of leverage made me feel that I was riding it, not the other way ’round. (That’s a nice change from the 1000s. Riding them is like being invited into a cage full of lions. “Don’t worry,” the trainer says, “they’re tame. Just, whatever you do, don’t show any fear.”)
In between sessions, I suppose it was natural that conversation turned to Dunlop’s role as a supplier of spec tires to all classes in the AMA Superbike Championship. I’ve heard some negative comments from the Superbike class riders, particularly. Words to the effect of, They’re two seconds a lap slower than last year’s race tires; they don’t last the race distance… I’m not sure if I see those problems where I could measure then, ie on timesheets. But looking back on the first-gen Pirelli spec tires in World Superbike, they were several seconds a lap off the previous years’ pace and were (no pun intended) roundly criticized. There were lots of observers and more than a few participants who viewed the spec tire rule as a nail in the SBK coffin. But Pirelli—even though as a spec supplier they didn’t have to—put a big test and development program in place, the tires improved a lot, and now no one’s complaining (except other manufacturers, who’d like a piece of the action in a resurgent championship.
![And now for something completely different... Last week, I borrowed this amazing bike—a BMW K1300GT—so I'd have a vehicle to use when I rode up to spend the day at Jay Leno's garage. The trip to collect this bike has nothing to do with motorcycles at all, really. It was made by train, bus, and on foot. The rail and pedestrian, er, legs of the journey were uneventful. But the bus ride was another story altogether[http://www.youtube.com/ttracer2002]. Remember that movie, a few years back, where if the bus slowed down it would blow up? That bus ride was nothing compared to the ride I took to pick up this BMW...<i>Mary Pinizzotto photo</i>](http://www.roadracerx.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/bm20090709_bmw.jpg "bm20090709_bmw")
And now for something completely different... Last week, I borrowed this amazing bike—a BMW K1300GT—so I'd have a vehicle to use when I rode up to spend the day at Jay Leno's garage. The trip to collect this bike has nothing to do with motorcycles at all, really. It was made by train, bus, and on foot. The rail and pedestrian, er, legs of the journey were uneventful. But the bus ride was another story altogether (See video below). Remember that movie, a few years back, where if the bus slowed down it would blow up? That bus ride was nothing compared to the ride I took to pick up this BMW...Mary Pinizzotto photo
Dunlop has found that the European market is very different than ours. European sport bike riders commute more than we do; they’re more sensitive to tire mileage and wet grip. The U.S. sport bike rider is a fair weather rider who puts in lower mileage and is strictly after performance. That was another reason Dunlop was desperate to become the AMA’s spec tire.
If that’s you, if you’re obsessed with sheer sport bike tire performance, you’ll probably want to try a set of Dunlop Q2s the next time you need replacement rubber. Based on Backmarker’s day in Pahrump—and no, I didn’t spend the night there, which would take a different kind of rubber—I’d say you won’t be disappointed.
