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‘I crashed so much they threw away my scaphoId’

Guy Martin meets... Kevin Schwantz

Guy Martin meets...Kevin Schwantz

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1993 World Champion Kevin Schwantz:

Goodwood Festival of Speed, summer 2010

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Fogarty/Rymer Kawasaki ZXR-7

the last in line

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This Kawasaki ZXR-7 didn’t know it at the time, but it was one of the final members of a dying dynasty – a TT Formula 1-spec endurance bike built about a full-race chassis.

Bikes like this don’t exist anymore, because two years after this ZXR took a young Carl Fogarty and Terry Rymer to the 1992 world endurance championship, they were banned. In their place came less exotic, mass-produced Superbike-spec endurance machinery, another nail in the coffin for originality.

The Fogarty/Rymer ZXR oozes the class that only a hand-built race bike can. Run your hands over the aluminium frame, across the milling lines and the crimp marks in the frame, and it’s almost like you can see the fingerprints of the Japanese fabricators who painstakingly crafted this chassis out of nothing, toiling deep into the night, well past the nine-to-five, amid a sea of swarf and the snap-crackle of a MIG welder.

This bike took Carl Fogarty and Terry Rymer to the 1992 world endurance championship. It’s not a mass-produced superbike, it’s a hand-made Formula 1 jewel. Words: Mat Oxley Pics: Jason Critchell

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The UK’s besT handling 90s biKeHow a 17-year-old performance bike was made to handle like modern machinery

Words Alan Seeley Photography John Noble

Words: Alan Seeley Pics: Jason Critchell

Owning Yamaha YZF750

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Once you know what it is you want from your motorcycling, you’re half way to getting it. If perfect handling is your Holy Grail, that becomes all the more attainable if you happen

to be co-owner of one of the country’s leading suspension specialists. Darren Wnukoski co-founded MCT Suspension 18 years ago at the age of 22. The firm’s burgeoning reputation makes him hard to pin down but when we do eventually get to talk to him, he describes the route he took to ownership of the UK’s best-handling YZF750.

‘I had a new Blade in 2008. Its first outing was to a trackday at Snetterton. First thing I did when I got home was to strip all the road gear off and turn it into a track bike. The engine was still warm. I knew the Blade was too much for the road. It was too easy to go too fast and get into trouble,’ he says, without a hint of apology for his actions.

‘That experience got me to thinking about what I really wanted as a road bike. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Yamaha YZF750 but could never afford one back when they were new,’ says Darren.

His search for the right bike took close on a year. ‘It absolutely had to be red, black and white, in good shape and unmessed with,’ he says with the assurance of a man who knows what he wants.

Eventually the used bike lottery that is eBay threw up the perfect machine. The YZF was in Manchester, which is almost the ends of the earth for the tractor boys at MCT, but when Darren placed the winning bid it was off to the north west of England to pick it up.

‘It cost me £1700, which felt about the right money,’ he says. What didn’t feel right was the bike’s suspension, especially to one as highly attuned as Darren inevitably is in that department. ‘Put it down to rose-tinted spectacles or whatever. But I took it out for a ride and it felt dated and old.’

Less determined and focused types would have flogged the Yam and bought a sports naked, but Darren knew what the YZF needed and how to achieve it.

‘There wasn’t anything to be done with the stock fork internals,’ says Darren. ‘We happened to have a pair of 05 ZX-10R cartridges in the workshop looking for a new home. They looked likely candidates.’

Sure enough, machined and modified for the same diameter and stroke as the YZF’s now redundant fork internals, and fitted with MCT’s own 20mm piston kits they were ready to grace the front end after two hours’ work.

With stronger springs and thinner oil – ‘you can use lighter oil once you have proper pistons in’ – the fork legs were ready to be refitted. Darren also decided to go for a larger air gap

Words Alan Seeley Photography John Noble

Take one £1700 Yamaha, add 18 year’s worth of suspension expertise. Result: the UK’s best

handling YZF750

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In the last couple of years a group of British specials builders have been creating the world’s finest nakeds. Jon Keeling’s Spondon Zed is the latest Brit mind-blower

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Racefit’s workshop is full of bikes, but all eyes are on the kandy-coloured, Spondon-framed Kawasaki Z1. And it’s making the atmosphere awkward. Jon

Keeling, one of Racefit’s directors, bought the bike as an unfinished project from Mark Toon. Both Mark and Jon are here for the PB photoshoot.

It’s hard to explain but I feel like we’re being encouraged to ogle Jon’s beautiful, glamorous, rapacious new wife, who just happens to be Mark’s somewhat dowdy ex-girlfriend. You know the one, worked in TGI Fridays, blackheads on her nose, belly button piercing went septic, bad VPL… the one Mark dumped without ever realising her full potential. Well look at her now. Perhaps it’s just me thinking this. I might be too sensitive. Anyway, the situation is not that simple. Mark built up the project over eight long years, then, with very little left to do, he decided to start RCD,

Spondon Kawasaki Z1

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EnginEWiseco 1015 kit; Kent cams; stainless valves and guides; adjustable cam sprockets; Ray Stringer gas-flow; Tsubaki cam chain; Barnett heavy duty clutch; hydraulic clutch conversion; Mikuni TMR 32mm carbs with red anodised inlet trumpets; Dyna 2000 ignition and mini coils; Taylor plug leads; Earl’s oil cooler and hoses; kickstart gear removed; APE kickstart blanking plate

whEElsDymag H-section magnesium wheels: 16x3.5in front, 17x6.25in rear; AP radial front calipers

ChassisSpondon aluminium tube frame and swingarm; Marzocchi RAC50 forks; RCD top yoke with Renthal bar clamps; Marzocchi bottom yoke; WP twin Fusion shocks

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Hillclimbing for the first time

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The man with the beard says it’s time to go. You dump the clutch.

The next 45 seconds are full of blurred trees, saved slides and

an ever-climbing piece of tarmac. At the end you stop.

You’re covered in sweat.Your tyres aren’t even warm...

This is hillclimbing

Words: Matt Wildee and Mark White Pics: John Noble

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This is hillclimbing