Yamaha preferred to keep winter holidays celebration to a minimum, in favor of working hard to prepare their all-new YZF-R1 for the all-new MotoAmerica AMA Superbike Series which is set to debut this April. The team is working closely with rider Cameron Beaubier and they’ve all spent some track time at the Chuckwalla Raceway in sunny Southern California. Obviously, another episode of the “Road to Austin” follows.
Even though the first episode already showed the new R1 being worked on hard, and ready to receive race-grade components, Beaubier and his team took a stock superbike to Chuckwalla and set it free. That was because they wanted to get a better picture of what the bike can do in stock trim, and understand what changes are needed to make the bike better.
A completely new R1
The current R1 is an all-new bike, off which Yamaha only pulled the wraps at EICMA 2014 in Milan, in early November. This means that both riders and mechanics have virtually no experience with the bike, and this can be a major drawback when it comes to developing a bike which will race in a competition in 3 months’ time.
Hence the need to have a rider behind the bars of a factory-stock machine, riding it to the limit on a real, demanding track and providing as much information on how it behaves before the special parts are put together. We knew that the new R1 is a highly-capable machine, as the teaser showed that it could do 262 km/h (163 mph) at 12,000 revs, with a couple of thousands of revs still remaining until the red line.
So far, Monster Energy/Graves/Yamaha’s Cameron Beaubier looks happy with what the 2015 MY YZF-R1 can do, but we just know there are a whole lot of goodies yet to come once the R1 gets closer to the final MotoAmerica trim.
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