Danny Eslick and Geoff May had several podium finishes on the EBR 1190RS in AMA Superbike. The team seemed to be improving fairly steadily, then EBR's focus shifted to the new street bikes (1190RX) and the race teams (EBR factory team and RSR) weren't as competitive last year. Now they've moved their main effort to WSBK, which seems to be a huge leap in competition compared to AMA.
Originally Posted by Beau1k
Yeah, I think the basic design has proven itself pretty well up to this point. For such a radical approach, being able to qualify on a WSBK grid is pretty amazing. There's no reason that refinement, as opposed to reinvention, shouldn't be able to make it competitive in the future. But I have my doubts regarding the ability of the specific team to pull it off. With the complete lack of experience they came in with, I'd expect them to start very slow, but make gains quicker than all the other teams who were already running close to peak efficiency. But that doesn't seem to be happening.
But each race, I hope to see some improvement, so let's see how things look tomorrow.
As a general statement, this is way too broad to be either accurate or inaccurate. It's just wasted words.
Some of Buell's concepts like unsprung weight and centralized mass are standard design principles used today in most racing machines. Others, like the single-rotor front brake, have proven to require additional development to offer equal performance, all things considered.
So, it's a mix.
Well I was trying to be nice
I think it's pretty obvious that if any of the "innovations" were truly better the market would adapt and you would see these features adopted by the other manufacturers.
The day Yamaha has fuel in the frame, and a single rotor on the edge of the wheel I'll eat my words
With respect, isn't this a fairly simplistic view? If everybody else doesn't start using a cross-plane design, does that mean it doesn't work? If Aprilia is the only company running a V4, does that mean that engine configuration isn't valid? If most companies don't race V-Twins, does that mean the engine doesn't work?Well I was trying to be nice
I think it's pretty obvious that if any of the "innovations" were truly better the market would adapt and you would see these features adopted by the other manufacturers.
The day Yamaha has fuel in the frame, and a single rotor on the edge of the wheel I'll eat my words
What a boring world it would be if everybody used the same method to try to achieve a goal. A single rotor front brake that is in it's infancy in terms of development (compared to designs from other companies that have been refined for the past 40-50 years) is close in performance to the highly refined designs. What might happen with five more years of development, improved materials, designs, manufacturing methods etc.?
So if you select only the innovations that didn't work out so well, sure, I can see your point. Or, if you select ideas that are incompatible with the engine architecture of a given platform, sure, I can see why other manufacturers didn't select that approach. Never mind that getting the fuel under the airbox is becoming more common on inline 4s...I think it's pretty obvious that if any of the "innovations" were truly better the market would adapt and you would see these features adopted by the other manufacturers.
The day Yamaha has fuel in the frame, and a single rotor on the edge of the wheel I'll eat my words
I'm also not seeing a lot of undertail exhaust on serious new race machinery.
The front brake sucks. It's flawed. Even if the heat and wear rate problems are eventually solved, because of where the rotor is on the wheel the only real advantage to the system is in unsprung weight. Everything else about it is a performance penalty.
It's fine for casual street riders, but it takes a ton of TLC if you race that thing, even at my lame skill level. I can make it perform well enough for me, but at a higher operating cost and complexity than a typical two-rotor system without any real advantages.
So hypothetically, if you had these brakes:
isn't it likely that your braking performance would be inferior to the brakes on competing modern superbikes? My point being that it may not be the basic design, but a lack of refinement.
Of course it's also possible that the basic design is flawed and will never equal that of other bikes. I don't know, but I don't think we can compare the designs apples to apples because one design has been refined for 40 to 50 years while the other hasn't yet begun to be refined.
There are some "all things equal" trade-offs to the EBR brake design. In exchange for less unsprung weight, you have less rotor area, a higher moment of inertia, and so on.
You ask a fair question: Could the single-rotor design be refined to the point where, yes, there are fundamental engineering trade offs but it doesn't matter because the system as a whole is good enough? Perhaps. Certainly the WSBK effort won't hurt the development of the brake, and it might help it tremendously.
But right now, the dual-rotor systems out there are still better as a total set of trade-offs.
I have mine working well enough for me. But, I'm not all that fast.
So what should we expect for the future at this point? Will Hero and EBR recognize they have to put more money in to be competitive and increase their efforts . . . or will they cut their losses and give up at least for the next few years?
I hope it's the former, but fear the latter. Has anybody heard any inside information or have any reason to believe they'll go one way or the other?
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