So the 749R engine is reacquainted with her old home. It's no 5 minute job but soon enough I find myself loading the appropriate map into the Nemesis ECU, and it’s done….I think. I have a self-congratulatory/Dutch courage beer, contemplating that suddenly-useful-again "Start" button. I still can’t think of a reason not to attempt a start so I give it a kick in the guts........2nd prod of the button and it barks into life, not sounding quite as angry as the RS, but still every bit as pissed off as I remembered.
I’m grinning away, feeling pretty cock-a-doodle-doo with myself….right up until I realise the oil pressure light hasn’t gone out on the Falcon dash. Oh shit! I shut it down and run through a mental tick-sheet of filling the oil pump as best I could during assembly, plugging the harness back together, priming the oil system etc and nothing untoward springs to mind. I fire it up again, with my ears swivelling like radar dishes listening for metal on metal, and quickly check the multi-meter I've connected to the pressure switch: and give praise to the mechanical gods when it looks healthy.
With that my galloping heart rate slows...but the light is still glaring at me like Arnie's Cyberdyne Systems "Terminator" eye. Disassembling the harness and front end has me none the wiser. WTF? I check and re-check everything, plugging in the laptop to confirm the ECU is seeing the healthy oil pressure digital input, which it is, and is displayed as healthy on the ECU monitoring page....just not on the dash. We’re talking CANBUS comm’s and binary code between the ECU and the dash so what else can you do once connections are verified: “You there, Mr 0, you should be over there next to Mr 1…not that 1, the other 1…”
Bugger it. A quick romp up and down my 350m drive-way has me smiling as I do a fine job scaring the parrots away from the fruit in the orchard next door, the lil’ honey feeling and sounding rudely healthy as I blast back down the drive. But the oil light stays on.
I've reached the end of my (very) limited serial link comm's skills: "Is everything plugged in? Yup. Ok, I'm done." All I can do is send off some smoke signals to the few people I know with some experience and hope to hear something useful in return....
Soon the 2nd set of 2V pulleys and new lock nuts etc arrive and I hook into cam timing the 851. The inlets are easy enough but it takes a bit of time to get my brain around the figures I need to see for the exhaust….gawd, what I wouldn’t give to be on the right hand side of the intelligence bell curve rather than the left. But after filling 3 A4 pages with the empirical measure-calculate-adjust-repeat calcs and the odd “Woops, wrong way…” it’s finally all done. There are easier/faster ways of doing it but I didn't have the tooling, and like I said, wrong side of the bell curve.
Has it made much of a difference? I’m not sure yet, but what was a nice idle is slightly less so, it's a bit more inclined to stall and is harder to start, so I’m hoping this is indicative of pinching something from the bottom end and putting it further up the rev range for a healthier top end. Again, hypothetically speaking, it would have been great to form some sort of 1st hand impression via something like a short scoot around my semi-rural back roads while bedding in new brake pads. But we both know I have far more willpower than that, don't we? (insert fingers crossed behind my back here)
Then along comes that alluring, she-devil "Temptation", dangling a track day right in front of me. I could almost see her smug smile as she watched me squirm: awwww man, I’ve barely put the 749R back together, am I ready to break it again so soon? And the 851 really needs another tune, should I really be giving it a fistful? Gawd, will it even make it around the narrow hairpin at Collie seeing it has the turning circle of a supertanker since fitting the Corsa carbon intake?
As you will have noticed from my beer habit (word used deliberately) I can resist anything except temptation, so I take the band-aid approach: stop fiddling at the edges and just rip it off, get it over with. The refreshed 749R engine is going to have to prove itself at some stage, might as well be now, and I’ll give the 851 a shakedown, properly stretching its legs to finish up.
I check the oil pressure switch again, still healthy, so I “fix” the dash light with some tape and ignore the “CHECK OIL P” displayed on the dash. Hmmmm, tyres…tyres are a bit of an issue. I still had the same barely used 16.5” Pirelli’s on the 749R that had last run 2 years ago……dated 2013, they were a few years old even then, now coming up to 6 years old (!). Now my “shed” is a converted cool-room, no windows whatsoever, well sealed and insulated, so there were no drama’s with UV degradation or temperature extremes, pretty much the ideal environment to store tyres. It was either use ‘em or chuck ‘em. It was only an "exploratory" test/track day, so I used the old trick of hitting them with some tyre buffer (the stuff they use to clean tyres/tubes rubber prior to patching) to freshen them up and left it at that.
It was about this point someone would have seen an empty cartoon speech bubble hovering over my head. I knew I’d fitted new timing belts to both bikes, I knew the tensioner pulleys are supposed to be rotated anti-clockwise to tension the belts. But in the interim I'd read something online about belts being shredded if the tensioner is inadvertently rotated clockwise…..this jangled something in my brain because the correct anti-clockwise rotation seems counter-intuitive, making the belt bend radius sharper. Which you'd think would be undesirable. So I knew the correct rotation but for the life of me all I could remember was thinking about it, not actually doing it…so I pulled the covers and checked. Thankfully all good, ‘cos I needed to load up and get on my way.
And this is where we're heading, the track up there under the title, with the lighter coloured extension on the left still under construction: Collie Motorplex. It sounds pretty impressive but at this stage it was just 1.6km long, barely getting out of 3rd gear on a big bike but surprising fun:
I eventually get to the track, get set up, and try not to fidget like a junky looking for a hit.
With zero confidence in anything, I’d entered group 3 rather than the race group, so I had plenty of time to, sort warmers, check tyre pressures, and give the 749R a good warm up. I left it idling while I went to grab something from the car and came back to find it had stopped. The bloke next door looked up and says casually
“Oh, it was on fire so we shut it down”
"Oh cool, thanks....hang on a minute…did you just say “FIRE?!”
“Yeah, smoke pouring out of there…” he says pointing under the tank. “There’s something against the exhaust”
I could have booted myself fair up the Khyber Pass: in checking the belt tensioner rotation (you wondered why I yapped about that, eh?) I’d tucked the breather hose up under the exhaust to remove the belt cover and in my rush to get packed up, and as nervous as a bride on her wedding night, I hadn't refitted it. Embarrassed much?
Luckily the hose wasn’t too far gone so I just reinstalled it, all the while trying to shrink inside my leathers.
Finally, we’re due out and I wait until everyone has gone before I cruise out. Straight away the sweet lil' 749R feels great, like picking up with an old mate right where you left off, and handles in a different league to the ’06 R1 road bike I’d done the odd track day on. The R1 is quite well sorted suspension-wise but the 749R is just so much more eager in hunting for the apex, and I’m finding myself having to pick it up and take two bites at corners while I recalibrate. And the engine is a little pearler, pulling with the lovely hard edged sound of a big wood chipper getting down to business.
I’m a few laps in, the mechanically sensitive hairs on the back of my neck are starting to calm down and I’m getting a bit more enthusiastic with the gas. Winding it up onto the short main straight, it’s pulling like a lil’ train and then…..crickets. The engine has completely died. One minute I’m 9000rpm in 3rd, the next second I’m coasting, without the slightest hiccup in between.
I can’t really say I was surprised, more resigned really, but what am I going to find? I tentatively look down to see the dash with the “LOW OIL P” displayed: dickhead, what did you expect to see? I check the lanyard cut out, all good, cycle the kill-switch and let out the clutch I’d automatically pulled in, only to feel the back end all slippy as it refuses ti fire. Oh God...it really is an oil issue, as I picture oil on the back tyre, and $$$ signs flash before my eyes as I coast into the pit entry.
I pull over and look down at the back tyre and see spots of…wait…is that petrol? Yup. Checking under the tank I can see one of the fuel line quick connectors has popped off the tank. Either the good folks investigating my smoking bike or I, in replacing the breather hose, must have partially dislodged it. I pop it back on and it feels secure but there is a small pool of fuel in the belly-pan so I push the bike back past the row of enquiring faces and into my bay, doing my very best “nothing-to-see-here-just-a-plug-chop…” type walk. How does it go? “Yesterday I was known by no one, today I was known by all….”
But that was the end of the typically recalcitrant 14 year old teenager behaviour from the 749R, she ran faultlessly after that and even the antique tyres held their own, giving good drive and never putting a foot out of line. I really put the acid on myself and the bike in the last session, playing rabbit to the hounds as I jumped out in front of everyone and put my head down, no-one came past (who knows when the fast guys went out though) so all in all it was a pretty good hit-out.
So the 749R goes back onto the trailer, looking pretty chuffed with herself and chattering to whoever will listen in a series of clicks, clinks and tinks as she cools down, and the 851 goes on the warmers. Near enough to 7 years, this would be the first time I’d ridden the ol’ girl with any serious intent
I fuss over/under/around it like a mother hen, determined not to shoot myself in the foot again, and soon enough the 2 minute call comes. I let everyone else head off, take a deep breath, and follow….
….and everything actually feels pretty good for the first time on track. I approach the hairpin fully expecting to wobble off into the bushes, or flop unceremoniously on my side like a landed fish as I hit the steering lock stop, but that was one box safely ticked.
Funny, in isolation the old 851 looks bigger/bulkier than the lean looking 749R....but it’s all about proportions. Put them together and the 851 shrinks, becoming short and stubby rather than big and fat. And that’s pretty much how it feels on track, as though it has been squeezed at each end, shortening it and puffing it out a little in the middle. If you have duck’s disease with your bum too close to the ground you'd love it, as the pegs aren’t so much up under the seat, more like the seat has been lowered in relation to the pegs.
The throttle is quite heavy with the Electraeon fast turn throttle cam fitted at the throttle bodies. You have to make a conscious effort to give it 100% but the noise emanating from the airbox is a handy reminder, striking a much more guttural note when she really starts heavy breathing and you find yourself listening for it.
The thing has got some serious stomp though and I'm starting to think about hassling some much newer machinery when….crickets. Again. In almost the exact same spot as the 749R issue, it dies an instant death. Who knew an active race track could seem so damn quiet? I coast down the pit entry (again) and start fiddling: power on/off…nope, rh killswitch…nope, lanyard switch…you bewdy! I trickle through the pits and with the simple issue sorted I’m kinda relieved/kinda pissed off with myself and just relax into it, pushing it a bit harder. And the old girl loves it.
I had no idea what to expect from a 30 year old bike, but it handles waaaay better than I thought, there’s certainly nothing wallowy or loose about it. The OEM black Brembo’s and organic pads on cast iron rotors brake well enough, just needing a firmer squeeze of the lever but I can still (just) get by with 2 fingers. With the adjustable shock linkage set to the neutral position it even trail brakes without wanting to stand up.
One thing I definitely need to sort is the Scitsu tacho which is reading ridiculously low, so I’m just shifting by feel/ear.
It doesn't have the refinement of a modern bike but if you didn't know what it was you wouldn't pick it as being 3 decades old, I mean Madonna was still a fresh faced young thing when these came out....yeah, that puts things in perspective eh?! Lol.
