As our regular readers will know, after an ‘interesting’ year of real world testing the car is now as ready as ever to leave for America.
We have secured some storage in California and our plan is to get all of the racing vehicles out there ASAP. Once in California, all the team then needs to do is fly out before any event, get the vehices to the track and find out how fast they go!
There is a reason as to why we haven’t left yet. We have been secretly working on another project.
Sssh!
Upon our return in 2018 the entire team was so inspired and enthusiastic that an amount of that was bound to rub off on others.
A very good friend of Ian’s, who he met during his time working on the Bloodhound SSC project, was also called Ian. (Yes, this is going to get confusing).
After spending some time with Ian and the team, the second Ian asked about the possibility of our building him a machine to fulfill his dream of racing at Bonneville.
Ian is a massive supporter of British engineering and innovation and so had a couple of conditions to his plans.
Firstly, he wanted a motorcycle.
Secondly it had to be of British manufacture and preferably a twin cylinder.
Ian and Ian hatched a plan to try and find a complete bike, that wasn’t worth saving and restoring back to original condition.
We ended up with a Triumph TR6P engine in a frame that had been ‘chopped’ some time in the 1970’s and then left unattended. A perfect mix of completeness and lack of future value.
The Triumph officianado’s amongst you will have spotted that a TR6P is a 650cc twin cylinder engined bike that was supplied to many police forces all around the world.
As you can see from the above images, the donor bike was both ugly and neglected but more importantly complete. This meant all of the necessary brackets and fittings would not need fabricating.
As quickly as we could we stripped the bike down and built up a running chassis.
The engine was stripped.
We took some advice and had some modifications done by local Triumph tuner and ex-racer Dave Degens of Dresda fame. He was intrigued by our ideas and let us into a few of his performance secrets.
We decided not to go ‘too mad’ with the compression ratio and performance tuning as we had another trick up our sleeve to make the project ‘interesting’.
We rebuilt the engine replacing all of the bearings and seals plus any other work we deemed necessary once inside.
After carrying out a lot of research and talking to other Triumph motorcycle Bonneville racers, there seemed to be a common thread with the issues they encountered.
Because of the height above sea level and changes in air pressure caused by the temperature variance, maintaining the correct air/fuel ratio is very difficult. Particularly in an engine that will be running close to 100%, if the ratio is wrong the results could be catastrophic.
With this in mind the decision was made to convert the bike to electronic fuel injection. Using a system based on the original EFi on our car.
Once cleaned and made ready it very quickly became obvious that the frame was not going to be strong enough for our plans and the existing oil tank was also not fit for purpose.
Luckily, we are part of a team and as such we have access to some highly skilled people. Harry Smith lead fabricator for the car was more than happy to step in. Making a new oil tank from scratch, cuttinging the fuel tank in half to fit a fuel return pipe in the right place before welding it back together and substantially strengthening the chassis.
Once the bike had been assembled, the wiring loom fabricated and all of the necessary sensors and controllers fitted the next step was to get a basic map in the ECU (Engine Control Unit).
So off to the dyno.
We had a basic map and only a few teething faults stopped us from finalising the injection map ready for Bonneville.
The next step was to get the bike stripped back down and painted, whilst the ‘rat-rod’ look is quite fashionable we wanted something that both Ian and the team would be proud to be associated with.
We encouraged Ian (New Ian) to do as much of the work himself as possible, so should there be a problem at Bonneville he has some idea how it’s held together.
He is certainly enthusiastic about the project and seems to enjoy something different from his daily life.
His choice of colours and design of the bike produced something that looks fantastic.
Our next step was to get that final map done on a dyno. Here we could finish the set up of the tune and Ian would get the chance for a practice run before we packaged the bike for it’s trip to America.
At this point reality bit and the gods of speed reminded us that going fast is never easy.
We had made an injection system using a collection of parts from other motorcycles and ‘left-over’ parts from some old racing Jensen.
However our system was a little too simplistic. We were using a single injector and a single ignition coil to minimise the possibility of failure. This only works on this design of Triumph engine and means in effect, the spark and the fuel are at the same time for both cylinders.
As a peculiarity of this set up, we left ourselves open to a phenomenon called charge robbing.
Under heavy load and high revolutions one cylinder was ‘stealing’ the fuel from the other. The result being one side was running very rich and the other very weak. If allowed to continue this would damage the engine as well as losing a lot of power.
Once again the strength of the team came to the fore and our friend in America, Bruce from F&B performance came to our aid.
Using his many years of experience he was more than happy to redesign our inlet manifold to incorporate two injectors.
After another quick trip to our friends at Think Automotive, specialists in automotive liquid management for supplies we were ready to finish off the bike.
This did involve adapting our existing wiring loom and reworking our high pressure fuel lines to allow for the new and extra parts involved.
As is always the way with F&B products it was fit and forget. Once mounted and connected the bike fired up on the first attempt.
Result a couple of happy Ians.
