Project Spare is go

‘I’ve seen your website. Hovercraft racing looks like fun like,” says the bloke with a thick Black Country accent and a TZR engine for sale. I’m sure it does look like fun like, but this engine won’t be going anywhere near water. Unless things go very badly wrong at Barn. Second thoughts, maybe a hovercraft might not be such a bad idea.
Rucksack and I turned up at this bloke’s house in Wolverhampton to collect the engine and running gear after winning the eBay auction. £250 for the motor, carbs, electrics, airbox, radiator and throttle seemed a good deal. That was virtually everything we needed to turn a chassis that Rangi give us from a donor bike to a spare bike.
We won’t be able to take it to every race, but it might get us out of the cart if we trash one of our bikes and don’t have time to fix it before the next round. Most tracks are within an hour and a half of our workshop at Wittering so we could get it on a Saturday night in a real pinch. Loads of mates have spoken about having a go at YPM, so having another bike might get them out there on a loaner and then into racing on their own bike. It worked for me when I borrowed Rangi2 in 2007, and for Rucksack when he rode Tyler’s spare in 08. Maybe we can get some more people into YPM. Already our mate Weeble is thinking about a second crack at it after doing Donington in 2008, and a couple of others are keen too.
The motor we bought looks in good nick, but I was annoyed to find it had a 1KT CDI, which the YPM forum chat suggests might as well be used as a paperweight because it acts as the restrictor for the scaredycat Japanese TZR owners. So we may need to get another CDI for it.
The engine will be pretty standard to start with and we might have to stick with stock pipes as I’ve only got one spare JollyMoto spanny so we’ll see what turns up there.
Much to my distaste, it probably ain’t gonna be a pretty bike. It’ll use bashed and scuffed bits from the spares bucket, and probably mismatched bodywork from a variety of different sources.
I’ve got a few days off over Christmas so there might be some workshop time ahead. And if anyone’s got any bits that will help us with the project, give us a shout. We’ll update the project as we go along, so it’ll probably be the perfect guide on how not to build a TZR race bike.
Right, I’m off to look up that hovercraft racing site.