SR Archive: Cycle Motion Suzuki GSX-R1146

This article was originally published in the April 1996 issue of Sport Rider.

When the Cycle Motion Suzuki crew wheeled into and glanced around the Daytona paddock for the first race of the ’95 season, not a single member of the team could see themselves ending the season with the AMA SuperTeam’s number one plate. On the famed tri-oval, their GSX-R—stock with the exception of smoothbore carbs, headwork, pistons and a pipe—was no match for the exotic, overpowered Dutchman Yamaha YZF1000 and Erion Honda CBR900RR, but riders Mark McDaniel and Dave Deveau collected a third place, happy to be there and hoping for a season of filling the bottom stair of the podium.

The next round at Pomona, they moved up to second, displacing Dutchman in the final laps; by the third round at Laguna Seca, they won the race outright and captured the series points lead. This from a team that was new to not only their Suzuki equipment, but the AMA series as well, after years of campaigning Hondas in WERA. According to team owner/manager Landers K. Sevier, who, to use his words, is in charge of “organizing and soliciting the dough,” it’s no coincidence that the team’s first win coincided with signing Hyper-Cycle’s Carry Andrew on as crew chief and bike/engine builder. Andrew’s years of AMA endurance experience (including the national championship in 1988) paid off in everything from bike preparation to team strategy. Team riders McDaniels, Deveau and later Aaron Yates were hungry privateers with an appetite for all the horsepower Andrew could give them and a desire to show up the more established teams. In the eight seven events, Cycle Motion won four, finishing second and third with a single DNF at Mid-Ohio. The team clinched the championship in the final round with a win, a fitting end to their season.

Against the exotic parts and materials on the other top SuperTeams bikes, Cycle Motion’s machine looks decidedly stock: no six-speed close-ratio transmission, no trick brakes, no aftermarket fork and not even an electric shifter. It’s intentional, too. “We didn’t want to out-trick ourselves,” explained Andrew. “We just wanted to keep the changes simple and productive.” And the riders weren’t complaining, either. McDaniel has little other than praise for the machine, saying it was “somehow much easier to ride than the competition’s CBR900RR and YZF1000. It worked well at every track,” McDaniel recalled. “We never needed to change springs or anything major.”

Indeed, in our few laps on the Cycle Motion machine, we were immediately comfortable doing things we shouldn’t have. Things like effortlessly spinning the rear tire out of 145 mph turn eight and wheelying out 100-mph turn nine while leaned over with the<$> rear tire still spinning. There’s something magic about the Cycle Motion bike’s relatively long, relaxed chassis; even when it’s doing things that should be downright frightening, it inspires confidence.

As well as its chassis performs, it’s the engine that takes center stage. Andrew’s 1146cc powerplant responds to the throttle at any rpm, in any gear, with a distinctive hard-hitting immediacy that we’ve felt in only one other machine: the 1205cc bike he brought to our UFO ’95 competition. We’ve ridden normally aspirated bikes with similar speed at the end of the straights, but we can’t recall one that leaps off the corners with as much excess energy. This kind of instant-on power demands respect from the rider’s right wrist and takes a while to get used to.

We asked McDaniel how he coped. “The horsepower came in stages throughout the year, which definitely helped ease me onto my learning curve.” Similar to the straightforward philosophy used throughout the bike, Andrew’s idea is simple: “It’s always easier to have the power wherever you are, rather than having to search for it. Bottomless power is one of the things that makes it easy to ride. It’s better for it to spin like a locomotive rather than a peaky horsepower [wheel]spin that just blows the rear tire away. That’s what makes our bike easier to ride than the Dutchman bike.” It also makes high revs unnecessary. “I don’t know what the rev limit is, to be honest. I never heard the guys hit it once all year.”

Of course, that hit of power means that when you crack the throttle from closed to one-third-open at 5500 rpm in third gear, the rear tire lights up and starts coming around gently, demanding a bit of opposite lock correction. But this is the way you learn to ride a 385-pound machine with roughly 20 more horsepower than most front-running Superbikes. Andrew estimates “at least 168 to 170 horsepower,” although he admits it’s never been on a dyno. When you’ve been building Suzuki engines as long as Carry has, you just “know” these things, we assume.

We asked McDaniel, almost rhetorically, whether he could use more power if it were available. “Yep,” he snaps back without hesitation. “It’s down just a little bit at the end of the straight [compared with Erion’s 900RR].” Andrew assures that “our bikes have a lot of potential left in them and they weren’t being ridden at 100 percent last year.” Of course, he qualifies that: “It’s like it’s impossible to ride it on the edge. The horsepower is so intimidating that the riders are unwilling to push it that hard into the turns. It’s unnecessary really.”

Andrew explains that the bike’s big-cube engine acts like a heavy gyro, preventing the rider from flicking the bike like a 750cc Superbike. “The 1100 engines have a lot of inertia and that’s harder to redirect in the corners, no matter what geometry you run in the chassis. Erion’s CBR900RR is a compromise, but the 1100 is a true big beast.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves, though McDaniel points out that while the bike is unquestionably a beast, it’s a friendly one. “Our bike was always easier to ride,” he said after a season-long front-row seat in the action. “Watching those [Erion’s] guys, it looks sketchy going into the corners.” McDaniel demonstrated this by repeatedly running underneath and around Erion’s bike in Firebird’s tight esses section during the final race of the season when all he had to do was finish behind them to clinch the championship.

After winning the title in their rookie AMA season, you might assume the team is satisfied. But you’d be wrong. Owner Sevier took a solid month to put together the most impressive sponsor prospectus we’ve ever laid eyes on and has his sights set on bigger and better things. “We’re looking for $450K,” said Sevier. “We would like to step up to a Superbike program over the next couple of seasons and we’ve got a lot of ideas on how we’d like to improve.” Rider Mark McDaniel has simpler goals: “Winning 10 out of 10 next year would be nice,” he said with a smile. Quite a change from the man who was happy just to climb Daytona podium.