SR Archive: Miguel DuHamel's Honda CBR600F3

Much more than the sum of its parts: Smokin’ Joe’s Honda CBR600F3 SuperSport Champion

This article was originally published in Sport Rider's February 1997 issue.

Six wins from eleven starts. Four consecutive victories. Domi­nation on technical tracks like Loudon and horsepower tracks like Brainerd International. No mechanical failures. No crashes. Despite competing in one of America's most talent-laden, bar-banging national roadracing classes, Miguel DuHamel's Smokin' Joe's Honda CBR600F3 has put together the type of season most racers would trade their umbrella girls for, clinching the AMA 600 SuperSport championship a round early and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that domination is painted yellow and purple. Immedi­ately following the Las Vegas AMA race, Sport Rider spent the day aboard Miguel DuHamel's Smokin' Joe's Honda CBR600F3 searching for the secret to success in this tightly controlled series.

Miguel DuHamel's Smokin' Joe's Honda CBR600F3Photography by Kevin Wing

One would expect immediate ridability from the best 600 SuperSport machine in the nation, but we found Miguel DuHamel's CBR a relatively strange beast, especially after sampling Doug Chandler's Muzzys Superbike and Rich Oliver's TZ250. The 600's riding position, with clip-ons above the top triple clamp and the thickly padded stock seat, simply didn't feel aggressive enough to ride at a pace necessary to beat the neighborhood Good Humor ice-cream truck, much less dominate the second most competitive roadracing series in America. We don't want to hurt Miguel's feelings, but his nifty number-one machine felt decidedly stock as we cruised around Las Vegas Motor Speedway, warming up the engine and Dunlop tires.

Two-time champ: Smokin’ Joe’s Honda CBR600F3Photography by Kevin Wing

The bars were surprisingly narrow and the entire bike felt tall because we couldn’t wrap ourselves around the fuel tank the way we can on a clip-on–equipped Superbike. A stock tach stared us in the face, and the Zero Gravity windscreen was a simple replica of the stock item, stripping any visual clue of racing trickness. There was no billet upper triple clamp with replaceable concentrics, no Stack tach with oil and water temperatures (in fact, there was no temp gauge whatsoever), no ram-air intakes snaking into a carbon-fiber fuel tank, just a prettily painted CBR with a big fat No. 1 plastered on the nose. The SuperSport rules, mandated and enforced by the AMA technical committee, simply don’t allow significant variation from stock, and our initial laps made it very clear that the Smokin’ Joe’s 600 wasn’t a one-off factory piece stuffed with hand-built pieces from HRC’s back room.

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External changes on the Smokin’ Joe’s engine are limited to the Yoshimura titanium pipe with carbon-fiber can, but a look inside would reveal an HRC clutch pack and some incredibly careful oil management aimed at reducing internal friction. The result is a claimed 100 rear-wheel ponies.Photography by Kevin Wing

By the third circuit of the Allen Wilson–designed racetrack, DuHamel’s bike was just beginning to work for us. The stock 36mm Keihin constant-velocity carburetors had been rejetted to match the Yoshimura exhaust system, but the initial cracking of the throttle felt delayed because our brains were used to the immediacy of flat-slide carburetors. We found ourselves turning the bike too tightly because the delayed throttle allowed the bike to fall in on the Dunlop D364s more than we expected. The stock transmission needed one less downshift than the close-ratio trannies on the true race bikes we were testing, and the lack of a slipper clutch made matching rpm during downshifts more important than it had been on Muzzys’ Superbike or Oliver’s two-stroker. But by the third lap, DuHamel’s version of a perfect SuperSport machine was beginning to move and groove. By lap four, the setup was working.

The aluminum-bodied Penske shock offers the usual compression and rebound damping, plus spring preload, but it also incorporates a ride-height adjuster built into the clevis. The thin rod is a crude but effective way of measuring rear wheel travel.Photography by Kevin Wing

Grab the brakes on DuHamel’s 600 and get ready for a 2-g push-up against the handlebars. Unbelievable, especially when SuperSport rules mandate stock brake rotors and calipers. Few national racers brake harder than DuHamel, and as we warmed to the task of decreasing our braking distances, we fell in love with the binders. Joey Lombardo, the primary mechanic for the bike, maintains the brakes religiously, glass-beading the rotors frequently to unload imbedded pad material and keeping the Honda kit pads fresh. Miguel runs relatively heavy front fork springs to offset his maniacal braking, and part of our learning curve on the bike involved experimenting with the superior stopping abilities of the 600 champ.

Cleated aluminum footpegs replace the stock rubber pieces, an excellent upgrade for a track CBR. The aluminum hangers came from Tom Jobe in the American Honda race shop, while the sano safety wire is the work of mechanics Al Ludington and Joey Lombardo.Photography by Kevin Wing

Killer brakes become significantly more important when the motor makes serious steam, and we’ve rarely felt a CBR600 of any persuasion accelerate this hard. Lombardo coyly told us, “Just shift it at redline,” but the bike was accelerating so hard at the 13,500-rpm redline that we just had to keep revving it. And revving it. The rev limiter finally interrupted at an indicated 14,800 rpm (due to an optimistic tach, we assume), the SuperSport bike producing what the Honda boys describe as 100 rear-wheel horsepower from the Ray Plumb–built engine. And like the stock F3, the bike revs with such an eagerness that if it was human, it would be described as a Type A personality that talks loud and often. We apologize for the un-Sport Rider-like lack of straight-line performance figures, but the Las Vegas Motor Speedway’s dragstrip had not yet been paved, so you’ll have to trust our calibrated backsides. Or just remember the last time you saw Miguel kick some butt on his 600. This thing’s fast.

We all know the hassle of using an open-end wrench to dial in the F3’s front preload adjusters, so the Smokin’ Joe’s boys fabricated their own finger screws. Miguel can adjust preload on the fly if need be.Photography by Kevin Wing

Joey Lombardo made his job sound easy when we asked him how the bike improved during the ’96 season. “Basically, this is the ’95 machine. It uses the same fork springs, the same Penske shock. We adjust a click here and a click there and change the gearing for each track.” Ray Plumb added, “We like to keep the engine fresh, not because it loses horsepower with miles, but because it isn’t as responsive.” Reading between the lines, you can be sure much of Honda’s testing measures not just pure power but how the bike accelerates through the gears, and it’s this acceleration that loses its edge with increased mileage. Plumb stresses that it’s the factory teams’ ability to keep an engine fresh that gives riders like DuHamel, Steve Crevier and Muzzys’ Mike Smith the edge over a privateer entry. “The 600s stayed the same as last year,” Plumb admitted. “Because of the rules, which are well regulated, we didn’t change much. I don’t like losing sleep over possibly getting caught breaking the rules. That means we have to have the best package within the rules.” And Plumb’s use of the word package is no coincidence. It’s the constant evolution, the polishing of the diamond, that has brought the team its second SuperSport championship in two years. No single piece of technology or performance trait dominates the bike, and as our laps counted into the 20s, the initial awkwardness of the seating position was forgotten. We found ourselves pushing hard on Miguel’s 600, reveling in its raceability and clear communication of how much traction the tires could handle. The harder we rode, the more integrated the bike felt as it approached the realm in which DuHamel lives, the level needed to dominate nationals. The highest compliment the 600 could receive comes from DuHamel himself. When Miguel’s Smokin’ Joe’s RC45 Superbike is particularly well set up for a racetrack, he’ll tell his mechanics Al Ludington and Joey Lombardo, “Great job, it’s almost as good as the 600.”

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