MCN races GSX-R600

MCN’s finest hooked up with Crescent Suzuki on Sunday to race in the final round of the KRC Endurance championship. And we’d have been in with a podium it if it wasn’t for that pesky fuel tank…

MCN Editor Marc Potter and road testers Trevor Franklin and Michael Neeves were at Donington Park to ride a Suzuki GSX-R600 tuned to Supersport spec by Crescent, the company behind the Rizla Suzuki British Superbike team.

With just 15 minutes each on the bike in the qualifying sessions Neeves took to the track for the Le Mans style start and got off to a cracking pace.

Throughout the race, Team MCN ran with the top riders but we were hampered by the relatively small standard tank on the GSX-R – and the narrow unleaded nozzle hole we were using.

Most of the regular teams were running 24 litre tanks and using fuel fillers that could fill the tank under five seconds. Two minutes was the quickest we could manage to fill the stock 18 litre tank. Despite the large amount of fuel stops Team MCN managed a creditable 7th place finish in our class and ran lap times that could have seen us in the top three with a better pit strategy (honest!).

The bike the team was running was built by Crescent. The cylinder head had been worked on to improve the flow of the fuel and air and exhaust gases. The pistons and con rods were all match-balanced. To make sure they were exactly the same weight the Crescent engineers had to sort through and measure as many as 30 different pistons to find four that weighed precisely same. The bike made126bhp at the rear wheel.

Potter, Neeves and Franklin were pleased with the 7th place but admitted they had found the six-hour race physically tougher than they expected.

Franklin said: “After the first session I was completely knackered but I really got in to it after that and we were setting some good times. The other teams were setting a hot pace out there and I was really impressed by the quality of racing.”

The class was won by Wasted Racing who used an R6 and claimed the championship.

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