Suspension Guide1

★ SETUP GUIDE YAMAHA RB ★

There's only one way to ride an R6 fast - nail it like a two-stroke and plot smooth lines to carry crazy corner speeds. S’easy.

But the R6's twitchy manner can make this rlding style tyre-wall hazardous. Time to tamę the tempestuous mid-dleweight. Enter Jim's longtermer.

The first session on the track proved the R6 had no major shortcomings in its setup, but near enough is never good enough for anyone, At least when it comes to bikes.

It had a weird tendency to shake its head while acceler-ating hard, especially over bumps. This is a known R6 trait, but it needn’t be this bad. The bike also tended to chatter and run wide slightly when pushed hard - the much chron-icled R6 understeer.

To make the bike tum quicker we need to drop the forks through the yokes. This would make the bike even morę twitchy, so we looked at stability. A suspension travel check showed both ends were bottoming out, so preload was increased front and back. This improved stability slightly but both ends were still bottoming, so we dialled in even morę preload. By now the front end had 8mm of spare travel, but the rear was still bottoming.

This was when a pattern emerged: as we increased rear spring preload the front end became morę stable. This is a good example of a front end problem being down to the rear. Because the R6 power comes in with such a rush, the rear suspension was being fully compressed on hard accel-eration. This left no spare travel, so when the bike hit a bump the suspension bottomed and set the front end shak-ing. Once we stopped the rear end bottoming the bike became stable enough to quicken the tum-in. (Notę: as we increased the spring preload we increased the rebound damping to stop it retuming too fast)

We dropped the yokes 10mm to make the R6 steer quicker. When doing this always check for dearance between the fork lower and bottom yoke on fuli compres-sion. This is very important because if they touch you will crash - we know from experience.

The bike now turned-in better and held tight lines, even on fast, fiat tums, and remained stable and relatively pre-dictable. After Gus and Trev gave the bike the thumbs up, it was off for the road session.

The bike felt as at home on the road as it had on the track so only tyre pressures were changed. When a pillion got on the bike stayed the same, but a larger pillion would require one morę notch of rear preload.

Here is where to find all the adjusters on the R6 and how they work.

SAG

Sag is altered by changing the spring preload (morę preload, less sag). Sag is the amount the suspension moves down from its fully extended position. Loaded sag is mea-sured with the lider and bike's weight combined and static sag is with the bike’s weight only.

FRONT SAG

Put a smali cable tie around the fork stanchion. Then push it up against the dust seal with the bike upright. Next lift the front Wheel off the ground and measure how far the forks travel down.

REAR STATIC SAG

Measure the distance between the centre of the rear axle and a fixed point on the tailpiece. Next lift the rear of the bike and measure again. The difference between the two figures is your static sag. The bike should be on the ground, not on a paddock stand.

REAR IDADED SAG

Measure as for static sag but instead of lifting the taił piece sit the rider on the bike and measure how far it moves. Add your static sag measurement to this to get your loaded sag measurement.

FRONT SPRING PRELOAD

Count the number of rings exposed on the top of the forks and adjust by tuming with a 17mm spanner. Both forks