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WHO IS JEREMY McWILLIAMS?
Ex-250 and 500 GP racer Jezza is also a KTM
development rider, road racer and occasional film star...JEREMY
McWILLIAMS
I HAVE WHAT SOME bike nuts regard as the
ultimate day job: testing the 1290 Super Duke
R, Super Duke GT, 1190/1290 Adventure and
now the new 790 range. I work with the R&D
team and project leaders at KTM who are
tasked with developing the road bike range
and Customer Racing department where we
develop road bikes, like the RC390, for racing.
Yes, there is a lot of pressure to get it right but
there’s plenty of job satisfaction if the bikes
are well received by the press and owners.
The R&D department does an outstanding
job; every aspect of a bike is evaluated. They
can replicate real road riding on test benches
in their new facility. The department has
grown from about 40 people when I started
to more than 500, with many smaller
departments within it dedicated to data
recording, brakes and wheels, chassis, motor,
electronics, suspension...
Test riders evaluate everything – tyres,
traction control and ABS, chassis, suspension,
handling and brake performance, ergonomicsKTM- usually at different proving grounds
through Europe. We work with the team to
improve the bikes before they’re approved for
production. Tyres, for instance, have to pass
stringent testing in all conditions at every
lean angle on road, track, wet and dry
handling courses. How they perform at tip-in,
how much effort is required, how they react
to rider input, do they have self-steering
tendencies or any lift up under brake and
acceleration? Where one tyre might out-
perform another in the dry it won’t make the
final list if it doesn’t perform in all conditions.
The bikes go through a severe shakedown.
KTM know how stiff a chassis needs to be,
and they know how stiff every other chassis
on the market is, but this doesn’t mean if you
make one with same lateral and torsional
stiffness it will react identically to a
competitor’s. We start with something the
team know will be in the ballpark then
change it according to test feedback and data.
Street bikes probably have as much data
acquisition hanging off them as a MotoGP
bike. It takes the engineers days to get
through all the data from a test.
When we started with the 1290 Super
Duke we had about four WP technicians over
the test cycle. We’d have forks and shocks in
different lengths, damping and spring rates,
and we’d ride up to the top of the roughest
roads and mountains in Spain. I’d be
hammering the bikes over those
roads, then back to normal
road riding, motorways, city
centres then back to the
proving ground with dry,
wet, rough and dynamic
handling tracks in one
facility. Then do all the
tests again until we had
covered every angle.
Every time you ride
a bike in a new
environment something else shows up. We’d
ride two-up with concrete in the tank bags
then go to the track and deck the footpegs out
to find the best suspension settings. The
toughest test isn’t opening the throttle to
maximum while dragging your toes on a
soaking wet track to test traction control – it’s
testing lean angle ABS. Squeezing the front
brake to maximum pressure at maximum
lean angle on a wet track takes a bit of getting
used to. We worked with Bosch at their
facilities in Germany and Japan to perfect the
TC and ABS. KTM were the first company to
come up with the idea for lean angle-sensitive
ABS, and I had the pleasure of testing the
early systems. When they first asked me to be
the guinea pig it was a relief to find it worked
first time and just needed minor adjustments.
The test is to see if the bike can hold a line
without crashing with full brake pressure –
you need to squeeze the brake to about 50 bar
pressure. We use no more than 15 bar for an
emergency stop...
Chassis stiffness is complicated, but the
boffins in the design department know where
it needs to be. We have been testing a stiffer
chassis lately for one of the bikes as we
noticed that when we used super-soft slicks
on a track there was room to improve. Flex is
good – we need some at full lean angle to
aleviate chatter. It is easy to produce a chassis
that is too stiff; at maximum lean you feel
every ripple in the surface and the bike is not
pleasant to ride. To find the best solution we
had to beef up one of the current frames to
make it stiffer. We went back and forth a few
times before making a change; the test is
rigorous and it has to work with road tyres in
normal conditions and on the race track.
Every rider in the department, including the
project leaders, then tests the bike, then the
test chassis is measured and a new chassis is
designed to the same lateral and torsional
stiffnesses. And then we repeat the test...