Steve Cox | February 24, 2017
Cycle News Empire of Dirt
COLUMN
The Bike of Eli
There are many pieces to a motocross or supercross championship puzzle. Any racer who wants to win a title needs to have all of these pieces to win. The Eli Tomac we saw absolutely decimating the field at the start of the 2015 AMA 450 National Motocross Championship was an Eli Tomac who had almost every single piece of the puzzle: confidence, a burning desire to win, fitness, speed, skill, focus, luck and a motorcycle that fit him. To understand what’s been going on with Tomac over the last couple of years, we’re going to have to start by explaining a few concepts.
Did Eli Tomac and the Monster Energy Kawasaki Team finally arrive at that “magic” setting for his KX450F? Sure looks like it. PHOTOGRAPHY BY HOPPENWORLD.COM
FACTORY TEAMS
When a motocrosser thinks about being a factory racer, they usually think about things like $100,000 suspension components, factory transmissions or having a fresh motorcycle every time they race. This is the mystique of being a factory star. Factory guys literally have parts on their motorcycles that you cannot possibly buy even if you have the money. But the parts are not what make a factory ride so great. Neither is the money, although it’s considerable in many cases.
What makes a factory ride so great, from the perspective of a racer in the running to be on any of our sport’s factory teams, is the ability of a team to custom-fit a motorcycle to you. Factory teams allow a racer to have a motorcycle built from the ground up to suit their riding style, their size and their tendencies, rather than the racer adjusting those things to fit a motorcycle.
And at this level, what works for one racer is not necessarily going to work for another.
SETUP WOES
The entire motocross/supercross industry and fan base assumed that Eli Tomac would return to his winning form of 2015 as soon as his shoulders were done healing, meaning by about halfway through the 2016 AMA Supercross Series—or at least by the time the outdoor nationals rolled around, since that’s where he was so dominant the year before. The Monster Energy Kawasaki team has a winning record and a winning reputation, and with Tomac on the team, getting paid very well, it was almost a foregone conclusion that he could end up being very tough to beat. But it wasn’t the case, at least until now.
As I reported last June here, Tomac has been fighting setup issues. He likes to have his bike steer on the front wheel—as is the most common technique for most of the 450cc field—while former Kawasaki team captain and racing legend Ryan Villopoto preferred to steer with the rear wheel (as did Ricky Carmichael in his heyday).
(Now, it’s here that I must make a disclaimer: None of what we’re about to discuss has anything at all to do with how a stock Kawasaki KX450F works under normal, human riders like us. The Kawasaki KX450F has long been a top contender in 450cc MX shootouts and is a wildly popular machine at local tracks for good reasons. It’s a very good motorcycle. And as pointed out in my column two weeks ago, at the level of factory racers, where Eli Tomac lives, everything is on a fine edge. A minor setup issue that only costs a racer 1/100th of a second in each corner, on a track like Minneapolis with nine turns and a 26-lap main event, means that issue will cost the racer almost two and a half seconds over the course of the main event. That’s the kind of fine line we’re discussing here.)
Last year, after the start of the season, some Kawasaki and KYB (Tomac’s suspension company of choice) people got together to develop a plan to make the motorcycle work the way Tomac wanted it to work. These changes included, but were not limited to, raising the rear end of the motorcycle and making the fork angle steeper. Raising the rear end puts more weight on the front and also steepens the steering angle some at the same time. More weight on the front and a steeper steering angle mean a racer can use the front wheel to turn, just as Tomac wanted.
However, according to a source close to the issue, some of the team members were concerned that the changes would make the motorcycle unstable. The counter argument was reportedly that all of the other factory bikes on the track had the same ride height and steering angle and were not unstable. In the end, Tomac and the team stuck to the previous base settings to work from, since they had worked in the past.
By the end of the year, though, it seemed like Tomac had found a happy place in that base setup. He won the two U.S. GPs as well as the Monster Energy Cup at the end of 2016 and looked like he’d be up for a fight for the win at Anaheim I. But then in the first three supercross rounds this year, he looked worse than ever, as he suffered arm-pump in every main event. He finished eighth at round three this year in Anaheim II, and he only finished that poorly twice in 2016, both times after significant crashes (Atlanta and Indianapolis).
HAPPY PLACE
I ran into Tomac the Friday before the racing kicked off in Arizona for round four. We talked about his arm-pump problem and he said he and the team made some changes to his bike during the week, and he hoped it would make the arm-pump issue a thing of the past. He didn’t specify what the changes were.
“We’ll see,” he said.
And we did see. We saw Eli Tomac absolutely murder his competition. And as a photographer on the floor that night, knowing what I know about his setup issues in the past, the first thing I noticed—with my naked eye—was how much higher Tomac’s bike was riding in the rear than it was a week earlier.
I did some digging, and it turns out that prior to the Arizona round, the team had made the bulk of the changes that were a part of the previously proposed base setup, with one noted difference: a new shock linkage that either wasn’t available or wasn’t part of the proposed setup.
Since the team made the changes, Tomac has won three out of four main events, with his only loss coming last week in Texas when he had a technical problem with the front brake.
THE RIGHT WAY
It seems obvious that this current setup is the right way, at least at the base, to set up a motorcycle for Eli Tomac. These settings very well could change over the course of time, too, if he finds something else that suits him better. It may have taken a year, but the team has come together to make Tomac’s factory machine fit him better, and the results speak for themselves. It’s not uncommon at all for factory bikes to take a full year to sort out for a new rider. Sometimes they never get sorted out at all. The team is understandably tight-lipped, as is Tomac, who praised his machine and his team at the press conference prior to Anaheim I, but regardless of who may or may not be to blame, consider the Eli Tomac Championship Express to be underway. CN
