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August 2025

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Streetfighting years

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‘He was a man of truth’

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What the TT does to your engine

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July 2025

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Cheap for a reason?

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SuperEnduro rocks Newcastle

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‘The buzz of the TT is a million times more than riding a short circuit’

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‘I’ve got the throttle open, the front brake on, and I’m on full lock…’

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120 years in the making

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How many valves is too many?

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June 2025

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May 2025

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Tortoise versus Hare

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The Cole shed

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Why you need a K5 now

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WHEN A BIRTHDAY PRESENT TURNS INTO THE ADVENTURE OF A LIFETIME…

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New bikes

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’81 Triumph TR7T

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Easy as that

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‘Y’know what? I want one’

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SAM SUNDERLAND

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Trackday Clobber

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SIX MONTHS FROM HOME

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BRADLEY RAY

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THE VINTAGE MOTORCYCLE CLUB

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DAN LINFOOT & HIS DAD

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THE KTM DESIGN TEAM

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A RIDE WITH MICK GRANT

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A RIDE WITH RANDY MAMOLA

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Glorious ride: A land lost in time…

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GOING THE EXTRA MILES

Features

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Travel Stories

Know How

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This issue is a celebration of the world’s greatest road race, with big stories and great pictures from this year’s event, untold stories from its glorious history and more than a few heroes.

Ever wondered what the TT does to your engine? Find out in this issue.

We’ve also taken one of this year’s most important new bikes – Triumph’s Tiger Sport 800 – across European with its key rivals, hurled the new Ducati Streefighter V2 at the Lincolnshire Wolds, and tested a staggeringly affordable new adventure bike.

Plus, all the riding advice, insight, guidance, and entertainment you can only find in Bike.

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Ducati’s new **Streetfighter V2 S** has a smaller engine with less power and torque, but also less weight and a lower price than its predecessor. Does this make it the ideal Ducati road bike? Simon H finds out by racking up 250 Sunday miles

By **Simon Hargreaves** Photography **Jason Critchell**

Enough visual ‘grr’ to go with the name? Yes

**H**ot Bolognese sauce, what manner of ungainly contrariness is this? The cold-blooded red Ducati lumbers, kicks, chunters and confounds in equal measure as we thonk our first tentative yards across corrugated town streets chiselled into a Desperate Dan jawline of stubbly bumps.

The Streetfighter’s bars are spread so wide it’s like steering a floorboard. The thin, hard seat tests the measure of my inside leg – and I’m a six-footer; I’ve ridden ’crossers with less lank. But few with less weight – the Ducati doesn’t connect with the road so much as stutter an inch above it. And the suspension might say Öhlins, but it’s surely named after the Norse god of granite…

In the early chill, I also appreciate the motor’s warmth flooding up when the fan kicks in – although imagine in central London in midsummer it’ll still be too toasty. The ’Fighter may be all-new, but some things never change.

The words of editor Mike ring in my ears between the V-twin’s combustion strokes: ‘Everyone says the new Streetfighter is a better, more civilised road bike than its predecessor…’. Really? Who is ‘everyone’, and why aren’t they locked up? Mind you, I’ve ridden the previous Streetfighter V2, and that wasn’t an armchair at a picnic, so maybe it’s about perspective. Thus, with the spangly new Ducati safely garaged and ground anchored for the night, I plot a 250-mile route for our Sunday ride, make careful note of fuel availability to manage its dainty 15-litre tank, and hope it gets better from here – and, mostly, it definitely does.

Don’t be fooled by the smaller motor. It’s perky –and eggs you on

Sunday dawns with wall-to-wall sunshine, prolonging an unusually clement spring and putting everyone in a better mood. Right, let’s reset and try the new Streetfighter V2 again. Plan is to dive into the Lincolnshire Wolds, arcing north to the Humber Bridge, then curl back south again making a long, 250-mile loop. I’ve ridden these roads for 30 years on a lot of different bikes, and still reckon the cocktail of bends, changes of topography and – in most places – quality of tarmac are among the best in the UK for digging into engine and chassis behaviour. Pretty scenery too, and an unhealthy selection of cafés to slake a rider’s thirst and fill the aching void where a sausage bap should be, with a wealth of secluded stops to pause and reflect on the unadulterated joy of riding.

The Ducati throbs through Boston, levering between lines of toking builder’s vans, its bar ends strategically placed at average family saloon wing mirror height (they’re an inexplicable 30mm wider than previously). At low revs, as we trickle along fanning the clutch lever, I can distinctly feel the Streetfighter’s array of engine management electronics beavering away to keep the motor from stalling or hesitating – engine revs rise and fall according to lever position, constantly chipping in to smooth out and help balance gearbox, throttle position and slipping plates. I appreciate Ducati’s mission to civilise and harmonise their bikes, even the Streetfighty ones – remember when their Vs were aggravatingly clunky, with transmission backlash chattering the rider’s teeth as much as thems on the rear sprocket? Those days are long gone; every Ducati generation gets smoother and less demanding, but hopefully without eroding the edginess that makes Ducati, Ducati – and nudging the Streetfighter around town is easy street (besides the unexpected weight of the clutch lever).

It’s much better here than the old ’un, but the V2 still prefers open roads

Clearing out from the town’s snarl, we hoof into countryside across the flatlands, past the Carrington Steam Rally – resist traction engine gag – which is where the Ducati’s V-twin perks up. The 890cc V-twin supplants two of their motors: the 937cc Testastretta from the Multistrada V2 (and, logically, likely in the Monster, SuperSport, Hypermotard and DesertX), and replaces the 955cc Superquadro from the previous Streetfighter V2 and Panigale V2. It’s a lot of ground to cover for one motor, but Ducati say the engine is ‘only’ 890cc because it puts a bit of performance space between it and the V4s.

Ducati’s first Streetfighter was launched in 2009, with a barely apologetic 155bhp 1098cc engine – a mere 5bhp less than the sportsbike – and came across as the Monster’s unreconstructed, forehead-dragging, bare-knuckle cousin. Wearing nowt but a perma frown, it was like riding a fist fight. In contrast, the 132bhp 848-powered Streetfighter two years later was a delight – from the launch, in _Bike_, I wrote: ‘The 848 is such an obviously ideal blend of performance and nudity even top-speed meatheads such as I can see the point. It’s the smoothest, softest Ducati I’ve ridden.’ Nevertheless, it wasn’t a massive hit and canned in 2015.

But the Streetfighter idea wasn’t, and in 2020 the Streetfighter V4 was born using an almost full-blown Panigale V4 engine – followed, two years later, by the ‘milder’ Streetfighter V2, with a paltry 150bhp 955cc Superquadro motor from the Panigale V2. Bearing in mind it had almost as much performance as the original big-bore Streetfighter, the old V2 was still a bit of a handful.

The new bike, as we start to climb into the Wolds towards Horncastle, is not. Its variable-valved 118bhp motor, liberated from desmodromic valve gear and the burden of unusable performance, is refreshingly light-hearted and revvy, balancing a surging bottom end with a potent-but-far-from-insignificant top end. It’s a better and more satisfying match for British roads and, I suspect, riders too. A model losing nearly 30bhp over its predecessor ought to be headline news in a bad way – but we all know it doesn’t matter when push comes to shove in a modern riding environment. These days, engine size is a matter of taste, not status.

With sap well and truly risen, the Streetfighter pings from apex to apex like a pinball wizard, and with joyful exuberance rather than an overcommitted grimace. And it’s incredibly flexible – from 2000rpm to flat out, the most linear power delivery ever from a V-twin Ducati pours out a constant flow of drive. At one point, pulling away from a junction, it picks up from walking pace in fourth gear. It’s like a twist and go – at 70mph in top the engine is pulling about 4800rpm; its on-cam sweet spot is a worryingly relaxed 90mph. It’s a deceptively fast motor. So praise the lord for newly installed cruise control to prevent average speed camera transgressions (shamefully, although the bike comes fitted with the necessary switchgear, there’s a £244.73 surcharge to activate it).

The new engine is also very vocal – the airbox induction warble has more than a hint of Tuvan throat singer about it; a mix of low-register bass and higher harmonics. It’s not the booming Bologna soundtrack of old but addictive in its own way, and encourages opening the throttle as wide and often as possible. Be a shame not to heed the call.

18kg loss is noticeable on both back roads and joints

A quick breather toddling through Horncastle, then we head for the jewel of the Wolds – Cadwell Park circuit, up the road the other side of Scamblesby. The Streetfighter bullets through the folds in the landscape, revelling in the grip from its Pirelli Rosso IVs. Last night, podging around for the first time on the bike, they felt remote and unyielding; today, with some heat in them, the tyres come to life and work with the Öhlins springs, not in spite of them.

There’s a classic race car meeting on at Cadwell, so we avail ourselves of the canteen for a late breakfast and bone-up on the rest of the Streetfighter V2’s changes. It’s much as per the new Panigale V2 – an aluminium monocoque frame doubles as the airbox and is indeed mostly composed of air. Similarly, a sparse subframe is bolted onto the back of the rear cylinder head, and the hollow double-sided swingarm contorts itself between pivot and spindle like an athlete’s ruptured cruciate ligament. With the bodywork off, it’s hard to work out why the bike doesn’t fold up and collapse on itself.

This is the £15,990 S model, which swaps the £13,990 standard bike’s Marzocchi forks and Kayaba shock for the aforementioned Öhlins, and adds launch control and a pit lane limiter. There isn’t a pit lane at Cadwell, let alone on the B1225, so we finish up, depart the circuit and ride back across the Wolds onto the Caistor High Road. The Streetfighter flits along rural lanes, frisking about with a new lightness of being. It only weighs a claimed 175kg – 18kg less than the previous V2 – and it feels flyweight. On the one hand it’s hyper agile and eager to turn (and easy to push around); on the other, not all mass is bad when you want to damp out bump forces. The Streetfighter demolishes smooth corners, but bumpy stuff has it over-reacting like a hammy actor. Okay, okay, calm down!

We stop for a gurgle of unleaded because the gauge is showing one bar left after 115 miles – consumption is low-40s mpg, but on 15 litres to empty that means filling up at around 120 miles. I sometimes wonder if half the reason manufacturers are obsessed with making fuel tanks smaller is because it’s an easy way to shave a few kilos off the spec sheet.

Scampering away from Scamblesby and feeling very fine

Caistor dispatched, we bomb up a side road to get to the Humber Bridge and a date with lunch at the Viking Way Café Bar – a fab biker-friendly coffee stop and fooderie on the riverfront just under the bridge at Barton-upon-Humber. Basking in the sunshine, I take a moment to examine the Streetfighter up close. It looks horny and hand-made; the level of detailing and finishing is a work of design and materials art. The swingarm is extraordinary, but the overall effect is made by details like the section of steel brake pipe

from the rear caliper, the gorgeous shock mountings, and the exhaust plumbing that culminates in stubby twin cans with mesh baffles. It’s exceptional; perfectly manicured and hard to believe it’s mass-produced.

Dinner downed, we hitch our skirts and head back south, picking up the road to Market Rasen, flowing fast and free. By now we’re slicing up the legendary bends back through Wragby and Bardney – you can’t live in Lincs and not know them intimately. The Ducati eats it up, spunting from corner to corner in a welter of revs and flappery frolics. It’s fun and fast, but I’m not convinced it’s necessarily as fluid as I’d like. The motor hums and thrums contentedly – but after a few hours in the seat the I’ve decided the aggro riding position – bum up, knees almost touching, wide bars, forward-canted torso – is, like the rest of bike, an acquired taste. It aggravates my tendonitis and my right hand has gone numb – blame a life in the saddle if you wish, but an MT-09 and Street Triple don’t have the same effect. It ain’t natural human ergonomics.

Makes light work of stuff like this. But you still need to put the effort in

**1** Exhaust cans are gorgeously groovy; no other manufacturer takes end cans as seriously as this. Even the welds look like someone cares.

**2** Beautifully finished, sparse, organic, hollow cast aluminium swingarm is double-sided for the first time on a Streetfighter. It looks factory.

**3** Öhlins shock looks like it’s rising rate but it’s actually cantilevered – a one-to-one ratio with the swingarm. But that alloy casting is pure horn.

**4** Small TFT display isn’t overloaded with info, but a six-axis IMU lends a deep dive of traction control, anti-wheelie and engine braking settings.

**5** Single seat as standard has room for a fat wallet (unbelievably, pillion peg conversion is a £323.14 extra – what genius thought that up?).

Perfect for garage-based dreams of machine-gunning your neighbours

Single-sider? Meh. This new swinger is sculpted alloy loveliness

S gets Öhlins. Urge to stick fingers in is considerable

Colour and data. Anyone else miss a white Veglia?

Be easier if it wasn’t stuffed with so many fifties

As the sun sets and we wend our way back home, the Streetfighter has me conflicted. I love its looks, design quality, ridiculous bespokery of components and finishing – if my bike life consisted of sitting in the garage admiring the machining, then riding to bike meets to have conversations about it, I’d take the Streetfighter all day. It makes an MT-09 look like an explosion in a parts factory. And the motor is the most flexible, forgiving Ducati Vee yet.

But as a cumulative riding experience – a bike to enjoy on the way to the meet, to bend a few back lanes, have a laugh, live it up a bit with an insouciant gallivant when plod are looking the other way – it still requires the rider to bend to it; literally. You have to meet the bike halfway; it’s not an instant fit.

The Streetfighter V2 S may be another step on Ducati’s path to civility, but it still makes demands of the rider to get there.

> ‘Another step on Ducati’s path to civility, but still makes demands of the rider to get there’

They’ve got the stop-and-gawp -at-it bit nailed to perfection

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25 years after his tragic death, Mark Graham and a host of greats remember the racer who will forever be intertwined with the TT: **the incomparable Joey Dunlop**

Joey, an RC30, sunshine, and the Isle of Man. Glorious

**N**o good wondering how a man who amassed 26 Isle of Man TT wins could perish on the 4.2 miles of the Pirita-Kose-Kloostrimetsa Circuit in Estonia. Racing is dangerous. Racing on roads riskier yet.

Doesn’t matter where an immovable obstacle is. A tree is a tree wherever it might be. Stone walls are stone walls regardless of location. Every rider knows that. Respects the fact.

Yet somehow Joey’s demise seemed the oddest, cruellest event. A man who made pure road racing seem the most natural pursuit met his end when the negative realities of piloting anything from a 125 to a 1300cc proddie bike at speed bit awfully hard.

It happened he was on a 125. A class he began riding after the serious 1989 Brands Hatch crash that might have finished his career. His recovery took months, his attitude to racing did not waver: ‘I was told it wasn’t my fault, so that’s okay,’ he said.

Joey’s death on 2 July 2000 was the starkest reminder that even the finest practitioners of a dangerous game are not immune from the worst consequences. It never seemed possible with Joey until it happened.

There seemed something other-worldly about Joey. Like all the best sportspeople he made his craft look easy, unhurried, almost gentle. If the best footballers seem always to have more time and space, the best darts players an effortless action, Joey looked relaxed and fluid on a bike.

With Philip McCallen, 1991. Trying to remember what time the party finished last night

‘He was smooth,’ says 11-times TT winner and a Honda teammate of Joey’s, Phillip McCallen. ‘He knew exactly where to be and when, and in all conditions, too.’ McCallen’s all-action style was absolute inverse of Joey’s economic progress. A pell-mell full gallop to what seemed like Joey’s measured, brisk canter.

‘Joey was smart about picking his races too,’ says McCallen. ‘He’d maybe do five or six races at the Ulster, but he knew which ones he could win and he’d go all out in them. It might even be one race he’d target. And he’d pick his races with DJ \[the late Dave Jefferies\], too. Although DJ couldn’t beat him when he was on form.’

DJ’s uncle Nick Jefferies, himself a TT winner, said: ‘Joey was a great tactician. When he wasn’t the fastest, he knew he was consistent and could win races through guile. He was a bit like the great Stanley Woods in that.’ Irishman Woods won 10 TTs in the 1920s and 1930s.

Joey wasn’t a bluffer, but his relaxed paddock attitude and contrasting track behaviour could startle people. ‘At our local tracks when I was just starting out, he’d turn up to run-in his new Hondas,’ says Grand Prix winner Jeremy McWilliams. ‘You’d think he wasn’t interested, his lap times weren’t that fast… then in the main 250 race he’d just smoke everyone.’

Classic TT, 1981. Black paint was Honda protest at that year’s Formula One result

Joey’s reasons for riding number three at the TT were typically cogent: ‘The first bike always gets the birds,’ he said. ‘If I go at number three I miss that, the marshals are all alert, and if I can get past the first two riders I’ve got nobody in front. I like an open road so I can go as quick as I can without having to pass people.’

Joey’s race craft was key, as was his meticulous machine prep. ‘He hardly ever retired from a race,’ said Jefferies. ‘I first ran into him in 1975 at the Skerries 100 when he was still Joe Dunlop. This scruffy local Irish lad who could ride amazinglyquickly. He was fast and he always got his bikes going well. It didn’t matter what they looked like – him or the bike – but they were fast and reliable.’

And he set them up exactly as he wished, even when he was a factory Honda rider: ‘You’re setting them up so they’re easy to ride, almost soft, so they handle well at the TT.’ No one could argue with the results.

> ‘He talked to you with his eyes, if you were smart enough to pick it up. You could see what he thought by his face, his body language’

Mischievous glint suggests he inked the camera’s viewfinder before this was taken

As Joey’s mechanic the late Jackie Graham said: ‘He’d been rebuilding engines since he was 10. He was extremely dedicated – in his own way.’ And his own way was precisely what made Joey so appealing as a top rider. When the competition were currying media favour, Joey was busy saying very little.

Not that he didn’t have the ear of the press. During TT fortnight he could regularly be found in The Saddle, in Queen Street, just behind the North Quay of Douglas Harbour deep in conversation with the late Norrie Whyte of _MCN_. There was more ale drunk than shorthand notes taken, but the connection was there.

Other riders would struggle to understand the very singular Joey. He was not a gregarious character. His circle of friends was small and very tight, and he kept it that way. ‘All those wild parties,’ said Jefferies. ‘They were closed shop affairs. Once he trusted me we got on, but he was quite a guarded man.’

McWilliams remembers a man who liked a pint; a social drinker. ‘We were standing in the Mondello café at lunchtime on race day,’ he said. ‘And Joey was having a pint. We still had a couple of races to go.’

> ‘He adored what he did, and he did it his way, even when paired with the mighty Honda organisation’

Defying gravity over Ballaugh Bridge, 1992

His relationship with McCallen was slow burn. ‘When I started to do well in 1984/5,’ said McCallen, ‘I knew him to say hello to and the first time I beat him in 1988 I think he respected me from then. I had a new 250 that year then broke my foot at the North West 200, so I lent him some bits for his 250.

‘I was supposed to join Honda for 1989, but they had too many riders so I went to Kawasaki, but it wasn’t really working out. I called into his bar and we were sitting there talking – he’d had his Brands crash and he said, “Phillip, you should have my bikes. I’ll ring Honda in the morning”. He did – and then I was a Honda rider. He was a man of truth.’

If he had spare parts he’d lend them out in the paddock, and even take bits off his own bike to loan if required. But Joey’s greatest deeds were performed at a steady 60mph in his Merc van en route to the war-torn Balkans in eastern Europe to distribute clothes and other necessities.

Honda SP-1, 2000 Formula One TT. Joey’s greatest win, celebrated overleaf

These were long hauls. He’d sleep in the back of the van, on a bench propped across the floor by the rear doors. He’d eat tinned soup, blithely traverse war zones and cross hostile borders to deliver his precious cargo.

He did it time and again to no fanfare, for no reward save that of improving the lives of innocent victims of dumb wars. He would no doubt have preferred his actions to have gone unnoticed, but he was made an OBE for his efforts in 1996 to go with his 1986 MBE for mere success on a motorcycle.

He never said much because, unlike many people, he never thought he had to. Almost monosyllabic in unfamiliar company, he was only slightly more voluble with those he knew. ‘He hardly talked at all,’ recalled Ron Haslam. ‘You could watch telly and have a cup of tea with him and if you got a couple of words you’d be doing well.’

McCallen again: ‘He talked to you with his eyes, if you were smart enough to pick it up. You could see what he thought by his face, his body language. And he was mischievous when he was relaxed. He literally stole my wife at my wedding when there was a white Gold Wing there for me and the bride. Next thing you knew he was away up the road on it with her on the back.’

He was the consummate roads rider. ‘He was fast on the fast bits,’ said Nick Jefferies. ‘He was careful on the brakes, very safe on braking, and always slow into turns and fast out, so quick on the big corners.’ No one makes up time on slow corners, it’s the fast turns that separate the aces from the also-rans. Joey knew that from day one on a 200cc Triumph Tiger Cub.

Joey attracted fans to roads racing because he made a dangerous sport look like an art form, because he was as down to earth as the fella next to you in the crowd, because he was his own man and cared not a hoot for pomp or hoopla.

He adored what he did, and he did it his way, even when paired with the mighty Honda organisation.

The great Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin said: ‘Death is only a risk. The risk is the very essence of life itself.’ All the finest hard sports stars know that – from boxers, to mountaineers, to motorcycle racers. Joey knew it.

RS125, 1993. Lid/bike colour combo never been bettered

**»** His tally of significant roads wins is testament to his domination of the 1980s and 1990s. Only his nephew Michael Dunlop has now amassed more TT victories. Joey won 24 Ulster Grands Prix on anything from 125 tiddlers to 1000cc Superbikes and everything in between. He won 13 North West 200s, five TT F1 World Championships, and we haven’t even touched on the countless Tandragee, Cookstown, Skerries, or Killalane triumphs. Behind the relaxed demeanour was an efficient and almost merciless winning machine.

Joey leads Niall Mackenzie (9) at the NW200

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Lapping the Isle of Man isn’t just a huge test of rider – it’s a vast task for their bike. **Jamie Turner** digs in to see what it does to a BMW M1000RR

It’s amazing that they don’t all do this...

Modern engines rev quite a bit. During a typical TT race, the crank of a BMW inline four – it’s in there somewhere – will rotate more than 1,000,000 times. Yes, over a million.

Imagine how fast the rear wheel turns, tearing around the TT. And for every rotation there are around 12 combustion events in the engine. It’s a relentless onslaught of explosions and involves enormous forces.

**W**e all know the TT is an ordeal for riders and for their mounts. It’s easy to see that the engines must be under enormous stress throughout practice and the races. The TT has always been an obvious proving ground for manufacturers, after all – the same as all the great races.

A couple of years ago some of Peter Hickman’s BMW M1000RR telemetry was shared with the magazine – it showed the throttle was pinned for 44 per cent of a lap. By digging out some of the spec information for the standard bike and making some (hopefully not too outrageous) assumptions we can put some numbers to things and make some comments. So let’s do that, and hope the results aren’t a damp squib…

Six laps of the 37.73-mile course means the race distance is 226.4 miles or 364.5km; 44 per cent of this is 99.6 miles or as near as damn it 160km. Knowing this, the first thing I’m going to do is calculate how many rotations of the bike’s rear wheel this represents. I’m going to use the road bike information to do this, because the racers have to be close to this and, well, BMW aren’t going to share deep specification secrets with us. The rear tyre is a 200/55 ZR17 which, knowing that this means the sidewall height will be 55 per cent of 200mm and it sits on a 17in rim, means it will have a rolling radius of 32.6cm. In turn this means one complete turn of the wheel will cover a distance of 205cm. Now, we all know tyres squash when you put weight on them, but equally they grow due to centrifugal forces, so I’m going to say that at speed one turn of the wheel will propel the bike this distance.

Peter Hickman and BMW’s M1000RR: quite the combo

Logically then, we can divide 205cm into the distance that represents 44 per cent of the race distance to get the total number of wheel rotations: this turns out to be about 78,300 (a complete race distance is nearly 178,000 rotations). First thing of engineering note: wheel bearings get a real hammering, and I’ll bet most of us hardly ever think of them…

Now, how many engine revolutions is this? Well, this is where I am going to make possibly the biggest assumption/guess – I’m going to use the fifth gear ratio to work this out. The rationale runs something like this: yes, a lot of the lap will be flat in sixth, but not all of it, and there are chunks of low-gear acceleration as well. So, you can’t use sixth, and knowing the circuit is damned fast it doesn’t seem ridiculous to use fifth for a calculation like this. Undoubtedly the telemetry gathered by the team could tell them how many revolutions the engine does, but then that will measure revs in real time and then integrate to get the real number. I can’t do that, not least because I don’t have the data (and my brain isn’t big enough). So, fifth it is.

I managed to find a BMW information fact sheet on t’internet which has most of the information I am going to use here.

Hickman on a gentle trundle on his M1000RR back in 2023

It says that fifth gear is 1.360:1, the primary reduction ratio is 1.652:1, and the chain sprockets are 17/46 for a final drive ratio of 2.706:1. While one may justifiably expect some fiddling with sprocket sizes, I’m going with the homologated numbers. So, multiply those together and you get the fact that, for each turn of the rear wheel, the engine does 6.08 revolutions – this is the fifth gear overall ratio. That means, for each rotation of the wheel, there are just over 12 combustion events (three in each of the four cylinders).

Now, take the number of turns the wheel did over 44 per cent of the race distance and multiply by the fifth gear overall ratio and you get nearly 476,000 engine revolutions. Yes, knocking half a million, with just under 952,000 combustion events. For the whole race distance, it would be comfortably more than a million engine rotations (actually, just over 1,082,000) with north of two million combustions. Clearly, these are Big Numbers.

What else can we calculate? Well, the M1000RR engine has a stroke of 49.7mm, meaning that in one turn of the crankshaft the piston moves a total of 99.4mm. Here I am ignoring the effect of any crankshaft offset in the engine design, but that won’t change things much. Knowing how many revolutions the engine has done means we can work out how far the piston moves under those 44 per cent of the distance conditions – the answer is 29.4 miles (it would be 66.8 miles for the whole race distance if the whole thing was done in fifth). Now, that might not sound like much versus the whole race distance, but the stroke is very short indeed in comparison…

> ‘Each con rod could lift four to five times the mass of your bike without exceeding design limits’

BMW’s inline four – what madness goes on within

Let’s now look at the loads the engine is under. That 2022 BMW spec sheet gives a maximum power of 156kW at 14,500rpm, which is 209.2bhp in proper money. To generate this the torque has to be 102.7Nm (75.7 lb.ft), representing a drop of 9.1 per cent from the quoted maximum torque of 113Nm/83.3 lb.ft (remember, we’re using data for the 2022 M1000RR). The mean piston speed at maximum power is just over 24m/s – a totally normal number. BMW said they ran it out to 15,000rpm in the race, and for that the mean piston speed is 24.85m/s.

Right, let’s calculate something which, if it doesn’t scare you, should at least make you appreciate the abilities of the engineers who have created the bike you ride – the maximum inertia force on the small end of the connecting rod, which it has to resist as the piston changes direction during overlap and there are no meaningful gas forces on the piston to counteract it. I’ve had to make an assumption on its ‘l/r’ ratio (the rod length divided by the crankshaft throw), but after doing this, at 14,500rpm in the M1000RR, the maximum piston acceleration (the thing that arises from the change in direction) is 73,665m/s2 . This is just over 7500 times the force due to gravity. Newton tells us that force equals mass times acceleration, so to calculate the force involved we now have to assume a piston assembly mass. I am going to say 130g – this may be off, but I am including the mass of the pin, circlips and rings in this. Anyway, multiply that by the acceleration and you get 9576N. Now, divide that by the acceleration due to gravity (or ‘_g_’), or 9.81m/s2 , and you get the mass that would give that force – it’s 976kg. At 15,000rpm the force trying to pull the pin out of the con rod’s small end eye is comfortably over a ton…

Why do I evoke the engineers who have designed the con rods? Well, assuming the rods in your bike have similar structural capabilities as those in the BMW, each one could lift four to five times the mass of your bike without exceeding its design limits. Of course, the shank of the rod is even stronger – we usually add a third of the mass of the rod to the piston assembly to get the total reciprocating mass. Serious loads are generated there. Whichever way, at maximum power speed this inertia force is being applied many thousands of times a minute, yet the engine holds together. And it’s all going on between your legs…

> A force on the piston of more than five tons...

BMW pistons accelerate with 7500 times the force of gravity. Eek

And _that’s_ before we consider the combustion forces. When we consider combustion, the numbers get even bigger.

The forces acting on the small end are, of course, counteracted every other revolution by the gas forces acting on the piston due to combustion. Now, I don’t have a cylinder pressure trace for the BMW, obviously, but highly tuned, naturally aspirated engines will generate a peak cylinder pressure of about 100 bar (one bar is approximately an atmosphere). Given the bore of the engine is 80mm, this produces an instantaneous force on a piston of approximately 50kN – or more than five tons, comfortably bigger than the inertia force, but inwards towards the crank. Subtract the inertia force and that’s about four tons pushing through the rod towards the crankshaft. So the rod itself has to be able to resist massive buckling forces too. (Oh yes, and lest we forget, there is also a five-ton instantaneous force trying to lift the head off the block and fire it through the fuel tank towards your chin. If you ride a Ducati, try not to worry too much where the rear cylinder(s) are pointing…)

Even after nearly 40 years of working with engines, when I calculate numbers like this, I still get a sense of wonder that they work day in, day out, for years on end, and that they can be designed, developed, built and sold for a price that people are happy to pay while making a profit for their manufacturers. The forces and temperatures they sustain are incredible.

Their utility is similarly amazing. While a lap of TT is undoubtedly a stress, Hickman’s bike is _not_ a prototype but a development of a homologated, over the counter product that also passes difficult emissions tests and is a 200+ bhp softy to ride slowly. I would say this, but, really – mechanical engineering, what an amazing thing. And long live the internal combustion engine – very few things are _anywhere_ near as impressive. Especially when you see a TT bike doing massive speeds through urban areas with a complete hero pinning the throttle wide open for nearly half a lap… maybe don’t tell him some of the numbers in this piece, though, eh?

**Jamie Turner** is Professor of Engines at KAUST. He owns a BMW K1200S and loves two-strokes.

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