Team ORC Finishes 4th!
2001 XR650R vs.
2001 Baja 500
How It Held Up
By Mike Hobbs
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Team ORC Finishes 4th!
2001 XR650R vs. How It Held Up By Mike Hobbs
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Racing Baja Mexico is truly a durability challenge on any machine that attempts to beat the peninsula. Folks spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on four-wheel vehicles and some of them won’t cross the finish line. Taking this into consideration you can imagine the abuse an almost stock motorcycle has to endure.
When team Ride-Net started our Baja 500 race effort months ago, we told you that we’d let you know how the products we used held up in the 500-mile event. For 13 hours our race team beat the crap out of our 2001 XR650R before crossing the finish line. We encountered every possible type of terrain one could imagine: rocks, sand, ruts, 90-degree heat, eye blurring high speed sections as well as a crash or two. In our class only 12 bikes finished out of the 18 that started the race. So, how did the aftermarket parts we used work? Lets find out…
The order of products is in the sequence received or bought.Too Tech Suspension
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Our challenge to Too Tech was no small one, which was to make the ill handling stock XR650R suspension work in a 500-mile Baja race. Then to make things tougher on them it had to work for three riders ranging in weight from 150 LBS to 230 LBS. We made no changes out of the box to the suspension whatsoever and it worked well. After many miles of testing our lighter racers decided on a happy medium from the heavyweight settings. We slowed the rebound a few clicks and changed the rear race sag from 4” with the heaviest rider to 4 ¼”. Of course it is impossible to have one setting work perfect for everyone with such a wide verity of weights. Tim Morton weighing in at a buck fifty said the suspension was a bit stiff for him. Kevin Gorzny said it worked much better then the stock suspension and as for me, the heavyweight, it worked perfect and the harsh front end bottoming was gone, along with the unpredictable rear end bounce. It worked so well I didn’t even think about it during the race and that’s saying something! http://www.tootechracing.com/
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