The 990cc four cylinder engine is mounted to the frame longitudinally (front-to-rear)—rather than transversely (side-to-side) as found most similarly configured motorcycles. A transverse arrangement fights a bike’s gyroscopic tendency to stand up when leaned over and applying throttle. The C1, on the other hand, in order to negate the resulting gyroscopic forces of the longitudinal orientation, has its lengthwise-mounted inline 4 engine cut in half, and the resulting crankshaft halves counter-rotated. Thus, the bike handles as if it had a smaller engine with less gyroscopic force.[3]
Two of the bike’s four throttle bodies are controlled mechanically, while the other two are controlled electronically by the ECU, theoretically smoothing power delivery. The ECU-controlled throttle bodies can be adjusted by computer for refinement of the throttle curve.
Unfortunately for the company the FIM and Dorna have reduced the engine capacity for a MotoGP bike to 800cc’s for the 2007 season rendering the current configuration useless for competition in that class. Michael Czysz commented in a blog post[4] that they have been looking towards racing the bike in either AMA or WSB competition.
I’ve been following them for a while. It is just a wild story, great perspective. Very neat to see what you can accomplish with a limitless pile of money. I can’t wait to see it become comptetetive w/ the factory teams and really push the thought process in terms of MC design.
This was pretty BA in HD - especially after they told one rider - “you dump it, it’s one million to replace.”
“I just bought a Z/06, that’s like 14 of those!”
It was one guy with a dream (and a almost-limitless) pile of money. Hey stole the best of everyone to get it done. Of course he still is in need of investors. It will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
It was hardly someone saying “hay, this seems like a great business idea”
It was more like “hay, I’m an incredible enthusiast, who has a giant pile of money and can make something like this start to happen”
im still not seeing this limitless pile of money… did you see the documentary?
he did design/prototype and build the first 2 bikes for under 2.5 million and was scrambling for more $$ the whole time… on the verge of investors pulling out etc.
the guy did seem to have some of his own $$ to get it started, but it just seemed like a typical california business man type of money… not a huge amount
but he did get some good engineers from cosworth to help with the engine design
