Description
MB4U British Superbike Championship of yr. 2000
Crescent Racing National Tyres/ Clarion Suzuki.
GSX-R 750 (XR09) John Crawford
#11 John Crawford stepped up to the superbike class after winning two consecutive british supersport 600 titles with crescent suzuki.
john earned a pole position at thruxton and wild card entries in world superbikes during 2000 aboard this bike finishing a respectable 8th for his first year in the hotly contested bsb championship.
This bike was sold to a private collector by crescent racing in 2002 who simply stored the bike prior to emigrating in 2006. i purchased the bike that year and since then it has under gone a full restoration and authentication by dave hagen (chief engineer for crescent racing 2000/ 2001 and origional builder of these machines and their factory engines) .
Crescent opted to run pectel electronics in 2000 as part of an r+d colaboration rather than the largely unadjustable xr factory ignitions at the time and so when the 2000 / 01 seasons were concluded all but one pectel t6 ecu was returned to pectel.
As a result, this bike now runs a modern yoshimura em pro system which allows for a modern , safer fuel setup for parading the bike on lower octane pump gas than the 20yr old pectel kit. However, should the buyer wish to return the bike to 100% origional i can supply an original pectel wiring harness.
To compliment the sale of the bike i will include some team clothing that was not available to the public, origional pit walling for jc's side of the garage in 2000, vip pack, magazines, and ofcourse authentication docs.
Background information on the bikes....
These bikes are based on the road going suzuki gsx-r 750 srad bikes and were under development between 1996-2000.
there factory designation number were xr06 / 7/ 8/ and then finally 9. made as the rules stated to be a "silouette" class that really is where the similarities to those road machines ended.
this particular bike was hand built by the japanese factory in hamamastu and supplied direct to paul denning at crescent suzuki as the official uk factory suzuki team.
These bikes come from an era of limitless budgets and where winning at the suzuka 8hr, the world superbike , british and american domestic championship's was of paramount importance to the respective factories.
These are essentially the last of the true suzuki xr0 750 development superbikes.
as a result every component on these bikes have been changed to the point that the only items to truely survive from the standard road bike was the frame. However, the frame did not escape alteration . they were cut, strengthened, braced for rigidity and modified where required, and then marked accordingly.
subframes, swing arms and linkages were replaced with braced, lighter, and fully adjustable items as were the triple clamps to make chassis geometry fully adjustable throughout.
magnesium was also used to reduce weight where ever possible.
The engines are where the true art lies, as the cylinder heads on these bike were hand made and are narrower than the standard bike. They also sport a set of removable inlet ports which had interchangable inserts to change the charicteristics to the desired power delivery for each track.
valves, cam shafts, oil pump, water pump, cranks , pistons, rods, gearboxes, were all completely replaced with the mechanical wet clutch system being upgraded to a hydraulic dry clutch system to handle the extra 55+ hp these factory engine produce over the standatd 750 engine. This was also made possible by the then state of the art 8 point shower fuel injection system , huge radiator to aid cooling, massive carbon ram air box and d port titanium yoshimura exhaust system.
brakes are brembo monobloc with floating discs.
suspension is supplied all round by showa and was soley available to factory teams.
All in all, these true factory bikes of this era were essentially 4 stroke gp bikes in an age where 2stroke 500 gp bikes were producing similar power but with 30-40kgs less physical weight.
Please call for further details and pictures of this truly iconic machine.
When the 1000cc era arrived in sbk two years later the accountants had already started to take over and development budgets were reduced year apon year in favour of electronics development.
