Tyre Disaster

**Turbo** · 31-01-2016, 05:16 PM

I had a bit of a crappy end to the year last year. I dropped the bike coming out of corporate hill and lowsided into the kitty litter.
Happily my leathers held up and I kept the lid off the ground but the bike had a pretty long slide on it's ear...

Luckily I had the tank sliders on as well as a tank cover so that prevented it from fireballing

Damage to the bike wasn't catastrophic but has ended up being quite expensive:
New bar
Screen
Case cover
Frame slider
Fairings
....and most annoyingly, a new tank!
A bit of crafty bogging could have fixed the thin part of metal from the scuff but the left of the tank took a real whack, so the shoulder of it has folded down.
That meant it couldn't really be beaten back into shape and wouldn't fit a new tank cover over it or be easy to lock on to with my knee...

The culprit cause of the crash appears to have been the front tyre. If you look at the left hand side of the tyre (right of pic), you can see about an inch of rubber on the inside that's not wearing at the same rate.

Feeling this section with your fingers, it feels VERY hard and almost glazed as opposed to the regular wear that's elsewhere and even on the right hand edge.
As I was approaching full lean on the left hand side and I reached this spot, it just gave up and I lost the front.
Needless to say I was pretty unhappy. But even after sending back and waiting for months for some feedback, the manufacturer have not volunteered any sort of conclusion or accepted fault.
I'm pretty confident I wasn't asking too much of the tyre and that the temp, pressure and suspension were all set up well.... Ah well, #Tracklife!

Anyhow, the upside of all of this was getting shiny new bits for the #1 bike!! Everything landed almost at the same time, the night before my first trackday back.
It was a frantic day but happily I managed to get everything finished up in time for some hot laps in the sunshine

Just needs some team stickers and race numbers and we'll be ready to race next week!!