Roger Ditchfield » Fri Jan 25, 2013 2:43 am

Hi Guys, In this thread there has been several references to the "ears" in the Spondon frame. This the story. The development of the VTR was originally given to Russell Savoury by Honda UK who employed the services of Mick Grant as a consultant. After more than a year the project had failed to achieve too much progress and while I was at the Suzuka 8 hour I was asked by HRC if I would be interested in taking over the project. I agree provided that Russel was happy to do that - which he was. When I took over and uplifted all the bikes and equipment from Harlow I had five modified frames. Enquiries revealed that Spondon were asked to do this by Mick to cure high speed straight line weaving. I then examined the dampers that had arrived only to find that they had been extended between 15mm and 25mm centre eye to centre eye longer than standard of 345mm! IMHO the "ears" were fitted in an attempt to cure a self inflicted problem. As already mentioned in previous posts no ST3 race bikes producing far more power than Russels best of 118bhp ever ran with this modification including mine. The standard frame was modified and I have done this modification on two customer bikes in the UK. I left the Spondon ears on my ST2 Production race bikes purely because they did no harm to the new Revolution suspension set up and the then ACU Minimum Race Weight Regulation for that class allowed then to stay there. If you have a VTR bike exceeding 135bhp I recommend the Standard frame modifications as used on all ST3s*
Roger Ditchfield