Harley Davidson is back in motocross

This is what D.V. had to say: Spot on !

you can’t start from your factory US bike to test for the GPs. You almost have to start from scratch, from a bone stock bike and start bolting stuff on. It takes a lot of time. But making an US factory 450 MX bike into a good GP bike takes even more time. Just because the philosophy is so different and that’s what you have to put in your head when you start testing to race GP's. When I talked to RV in A1 about the MX GP's, I told him straight up that if he wanted to use his US bike there and steer with the rear like he often does in the US, he would hate it and struggle. His dad was there too, he looked at me and said, that’s what we do. We pivot the bike with the throttle and we won a lot of championships like that. We’ll be just fine. I didn’t really want to argue with the dad of one of the best rider the sport has seen but in my head I was like, ok whatever…


RV and his team headed back to Europe between GP's to do some more testing.
His bike in Qatar wasn’t good. It looked horrible. His forks bounced around like a ping pong ball on acid. His rear end looked very low and not moving at all. Riding like that on choppy tracks with long ruts isn’t fun and not efficient. The rear has no traction and you get kicked in every braking/acceleration bumps. The front bounced around, stays too high and you can’t get in the turns/ruts the right way. Center of gravity is too high and it’s tough to lean the bike in the ruts, in small shallow inside lines and slick flat turns. If you look at GP bikes of the riders that do good, they are more balanced. The suspensions has less damping to absorb choppy bumps and might seem real busy but it also helps in traction. RV’s bike doesn’t move in the rear. To have traction, you have to have a free-er/faster rebound. The swing arm/shock combo have to push the wheel/tire down to the ground to bite the dirt and get traction. Too often people think that if you get kicked it’s because the rebound is too fast and so they slow the rebound down.

Then, the rear wheel skims the bump while braking and acceleration but the wheel has the time to get back down to the dirt to get traction. When the tire is in the air, obviously, you have no traction. You can ride like that in Red Bud and Budds Creek and it’s a better set up for there. Since the dirt is so deep and the bumps big, if you ride with a "Euro" plusher and busier set up, both ends of your bike will be rocking back and forth and it wouldn’t be good. In Europe, only a couple tracks get that way.

I apologize...I made the assumption that a few people on here have a sense of humor and don't just bitch about whatever someone posts. I am learning that Negativity is the primary prerequisite to be a retard... I mean vitard. DV just validated the premise that RV's bike is too hardtail/chopper like for the Gp's. Just having some fun with it...but that might just get me banned from this place