[gmdboston]

Bergs, it sounds like you have very mis-lead about what Computrack is and what we do. I'll try to clear this up for you, but the explanation is very long and I'm a hunt & peck keyboard jockey, so if you have any lingering questions call me.

First a word about stock suspension. When a manufacturer designs and builds a bike, there are many committees involved. There is the engineering dept. that designs the parts and makes it work, the marketing dept. does the styling and graphics, the accounting dept. sets the budget for each of the other dept, and lastly the most powerful dept, the legal dept, approves the whole bastardized mess. All of these committees fight and bicker over how the bike will look, be built and be sold. What happens is we get a watered down version of the engineer's dream to build a high performance machine, a look designed to appeal to as many buyers as possible, a cost most buyers can afford, and settings designed to avoid law suits.

In choosing the actual suspension settings two major considerations must be taken into account. First is the "Showroom Appeal", this means that if you have settings firm enough to control chassis pitch, it will feel stiff when Joe Shit The Rag Man plants his/her ass on the seat and gives the bike a bounce. Marketing depts mandate soft low speed compression damping. Second is the manf's never know where any specific bike is going, other what country. So they have to allow for the 78lb Japanese Girl and the 350lb Bratwurst scarfing German man. The settings end up being quite Vanilla. The range of the Clickers is actually very limited and can not accommodate all riders under all conditions, in fact they do very little until the last 1/4 of a turn. On the whole stock suspension components are a poor compromise between engineering, marketing, accounting and legal depts.

As for the Computrack machine, there have been many bull shitters on the web that are glad to tell you what we do, when in fact they have never even set foot in a Computrack shop. The Computrack machine is really just a very accurate 3 dimensional tape measure. We can measure a chassis to with 0.01mm and 2 arc seconds of a degree. It does not give any answers (nor does data aquisition, but every one thinks by plugging in a computer to a bike all the mysteries of the universe will be revealed including reconsiling the quantum theory of gravity and quantum mechanics. I wish it was that easy) it only gives me a very, very accurate report of the alignment and geometry parameters. With this information we develop our "Sweet Numbers." This is simply a range of geometry settings that give the best feed back, feel, grip, turn in, drive grip and rider comfort. Not only is every model different, (some idiots think we use the same settings for every make, model, year bike we do) but each chassis/tire/rider/suspension component/ application is unique as well. In one case I had a customer bring in two bikes with consecutive VIN numbers that required 5mm different front ride heights to get the same geometry settings. Even with the same geometry the two bikes did handle differently because one was higher than the other.

When you purchase a GMD Computrack Geometry Optimization you are not buying a product, like you would buy an exhaust system. It's a process and a service. We start by measuring your bike to find out exactly what we have in front of us, do what work is appropriate, set up the chassis at our Sweet Numbers starting point, then work with you to fine tune the settings for your specific needs. It's not uncommon for the starting point to be good enough for a while, but as you go faster you will have to make adjustments to the chassis and we are here for that back up and support. We have thousands of measurements, and thousands of set ups to draw from. Many times the solution to a problem is counter intuitive, or is just a millimeter or two away. One case comes to mind where Eric Wood was having fits with his new 1998 ZX 6R. He was 2 seconds a lap slower than he was on the older, less powerful 95-97 version. I measured the bike and raised the front 2mm and the rear 3mm. The next day he posted practice times that would have qualified him on the front row of the AMA 600 Supersport race. He was 2.5 seconds quicker. He had been raising the bike up with no improvement and was ready to lower it back to lower than stock. With out a very accurate measurement, he would have been chasing his tail all year. From that day on he only moved the bike 2-3mm from track to track.

So while you can develop setting based solely on feel, unless you have hard data to track where you are, what the changes were, how the ride was affected, and what the next step should be it's all but impossible to find the best set up. To that end almost the entire AMA paddock uses Computrack on some level. Some have there own machine, some use the machines at the race shop some use the services of the retail shops like myself and Mike. Paul Thede has a very true saying "The best you've ridden, is the best you know."