Lumley Engineeting - Customer Driven Development of Hub Centric Steering System

For a few years now, Dave Langley has been enjoying being able to take part in sprint races on his Yamaha Fazer powered outfit. However, Dave is a racer and like all racers, he wanted to go faster still.

To facilitiate this, Dave sent us his Yamaha R1 and left us a free hand in how we adapted it to work the way his old Fazer had, but more so.

We had been working on the hub centric system for some time to make outfits handle and steer as accurately as a single seat race car. Having applied the concept to to a number of sidecar outfits with conventional chassis, we knew how well it would work.

The big question was how to attach it to the aluminium beam frame of the R1. This was overcome using a massively strong hollow bolt through the steering head to carry the front mount, with a stabilising mount picking up on the engine mounting bolts.

Once again, the Shock Factory came up with the one off suspension units, calculated to work with the loads and to perfectly fit our curved members at the front, the special wheel/caliper carrier at the back and our unique wishbone suspension on the sidecar wheel.

The sidecar bodywork was made in our own workshops with the aim of re-creating the spirit of 1950s Grand Prix cars, and everyone who has seen the outfit so far has loved the shape.

Dave is thrilled with the results and is going faster than he has ever gone before, feeling comfortable and confident with the stable, planted feel that the hub centric system imbues.