We talk set-up and electronics with Max and Jamie Stauffer

Jamie & Max Stauffer Interview

Trevor Hedge: Max, Jamie, good to have a chat away from a race weekend, here at a wet testing day at Wakefield Park, you got out on track tesing here in the dry yesterday, did you manage to make much progress?

Jamie Stauffer: “I think so, Max hasn’t had a lot of time on the superbike and this is I suppose a track he’s ridden at most, but it’s only his second time on the superbike here. So good to get here as we had a lot of stuff to try, and I think we are heading in the right direction. We came here our first time only a week ago, and I had a ride on the bike as well and had a good feel of a couple of things and sort of figured out what direction we needed to go in. We tried that a bit yesterday, and seems to be going forward. He actually went home happy last night, so that’s probably a first time on the superbike this year, so yeah we’re making progress I think. There’s been a lot of stuff to sort out because we’re trying to set up a bike, electronics, etc., it’s all fairly new. The electronics side of things is fairly new to everyone with the MoTeC, so I think we are getting somewhere finally.”

Trev: I think you found the geometry felt a bit wrong when you jumped on the bike? Is that right?

Jamie: “Yeah, I think where we had the bike it was just too… everything was on the nose on the bike…”

Trev: Sounds like a Krusty set-up.

Jamie: “Similar *laughs* I’ve had that experience before because it actually felt like, a lot like, when I jumped on the Suzuka 8 Hour bike with Nori, he ran his bike really steep. So as soon as I got on it, it reminded me of that and yeah we started flattening the bike out and it got better and better. Then Max was surprised with how much more grip in corner entry and yeah we’ve just been sort of fine tuning it a bit more yesterday. He seems to be happier with it.”

Trev: Max, good to get dad out on the bike? After he came in were you telling him, that’s what I’ve been telling you about? Or was his focus a little bit different than yours?

Max Stauffer: “I honestly didn’t know what was wrong with the bike, and every change we made didn’t change much or help us. Once dad hopped on the bike and sort of found out there was a bit of a problem with the geometry and we changed it up, we started to be able to make changes and feel like we were doing a bit better and then started to make improvements from that. Yeah, so it was good to have him on the bike, and that’s helped me out a lot.”

Trev: Jamie, I guess for us to try and educate young players in the game, with how much experience you have tuning and racing, how did you get it that wrong in the workshop, to then only feel it out on the track?

Jamie: “Well yeah, we ended up like that for a number of reasons, I suppose at the start when we first put the MoTeC on there was a problem with the firmware and there was no engine brake working, and I think a lot of where we started going wrong stemmed right back from that. We spent up until the last session at Phillip Island test, which was the first time MoTeC actually found a fault in their firmware, and updated everyone’s, then we had that last session then it rained. All the way up to that point, we were trying to work around a problem that we didn’t know we had. I suppose, I was sort of looking more as well at his 600 set-up and geometry and tried to mimic that a little bit. It just didn’t work. So there’s a couple of things we still need to make better, which I think once we sort those out, we’ll be able to actually lift the back of the bike back up a little bit. But nowhere near where we were. So I’m the same as anyone out there, I can make a bike bad, just as well as the next guy. That’s the perfect example of it.”

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Trev: The old rule was you went back to the point where it was exactly as the Japanese provided you the bike out of the crate and start again, is that where you’ve gone back to and started again?

Jamie: “Yeah it’s pretty close, I mean I suppose we were steeper than standard, now we’re not as steep, flatter than standard, so yeah it’s like I said, I think it’s just getting that balance of the bike right.  I think we did have it in a position where we were just that far away. I’d change it a couple mm here and there and he’s not feeling any different, but when I jumped on it the first lap, I thought it needs to go a long way, so I dropped it four mm in shock length, straight away, and felt a big difference and then kept going from there.”

Trev: So Max, have you now appointed dad as the official test rider for the team?

Max: “He’s not fast enough yet, I think he needs to lose a bit of weight before that happens.”

Trev: He’ll never get down to your race weight unless we start cutting limbs off him…

Max: “That’s right, but it was definitely a great help, even if he didn’t go as fast as me. (Laughs and grins all round). It was great to have his input to see what the bike was doing, and give me a direction of where I needed to go. Because at the moment I don’t really know what I need out of the bike to be able to go fast, I’m sort of working on that. That’s just a part of the learning curve I’m going through, so to have him hop on the bike was a massive help.”

Trev: So you’ve had quite a bit of success on the 600, you’re used to getting on the podium fighting up the front, now you’re sort of at the back of a deeper pool, you could say, I guess that you must have somewhat expected that but it’s never easy, but where are you in relation to your expectations?

Max: “Obviously you always want to be further up the field, it’s been my sort of rookie first year, on the superbike, and really just frustrating to be so competitive on the 600, and then not be competitive at all on the superbike. But at the moment we’re just chipping away and we’re slowing working towards the front and just trying to pick people off one by one. And we’ll just work our way until we are competitive and back on the podium which hopefully is pretty soon.”

Trev: Jamie you’ve just been so keen to get Max on as many laps as you can on the superbike on the limited occassions you have actually had him on the bike at a track, a couple of times when he has come in wanting changes you’ve sent him back out to there to do more laps and not come in until the end of the session…

Jamie: “I understand what he’s going through, he went down to Phillip Island thinking that it’s his first superbike race, and I’ve been there before the same as a lot of other people. Up until that stage he’s done hardly any time on the superbike with everything working as well, so I just wanted him to go out and ride around. He’s coming in panicking, thinking he’s got to try something to go faster and you know, I was like no, just get out there and do laps. It took a bit to convince him, but in the end it took the hard person in the family to tell him what he had to do. He went out and has done it, and I mean it’s just time on bikes. If there’s one thing any rider can do, it’s just more laps and more laps. That’s not an easy thing in road racing, because its so expensive to do. So that’s the thing about today it’s such a shame it’s raining, would have liked to have another day on the bike, we would’ve been a lot further forward than what we ended up yesterday, which is still an improvement, so that’s good.”

Trev: Max, so Phillip Island on the superbike, how long did it take you to dial your eyeballs in, the speed is just unrelenting isn’t it?

Max: “Every lap I came down the straight and I’m thinking, its getting pretty quick here, turn one is coming up pretty quick. But that’s what I enjoy about riding and road racing, how fast you get to go in a straight line. So it felt good straight away, I just need to learn how to get the quickest lap time with the power I’ve got underneath me.”

Trev: Jamie, you’ve made the big jump to MoTeC that’s obviously a huge development curve in itself, why did you make that choice when that’s another variable you’ve thrown into the mix, from the fairly safe YEC approach?

Jamie: “Well, we spoke about it early on, before we even got the bikes and there was a lot of talk about being a control ECU next year, and I figured – well I still hadn’t worked on an R1 with YEC, and as simple as it is, once you start getting fast it’s not that simple. It’s still the same as any electronics package, you have to learn it. I figured that by the time we just got the hang of that, we’d have to learn the MoTeC because its quite possibly a control ECU for next year. So the decision was if I learnt it now and learnt it better than anyone else next year, we might have a head start, or at least won’t have a disadvantage at all.”

Trev: What’s your viewpoint on the move to a control ECU, do you think it will be good for the championship, is that something you’re in favour of?

Jamie: “Yeah I think so, I think it’s a good thing. I mean I’m probably glad they didn’t do it this year, because it seems quite hard to get stuff out of MoTeC at the moment, same as trying to get hold of parts or anything in the world, supply issues are a big problem. I mean it’s a hard one isn’t it – Mike did a fantastic job at Queensland Raceway and won, I think if nothing else it puts a lot of questions to bed that people asked, is Wayne winning just because of the Marelli?”

Trev: I think we both know that’s not the case, because he was winning races and setting records on the standard set-up.

Jamie: “The reason Wayne’s as strong as he is, is because he’s got the best team in the paddock and that’s it. I think they’d be winning on any brand really. The team has the right mind-set, I mean at the end of the day it’s the team. I said when I was riding for Craig, I said this is what you need to do, these are the people you need to get, and that’s what happened, and like I said it’s the best team in the paddock and that’s why they are the dominant team.”

Trev: Even though they are dominant, and they’ve got their head around the Magneti Marelli they run as the nominated ECU put forward by Ducati, but still, they are also in favour of the switch to MoTeC.

Jamie: “They’ll still be just as fast on MoTeC if not faster, I believe, so they’ve got the right people in the team. Adrian Monti, he knows the MoTeC just as well as the Marelli and I’d imagine if we all went to MoTeC tomorrow, the next meeting they turned up to they’d be just as fast. So I don’t think there’d be any difference.” 

Trev: Good to catch up and grab some of your time. See you back here in a couple of weeks.

Jamie, Max: “Thanks Trev.”

The third round of the 2022 Mi-Bike Motorcycle Insurance Australian Superbike Championship roars to life on the weekend of April 23-24 at Wakefield Park, Goulburn, NSW.

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