Without wishing to put too fine a point on it, there is no better a big bike rider at the Isle of Man TT than Peter Hickman right now. From his first win in the Superstock class in 2018, he has raised the game on big bikes, setting a new outright lap record at the TT in that year’s Senior on his BMW Superbike at 135.452mph.
In 2019, Hickman won the Superbike TT and the Superstock race, and arguably should have added the Senior to his list. That unbeaten big bike run was broken due to a foreseeable mechanical issue, which allowed Dean Harrison to do the honours. Hickman and his Smiths Racing team at the time had hoped to run the Superbike with a stock engine to avoid the problem, but weren’t allowed to by the scrutineers after that year’s delayed Superstock race.
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There were no such problems in 2022 when the TT returned from a two-year COVID absence, with Hickman victorious in all three big bike races on his FHO Racing-run BMW M1000RR.
Nothing was expected to change in 2023. Except, he was beaten by Michael Dunlop on the Hawk Racing Honda in the Superbike TT, the Ulsterman celebrating his first big bike win since the same race in 2018. Hickman was 8.2s adrift of Dunlop at the finish of the six-lap contest.
Throughout practice week Hickman hadn’t been happy with the Superbike-spec M1000RR. It was violently unstable, which in turn was knocking the bike’s brake pads back. The team turned the bike upside down through practice to try and fix these issues, but the problems only got worse. To further complicate things, a swingarm he had been using that he liked had to be discarded because it was flexing too much.
“The biggest issue is, we know what the problem is – we don’t know how to fix it,” Hickman told Autosport on the Thursday rest day prior to the final three races of the week. “That’s the problem. And all the obvious things that you do aren’t working, and that makes it like a proper headscratcher because you don’t know what to do and what not to do. It’s like, in theory what we did for the [Superbike] race should have been better but it made it worse.
“The other big issue we’ve had, unfortunately, is the swingarm that we’ve developed, that we’ve been using in BSB, and we used here at the start of the week is awesome, works really well and I had less issues when that was in. However, because we built so much flex into it, it’s actually been flexing too much. So, the swingarm has been bending while I’ve been riding. So, when we come in and go to change the wheel, you can take the spindle out but it won’t go back in because the actual swingarm is twisted. So, it meant at the end of the week – so, for Friday – we decided to take the new swingarm out and put the old swingarm in, which I don’t like anyway, and that has made our issues worse.”
Source: Autosport