The conversion of a beautiful stock streetbike into a track-only racebike is an ambitious undertaking requiring a fair amount of financial and emotional fortitude. Buying a new streetbike should be an experience filled with wonder and excitement. Immediately stripping the bike down to its component parts is more demystifying than first-date sex. It’s more like first-date dissection.

No matter how much power your engine makes, it will do you absolutely no good if the bike’s chassis is the limiting factor. Although most modern sportbikes have suspension that is far superior to the stock suspension shipped with bikes even just five years ago, it still tends to be primarily engineered for a sedate street pace with soft springs and incomprehensible valving choices by the OEMs. At a number of recent late-model press launches the factory technicians had set the rear rebound damping adjuster at full hard or one click off of full hard. You would think that at some point they would recognize that if they are shipping the bikes with a suggested setting of "full hard" they might want to rethink the valving selections they are making at the factory.

Don’t kid yourself. If you race motorcycles, it is likely that you will crash. There are things you can do to try to minimize damage to yourself during a crash, but that’s a different article. We’ve found the easiest way to try to minimize crash damage to the bike is by replacing the stock handlebars with clip-ons with replaceable bars, replacing the stock folding footpegs and mounts with rearsets and solid footpegs, and installing frame savers. And thoroughly race-wiring your motorcycle may help to prevent a crash from occurring, since many a crash is due to a preparation error or improper race-wiring.

Most bikes converted to racing use have pretty good basic brake components installed from the factory. Some of the latest bikes with radial calipers and/or radial master cylinders come with track-spec brake pad compounds and hardly need any performance improvements before taking to the track.