Simon and Leo

If you are a track day regular this year, you may well have bumped into former racer and friendly Kiwi, Simon Crafar. I first met him in Malaysia in 1990 when he was riding for a Yamaha dealer team, sweating his way round circuits like Shah Alam and Johor Bahru but with a long term plan to make it onto the World scene.

And he didn’t take long as after riding for Honda in the UK in 1992 he moved to WSB in 1994 and enjoyed success with both the Honda and Kawasaki factory teams. His crowning glory (and I’d swap my whole career for it) was winning the 1998 British Grand Prix at Donington on the WCM Red Bull Yamaha.

Nowadays, between enjoying life in Andorra (too many sheep for my liking) with his young family he keeps himself busy instructing on a new GSXR 1000.

I love passing on positive feedback so I thought I’d let you know how excited he was while telling me about his new Leo Vince full system and power commander. Si was hoping it would make a better noise and maybe be more free-revving but he reckons it totally transforms the Gixxer, letting it stay with any new ZX10 or S1000 no matter what their state of tune. I have no evidence he is working for Leo Vince but by the time our chat was over I was almost reaching for the credit card to buy one myself.

By Niall Mackenzie