THE FRAME GAME

When it comes to chassis development, few folks know more than the legends at Harris Performance. We went to town, questioning them on all there is to know about this pivotal, mind-blowing subject.

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A motorbike chassis is just some metal that's been formed and welded to hold everything the motorbike needs in place, like the engine, suspension, fuel tank and rider, to name just a few things, right? Well, sort of, except that its design, the material used, and how it is constructed is critical to how a motorbike feels and gives confidence to the rider. Get the sums wrong on a bike chassis and it doesn't matter how posh the suspension or tyres are, or good the rider is, the bike will be a hound. Just ask Honda how its MotoGP season went in 2023.

Walk into pretty much any motorcycle showroom and you'll see bikes with frames that have different approaches to the same goal. Steel tubes are the go-to solution for KTM on all of its frames and Ducati for most.

Fabricated alloy is probably the most common material, and the construction technique for beam frames is used by pretty much everyone, and the Ducati Panigale and Monster use cast alloy 'front frames', which is essentially a way of connecting all the front suspension to the engine, effectively using the engine as the frame. There's a mixed bag of concepts and approaches to frame building, which suggests that there isn't a right or wrong method or material, which in turn suggests there are pros and cons for each concept. So, I took a trip to one of the best chassis builders in the business to ask some questions...