PIPE DREAMS... THE SC-PROJECT STORY

Going from launching a brand-new company to seeing your exhausts on a MotoGP bike in just three years sounds like a fantasy, but that's just what SC-Project managed to do when it started out. We spoke to the Italian exhaust firm about just what goes into a race exhaust...

- WORDS: ALAN DOWDS PICS: SC-PROJECT

Race bike exhausts are a curious thing.

They're the only major part of the powertrain that's obviously supplied by an external firm. Can you imagine Honda's HRC division shouting about having its cylinder heads supplied by a small company from Italy? Or Ducati Corse putting the logo of some Slovenian aluminium foundry on show, laser-engraved onto the clutch cover? Yet the muffler of virtually every race bike, at any level from MotoGP to Bemsee club racing, now sports the branding of third-party firms.

That's not always been the case. Look at the world-beating Honda NSR500 two-strokes ridden by Eddie Lawson and Mick Doohan in the late 1980s and early 1990s - they had completely plain 'stinger' end cans on their massive expansion chambers. There was the odd exhaust logo - some Yamaha YZR500s wore Arrow-branded cans - but by the mid 1990s, logos were becoming widespread. Doohan's Repsol bike had an Arrow logo on the end can in 1997, as did Alex Criville's machine. Then, Valentino Rossi moved up to 500GP and his Nastro Azzurro NSR wore an Italian Polini logo on its pipes for 2000. That was pure marketing for kids in its home market, though: Polini specialised in scooter exhausts rather than performance parts for big bikes, and we reckon that the actual design of the super-trick expansion chambers had come out of an HRC office in Japan, rather than a minibike factory in Bergamo...

Superbike racing, strangely, has a rather longer history of branded pipes: the Kawasaki Z1000 race bike used by Eddie Lawson in AMA superbike competition before his GP career famously wore a Kerker exhaust. Japanese brands like Yoshimura were a common sight in the 1970s and 1980s too. Something about the production nature of the bikes meant a third-party tuning brand on the exhaust felt 'right' to see, and this continued into the early days of WSBK, with brands like Bassani, Muzzy, Yoshimura, D&D, Two Brothers and Skorpion (which rebranded as Akrapovic in 1997).