Kevin Curtain on the original 1998 Yamaha R1
Kevin Curtain used the 1998 Yamaha YZF-R1 to excellent effect during the 1998 Australian Production Superbike Championship season.
The 1998 YZF-R1 was always intended to be raced, but at the time of its release there was no official Australian championship class for it.
Formula Xtreme wasn’t an ‘official’ Australian championship, so Motorcycling Australia created a race series for this new generation of 1000 cc four-cylinder machine called Production Superbike.
This new class would be run within the Australian Superbike Championship, which still ran 750 cc four-cylinder and 1000 cc twin-cylinder machines.
Kevin Curtain and the Radar’s Yamaha Team were the main players in the field, and came away with a commanding victory in the Production Superbike Championship that season. Here, Curtain takes a walk down memory lane.
“When the ’98 R1 came out it was a real head turner,” Curtain says. “We knew it would be a good thing, but were weren’t allowed to do much tuning at all because the 750 cc guys were up in arms about us racing a 1000 cc machine. Funny thing was our bike cost under $20,000 and the FIM-spec bikes were all way over $100,000!
“We were limited to mainly an exhaust, air filter and some carby tuning – no special cams or anything. Those R1s were a bit of a light switch in power delivery but with the right jetting you could make them quite smooth.”
Legendary Australian tuner Dave ‘Radar’ Cullen was teamed with Kevin Curtain in 1998 and remembers the YZF-R1 fondly.
“The R1 was really a ground-breaking machine,” Cullen says. “It was so far in front of the rest of the pack and miles ahead of the ThunderAce. From memory we never had any reliability issues.
“The engine benefited from Yamaha’s involvement in Formula One at the time with Tyrell in that it showed how much closer you could package the cylinders together. We ran the stock airbox and we were allowed to change that in 1999, but we already had some great power out of the new engine and with Kev riding so well that season it was a good year.
“We didn’t have any of the clutch issues that affected the standard roadbikes, but that was because we had the clutch out regularly to check it after each race – the engine itself was bulletproof. Our bike was sold to Roger Heyes.
“It’d be nice to see if the bike still exists – from memory it was number two from the worldwide production line. I was offered number one by Yamaha, but it was a red/white machine and I ran my riders in blue back then – I didn’t want to take it because we’d have to paint the tank. If it was number one worldwide and we won all those races on it, I reckon it’d be worth a bit now!”
Jamie Stauffer went on to win the Australian Superbike Championship on a YZF-R1 in both 2006 and 2007.
Yamaha then went 15 years without winning the championship until Mike Jones lifted the crown in 2022.
