When too much is almost enough: The Alpha Racing M 1000 RR
In 1888, Mrs. Bertha Benz loaded her two teenage boys on the back of an internal combustion engine-powered trike (built by her husband) and set out on the first motorcycle-adjacent road trip of all time. She had to buy fuel at pharmacies, invent brake pad linings along the way, and augment the power of the Benz engine with her teenage sons for some of the climbs. She completed the 66 mile journey (as a hooligan, as the trip was officially illegal) to prove to her husband (who didn’t know she was going to do it) and the world that internal combustion vehicles were viable.
Mrs. Benz also established the now time-honored tradition of all racers to follow in her footsteps, chasing budgets and better metallurgy: “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.” Following Bertha’s example, many motorcycle manufacturers proclaim their bikes to be race ready, secure in the knowledge that the claim will rarely be put to the test.
At Laguna Seca in July 2024, Nolan Lamkin suffered the misfortune of totaling his BMW race bike in qualifying for the MotoAmerica Stock 1000 race. His team purchased the Alpha Racing M1000RR displayed at the San Jose BMW tent at the track, changed the fork springs and shock, and took a ninth place finish, less than 13 seconds off the winner. No doubt Bertha Benz would be proud! Two days later I had the good fortune to test ride an almost identical Alpha Racing M1000RR at Sonoma Raceway.
It is worth contemplating, at the moment, the nature of being. If I remove the front wheel from a 1952 Vincent Black Shadow, do I now have two Black Shadows, each of which is missing some parts? Then, consider modern manufacturing. There is nothing physical in an iPhone actually manufactured by Apple. It is a sum of electronic components, assembled by a third party, and branded by Apple.
Bicycles use brakes, suspension, running gear and other parts from multiple brands, so the bike’s core identity is just the frame, which is also probably built in a factory along with frames for other manufacturers. But surely motorcycles, the purest of all industrial products, are different! Right? But then you look at a dirt bike with its KYB suspension, Nissin brakes, Excel rims, Dunlop tires, third party ECU, body work made by a subcontractor and electrics from someone else. You might get all the way down to just the frame and engine again. In the forthcoming Chinese dirt bike era, even those might be made by subcontractors.
In this spirit of that contemplation, we have the Alpha Racing M1000RR. BMW originally delivered the bike I rode to Alpha as basically a non-rolling chassis, with dummy suspension and an engine. Alpha pulled the engine and put it on a dyno for a 3.5 hour break-in period. Meanwhile, they installed Öhlins front and rear suspension, plumbed the brakes without ABS, installed Alpha triples, rear sets, handlebars, wiring harness, Alpha/Motec dashboard, switch gear, brake rotors, ECU, subframe, bodywork and myriad other parts.
So, contrary to most brand manufacturing, Alpha keeps the BMW frame and engine and changes pretty much everything else. They assemble the bike over the course of four days, test it one more time, then drain the fluids to facilitate air freighting. In the USA, Alpha Racing has two distribution hubs: Top Pro in Miami, Florida, and San Jose BMW in California.
In 1974, the BMW R 90 S was as sporty a BMW as you could get. A pair of 38 mm DellOrto pumper carburetors fed its air-cooled 900cc twin to 67 horsepower, which would top out at 124 mph with its wobble-inducing bikini fairing. Enthusiasts set about hot rodding these bikes, as well as other BMWs, with aftermarket frame braces, lightened flywheels, fork braces and myriad other parts. These were two main sources for hot rod BMW parts at that time, Luftmeister and CC Products.
CC Products (a contraction of Christopher Chassis Products) was the brainchild of Christopher Hodgson, who later became the owner of San Jose BMW, thus making San Jose BMW the absolute center of the world for performance BMW motorcycles, at least in 1985 in the mind of 18 year-old R 90 S-loving Sam Fleming in Washington, D.C. It was with a sense of reverence that your author stopped by San Jose BMW on his second cross-country motorcycle camping trip (in the spirit of Bertha Benz) to get a new rear tire in 1986. Your correspondent was thus deeply honored to be hosted by San Jose BMW’s current owner, Willie Hodgson, and his now-retired father Christopher Hodgson, at Sonoma Raceway to ride a San Jose BMW imported 2024 Alpha Racing M 1000 RR.
I have built championship-winning race bikes. I have ridden championship race bikes. I have ridden more “ready to race” production street bikes on race tracks than I could possibly count. The Alpha Racing bike is—without a doubt—the finest track motorcycle I have ever thrown a leg over. The fit and finish is that of a high-end production motorcycle, while the ergonomics of pegs, clip-ons and seat were perfectly natural for my 5’ 10”, 175-pound meat chassis.
There are some dark truths about race/track bikes which few want to acknowledge. One: Ride-by-wire liter bikes, and many other ride-by-wire bikes, are electronically throttle restricted to prevent the bike’s butterflies from opening fully and thus are restricting horsepower. The rider might be asking for 100% throttle at the grip, but the ECU only allows for 80% butterfly plate angle in the electronically-controlled throttle bodies. Two: The engines, when ridden aggressively, will usually not last longer than 3,000 to 4,000 miles.
The former issue—that stock bikes have electronic throttle limits—is due to noise and emission compliance with Euro 5 and EPA regulations. This is usually overcome in the U.S. by replacing the ECU with a race version (which can be expensive and may require a new wiring harness as well) or by flashing the stock ECU (if the stock ECU’s encryption has been cracked) with an aftermarket electronic throttle valve map. Controversially, both of these steps are a violation of federal law in the USA. The Chevron Doctrine notwithstanding, there is actually no carve-out to the EPA’s regulations for competition use. It’s a convenient fiction and mass delusion for us all that there is. (The Chevron Deference (Doctrine) was recently overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, find more information at https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/chevron_deference.)
For the latter, all engines have their Achilles heel. It could be the 3rd-4th gear cluster, the shift drum, the cam chain tensioner or the valves. With the BMW S 1000 platform, it was historically the connecting rod bearings which gave up first, followed by the transmission.
Since 2019, Alpha, in a wonderful example of their forethought, installed a spark kill switch on the left bar to enable you to crank the engine with the starter button on the right switch for 10 seconds before allowing the bike to ignite. These 10 seconds allow the oil pump to pull oil up from the sump, through the oil filter, into the crankshaft main bearings, through the crankshaft oil passageways, all the way to the connecting rod bearings, before applying any load to the engine. It also allows for priming of the engine with oil after an oil change when the oil filter is completely empty and needs to be filled before lubrication is available at the crank.
Alpha recommends a 1,500-mile tear-down to change connecting rod bearings, and a complete rebuild at 3,200 miles. Those numbers are in keeping with most modern racing liter bikes. However, my understanding of the world is that it is usually more efficient to purchase a new engine (in this case, for $15,500) than to rebuild; if it was me—and I often have poor judgment—I’d probably use that pre-oiler feature A LOT, skip the 1,500-mile con-rod bearing change, and put that money towards the new engine budget. Then I’d run the engine until it started missing shifts or dropped a valve, and make the stricken engine into a coffee table. If I was racing for a championship, then that calculus changes—but such is racing.
Alpha installs their own wiring harness with an unrestricted ECU, and their own dashboard as well. While competing street 1000s might be missing 35 hp due to ECU limits, the Alpha M 1000 is delivered with all 212 horses available at 14,500 RPM.
Fired up, the M 1000 RR engine sounds reassuring and purposeful through its Akropovič exhaust. Lifting the shift lever into first with its GP pattern (as delivered), all the sensations are “race bike.” The M 1000 RR was fitted with a Pirelli SC2 slick front tire and an SC1 slick rear. The voids in tires only exist to evacuate water or dirt so, on pavement, the most grip is delivered by a slick tire with no voids. Modern tires are a different animal that break from the older understanding of the tradeoff between “hard” and “soft” tires. Pirelli has rears from SC0 (soft) to SC3 (hard), but that isn’t really how they work. The SC0 needs to run at a higher temperature and, once there, it gives more grip. But if it drops out of its sweet temperature range (which is really high!), you get accelerated tire wear in the form of cold tearing. The SC3 works in broader temperature ranges but, because it is less focused, its ultimate performance is a little lower than that of the “in temp range” for an SC1. The trick is to match the tire specification to the weather, the track and the rider’s ability to load the tire.
Sonoma Raceway is north of San Francisco and the day dawned foggy and cool, as is typical for the area. The 55-degree overnight temperature suggested it was going to be tough keeping heat in the SC1 (which really prefers to be over 185 degrees!) and it did wear a lot in the cool morning sessions. On a race track, the surface of a tire might change temperature from 140 degrees to 300 degrees and back to 140 all in the space of a second or two. Rear tires get hottest at the entry to turns (from engine drag) and the side of the tire—which is not being used—tends to shed heat pretty quickly.
It was my first time at Sonoma. For fellow East Coasters, the track is kinda like a tighter Barber in that it has lots of elevation changes with blind crests, even shorter straights (compared to Barber), low top speed and is really busy. Given the tight nature of the track, the big strength of the bike was not its impressively powerful engine, but its 363-pound dry weight, competition geometry and suspension.
The Alpha bike had perfectly neutral steering and would tighten lines when trail braking. Sonoma is 95% smooth with just one strange “old pavement” garbage turn. Banging over the exit curbs of Turn 1 never upset the Öhlins-internaled forks or the Öhlins shock. There is one really long downhill left turn with a double apex leading onto the short back straight; the chassis handled it perfectly.
The track was too small to use anything past fourth gear, so the top speed was modest in an absolute sense. That means carrying less energy into the five hard braking zones on the track. All the potential energy that gets built up into the bike and rider when the throttle is opened has to be dissipated as heat into the next corner and, with liter bikes, it can be tough to dissipate enough heat away from the brakes. The Alpha bike has a beautiful caliper cooling scoop built into the front fender but also has 7mm thick front rotors. The thermal mass of that metal helps suck away heat from the friction zone and also resists warping of the rotors. The metal in brake rotors can get so hot that it changes the crystal structure of the steel. When they cool down, the crystals are smaller and the rotors shrink onto their carriers and warp. These super thick rotors ain’t gonna warp!
I wasn’t a huge fan of the retention of the Nissin master cylinder, as the lever position would change from the pits (too close) to the track (too far out), but the remote brake lever adjuster on the left bar allowed me to change the engagement point on the track.
Although top speeds get all the glory, races are won and lost at the apex of every turn. The first touch of throttle at full lean is always the trickiest part of the track. Upsetting the chassis at that critical moment will lose time down the next straight. Overspinning a tire at that moment will cost drive. In the old days there was a lot of attention paid to slide cut in the carburetors and pilot jets. Then we got into progressively cammed throttle linkages so the first 10% rotation of the grip only opened the carburetors 5%, while the last 10% of the rotation maybe opened the entire last 20% of the carb. Trail tamer progressive throttles are still a thing in dirt bikes for riding technical single track.
Electronic Throttle Valve/Electric Throttle bikes all have ETV maps which allow tuners (or manufacturers) to specify that progressive concept to the link between the grip and the butterflies in the ETVs. Ideally you never want the engine to produce enough power to overwhelm the tire and force the traction control has to cut in. In practice, we all aim to have slightly more ETV than the tire can handle so the TC is being activated slightly as well. The ETV map on a stock bike might be limited to a maximum of 80% butterfly plate angle. We talk about a direct linkage of throttle grip to ETV as 1 to 1. In low gears or when using rain maps you want a slower ratio of grip to ETV; in higher gears, you want to get closer to 1:1.
The ECU on the Alpha bike is unlocked, which means you can either choose from the ETV, traction control, wheelie and fuel maps that Alpha has developed, or create your own custom maps. Because the ECU is “race only,” the bike makes the full 212 horsepower when delivered.
But getting back to the crucial, full lean, low speed, second gear turn… Alpha lifted a trick from MotoGP by applying split throttle body mapping at this crucial moment on the track. The two left throttle bodies have one stepper motor; the two on the right have another. The butterfly plate response (or electronic throttle valve) maps can be programmed independently. The split ETV maps allow the bike to accelerate first with just two cylinders and, as the rider takes away lean and the RPMs come up and the grip opens further, the other two cylinders catch up and deliver all the power the engine has been programmed to deliver in that gear.
The effect is a guttural raspy exhaust note when decked in second gear past the apex. The exhaust note was so foreign that at first I thought I was hearing a twin behind me. As I got accustomed to how docile the engine behavior was, I could get back to throttle earlier and earlier in the corner, which of course is the whole point.
My ego wanted to ride this bike at a familiar track but as I turned early, or set the wheelie down past my brake marker (eek!), or ran up on fellow track day participants, I realized the bike itself was always doing exactly what I wanted it to do. Brake harder to miss traffic at an apex, OK. Turn late and try to get back on line, OK. Wheelie over a crest and let the electronics sort it out, OK. Not a single missed shift from the autoblip (which allows clutchless upshifts and downshifts), no brake fade, no head shakes, no running wide. It was, dare I say, easy to ride fast because you could forget about the bike and just ride the track. Even when the rear Pirelli SC1 had pretty much given up the ghost on the right side to the point where the rear of the bike was wallowing with a lack of side grip, positive throttle to set the bike back on the traction control straightened everything out and kept driving.
There were only three little things I think could be improved. The rear stand spools are in an awkward place, which means the stand is always hitting the rear caliper plumbing. Not many bolts on the bike are safety wired. If we were going to put this platform in an endurance race, we’d strip it again to drill and wire lots of bolts. And lastly, there is no fuel light.
Many manufacturers have a resistor in the fuel tank which sends an electrical signal once it’s uncovered by the fuel. BMW has a linkage with a float to be able to send a proportional signal. That linkage won’t work with anti-slosh foam in the tank—and it takes up room—so it is not included in the tank in Alpha’s preparation. It sounds like a little thing, but my co-tester Jeremy Toye brought the bike back complaining of a sudden loss of power which caused about a 40-minute full electric diagnosis to determine the bike was running out of gas.
When my team won a couple national endurance championships on the S 1000 RR platform, we found the bikes to be robust and to have a pretty small set-up window. Jayson Uribe (top 2024 MotoAmerica Stock 1000 BMW racer) is racing a bike almost identical to the M 1000 I tested. Jayson shared: “We lowered the ride height to its lowest setting to get as much rear grip as possible, We also ended up running softer fork springs than I would have expected in a liter bike. They are still sensitive to changes so we make changes to, say, spring pre-load by 1mm increments, where on my other bikes we would have tried 3mm. It’s phenomenal though. I always feel like the bike has more in it that I need to try to bring out in my riding.”
Alpha offers the bike with a variety of upgrade packages based on the rider’s needs. The bike I rode has the carbon package (absolutely gorgeous but I probably wouldn’t run it for a race team on a budget) and the setup package, and goes for $58,320 out the door for an out-of-California buyer. Now, that price tag might seem steep but, as a jaded motorcycle racer and race bike builder, it’s pretty fair for the parts and, more importantly, the time required for Alpha to develop those parts and build the bike.
Other available packages include a performance package, a pro race package, a sensor package (suspension travel and brake pressure), the aforementioned carbon package, the pitbox package, sprockets and chain package (allowing for gearing changes) and a spare wheel package, plus a few other things. All the parts are available from Alpha through San Jose BMW, meaning once you are in the ecosystem, you can service and repair crash damage from a single supplier.
Sam Fleming has ridden BMWs to 49 states, covering over 300,000 miles as well as winning multiple national endurance road racing championships on a brace of S 1000 RRs with his team, Army of Darkness.
