July 22nd, 2006 by R.J.

Buell is set to relaunch its XBRR platform at Mazda Raceway LagunaSeca this weekend.

Buell has announced that three teams are going to enter the Formula Xtreme class during Round 7 of the AMA Superbike Championship. They will be competing with the “new and improved” XBRR bike.

A few of you may recall the disastrous showing Buell had at Daytona in March. If you don’t, let me remind you…

Buell had entered four of their bikes in the FX class in the Daytona 200. There was a lot of controversy prior to the entry as the XBRR has twice the engine displacement as the rest of the field. This “supposedly” gave them an unfair advantage — hah.

During practice, the fastest Buell rider (Jeremy McWilliams - 1:44.065) was more than 2.5 seconds off the pace (Jason DiSalvo - 1:40.0).

The race was even worse. McWilliam’s pitted and his team couldn’t get the bike on the stand. They ended up dropping the bike on its forks (with no front wheel), while they all ran around like chicken’s with their heads cut off. They had a lot of trouble getting the wheel back on and couldn’t get the brakes pumped up at the lever. All three of the other Buell’s also suffered mechanical failure and did not finish the race.

After the race, in typical Harley-Davidson style, Buell claimed the root cause of the failure was evil Japanese-made clutches installed immediately prior to the race. Please… Like anybody that follows sportbike racing is going to believe that. But… I mean, they had to come up with something, right? They couldn’t just tell everyone they make a piss-poor race bike… Might as well blame the japs and score some points with the HD crowd.

I’m really anxious to see how Buell performs this weekend. I just hope they don’t leave too much oil on the track for the GP race…