Attack Performance Racing (APR) boss Richard Stanboli is currently on his way to Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca with a completed APR MotoGP Claiming Rule Team (CRT) racebike for his wild card appearance at the Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix in spite of only starting the project in March and facing last-minute hurdles that prevented Steve Rapp from doing any testing. The most Stanboli could do was ride the completed machine on the streets adjacent to his shop in Huntington Beach, California. “I’m driving with a complete motorcycle,” Stanboli told Roadracingworld.com Thursday evening while driving his semi-truck to the track. “We had a really accelerated development schedule. We knew it was going to be tight, but we really didn’t want to miss that test. Steve was pretty bummed we missed the test.” That test was a difficult-to-arrange and very expensive affair complete with real MotoGP tires and Bridgestone engineers that was scheduled to happen this past weekend at Buttonwillow Raceway Park in central California, but two supplier-related delays resulted in the test being cancelled. One problem was with due to a late delivery of the APR’s bodywork, which was custom-made to fit Stanboli’s billet aluminum chassis. The other delay was caused by an independent suspension supplier failing to deliver a promised custom, thru-rod-style shock that the whole bike had been designed around. “Not having a shock was a major setback,” said Stanboli. “I had to go back and redesign the swingarm, modify the fuel tank and design a new linkage. The shock we were going to use was really compact, and it also was the length of the shock. When we finally realized we weren’t going to have anything and we had to use one of our AMA shocks that set everything else in motion to make sure it all fit. “When we started looking at it I thought we were screwed. I thought we were going to miss the race, but we were able to pull it off.” After a week of averaging two hours of sleep per night (after weeks without much more sleep), Stanboli and his APR crew had modified everything necessary to use one of the Öhlins shocks from their Kawasaki ZX-10R AMA Pro Superbike. “That ate up all the buffer we had,” said Stanboli. “When we knew weren’t going to be able to test the thing properly, I decided to spend all of the rest of the time we had at the shop trying to make sure it was as complete as possible.” Asked how confident he was in the motorcycle Rapp will ride out of his garage in the first MotoGP practice Friday morning, Stanboli said, “Pretty confident. We’re starting with [chassis] numbers we know. It’ll be like taking a Superbike and chopping 30 pounds off and adding 22 horsepower and carbon brakes. We’re going to set the electronics to their minimum to start, set the fly-by-wire throttle at a 1:1 ratio, put the [power] cuts in the places where we know they should be, gather data through the first session and then start turning things off. The good thing is we know Laguna really, really well.”