From a press release:

CARL HAS FIRST VIEW OF NEW BIKE IN ACTION

Bruntingthorpe, England
7 December 2001

CARL Fogarty today enjoyed his first close-up look at the bike that his Foggy Petronas Racing team will eventually run in next year’s World Superbike championship.

The former four-times World Superbike Champion, who has signed a five-year deal with Malaysian petroleum giant Petronas to run his own team in the series, was on hand to see the prototype put through its paces at a private test session at the Bruntingthorpe Aerodrome, near Leicester.

The four-stroke, three-cylinder 989cc GP1 engine, developed by Sauber Petronas Engineering, is in the early stages of being modified to meet World Superbike rules in time to race in the fifth round of the championship at Monza on May 12.

And Foggy, whose Team Foggy Racing company will run the Foggy Petronas Racing team, was impressed with what he saw in the straight-line test. Until today he had been unable to see the bike in action due to restrictions on his travel through his recent broken leg. “This thing is like a bullet. I have heard only good things about the bike and, although the engine still needs to be modified and the bike will look a lot different when it is raced, it’s obvious it has real potential. I really wanted to get on and ride the bike myself.

“We have the top people in the industry working on the chassis and the design of the bike and, with the ongoing engine expertise of Osamu Goto and his SPE team, we are confident we will soon be running a competitive machine.”

The test was designed to develop the engine management system further, as well as testing the cooling system and noise control.

Foggy Petronas Racing team manager Nigel Bosworth, who also saw the bike in action for the first time today, said: “It’s awesome, the sort of thing nobody has seen in motorcycling before and it sounds unbelievable. Everything went smoothly and we are all starting to work well as a team.”