Chris Avakian 

Chris has been campaigning his MotoParilla for several years in Australia. What follows are some emails he has sent me over the last year detailing his racing. Hopefully more Parilla pix from him soon.

         The race bike

Some background...

I bought my bike in 92 off  Peter Simmons . A tourist bucket case come GS racer.

I have 2 other mates here in Sydney who also have Parillas .Anthony who has been racing his since the age of 16, now 41  and Ian a good friend of Anthonys, himself racing  for about 15 yrs, myself now about 15 yrs. I met the guys at the track - I had no idea about the insides of a Parilla but the boys sure did .

We are all good mates but I am now left as the lone MotoParilla racer now the boys have moved on to boat building .I'm just hoping they will come back and race soon .We came close to having 4 Parillas on the Grid at one stage but Trevor another friend of Antonys never got there and i believe  he is now selling the bike (A red rocket replica) Anthonys has known PJ since he was  a kid and that's where his bike came from (US).Ians bike came from Peter Simmons along with mine   Trevors originally came from Malaysia before it landed in OZ.

Some prep....

So Anthony has been generous and loaned me his PVL ignition which is a twin plug type as i have been running a twin plug head all this time using one plug only which performed fine, so now hoping there will be some noticeable improvement with the two plugs sparking .Unfortunately on the dyno after setting up the ignition i had severe clutch slip so the readings were pretty poor. I took the bike off the dyno at 15 hp with the slip and had all intentions of going back to do some more runs after fitting a new clutch.That didn,t happen so after this weekends effort I know that could have  been a costly mistake .Mind you it aint cheap putting the bike on the dyno.

I was struggling all weekend trying to find acceleration through the mid range and even on the main couldnt get full revs Say 8-8.5K.I just held the bike full button  3rd all round the back and hoped i could get to the straight with out having to back off. If I couldn't get past someone and had to wind off then that was it , i would loose heaps of ground .The spark was solid and  the dyno readings for the carburation where all good .So for some reason  it seems I've gone backwards. Bikes  i would usually beat were kicking my arse .I've got three weeks to sortt things before the Australian titles

That was Chris's story pre OZ titles, now the race report:

Just finished a hard three days of racing for the Australian titles .Was able to take second place overall  in the championship races,and first place overall with the support races included. Managed to take of 2 seconds off my best time  from 2m.9sc to 2m.7sc.The meeting was held at Eastern Creek.We had practise & qualify on Friday where I managed to get third place on the the grid.

Grid was as follows :

Front Row          #1 Honda. # 2Honda  # 3 Parilla  # 4 Bultaco

.Second Row    # 5 Motobi  # 6 NSU  # 7Bultaco  # 8 Honda.

Third row           # 9 Bultaco # 10MV Agusta. # 11 Velo
 

Leading up to this meeting I had some major issues which I think I mentioned to you after racing the NSW titles. I popped the head of and dropped the valves and found the exhaust valve was not seating  properly.  After having a good look at the valves and seats I realised that I hadn't done a very good job of it in my last build The valve guides where pretty well flogged so it was obvious that this was time to have the head re worked, Head back on , and off to the dyno.

Rolled the bike off the dyno with a miserable 17 hp. With just 2 days to go before the meeting I should have done a compression test which would of been easy but was led to believe that the rings should still be fine as the motor had only done 5 meetings with Arias piston and rings which supposedly should get you through a whole race season .Not the case! Rings were flogged .Put the bike back together
with new rings and hoped all would be good .

Well by the end of the meeting there where only five bikes left The rest had gone Pop. The Honda took first place ridden by a kid called Jake. The straight line speed of the Honda was pretty impressive ,unlike the kids riding .I was almost taken out twice , not like some of the other guys who where taking full body blows. There was nothing smooth about his riding .Third place was taken by John Imrie on his Bultaco .John would be in his mid to late fifties at a guess and still rides hard. I knew the kid was go to be hard to beat.  Thank God the Velo never made it out there! The Velo is one  over engineered piece of kit .Problem with it is every thing of it is so refined it keeps breaking its frame and engine. Ive only seen it run once in 2yrs.That one Meeting that it did run it smoked all the 350 in the junior/ lightweight rounds.

I had a couple of moments of my own with chatter but that was resolved when I realised  my tyre  pressure was well over what I usually run, Unfortunately I realised this tool late by the time the second race of the champs had finished. I was running a 40 rear sprocket which worked real well all round except for 2 parts  of the track, slightly over geared