With the opening round of the motocross season just over four weeks away, Australian factory teams are up to their nuts in pre-season testing.

But what exactly does pre-season testing mean and what does it involve? We tracked down Serco Yamaha’s head mechanic Michael Marty and got the inside word on what goes down before the gate drops on April 14.

Serco Yamaha’s Michael Marty is preparing for a big season ahead in 2013. Image: Simon Makker/Makkreative.com.

First up, what exactly does pre-season testing entail?

The first thing we do is send the boys the bikes with last year’s settings, so they can get comfortable with the machine. We then bring them up one at a time to undertake some more concentrated testing.

This year we started with Luke Styke, seeing as he’d been on the team last year. We already had good base settings and a very competitive bike in 2012, and Yamaha kept the YZ250F unchanged for 2013.

We then brought Luke Clout up. He was first given [2012 Serco rider] Kirk Gibbs’ set-up, then when he arrived we rode with some new suspension settings that we’d gained from our testing with Styke.

We’d planned on racing the Coolum round of the Sunny State series at the end of those two weeks, but it got rained out. Both boys went back to NSW and raced the Appin round of the East Coast series. It was a mudder and Styke won the first two races then went home, and Clout won the rest of the day.

On the weekend just gone Styke raced the Canberra round of the East Coast series on his 450 training bike against Cody Mackie, Jay Marmont and Dan McCoy and won every race, so that was a great result for him.

Wow that’s a huge confidence booster. So Serco is Yamaha’s factory MX2 team here in Australia, do you get any help from Japan with factory parts?

No, everything is done 100 per cent in-house. With the exception of tyres, chains and tubes, everything on our bikes is either designed and manufactured here, or is distributed by Yamaha or Serco, such as our Yoshimura pipes.

We spend a lot of time on the dyno testing pipes and our own designed hard-parts such as pistons, cam shafts and cylinder head designs, and working closely with our suppliers. We’ve got a specific dyno bike that we received in October and it’s done hundreds of runs.

We also put Styke’s bike on the dyno for the first time today and we’ve seen a bit of improvement from last year. We made a few changes for the Coolum round of the MX Nationals and Styke loved it, so we based a new motor around those adjustments.

There are minimal differences between the 2012 and 2013 YZ250Fs. Does that make your pre-season testing a bit easier this year?

Yes and no. We don’t have to develop a whole new raft of hard-parts or start our suspension testing from Square One, but we work hard at refining the package we have. This year Styke has tested five or six sets of forks to find the right set-up for him. We didn’t change a lot from where we started, but we still experimented extensively with different settings.

Take us through your suspension testing. What exactly do you focus on?

We experiment a lot with valving inside the fork. We run different spring rates and change the oil a bit, depending on what we’re trying to achieve. Styke likes a plush fork at the top of the stroke, but in doing that you need to work on the mid-stroke to ensure it holds up. If it’s not right it’ll soon become obvious when you get to tracks like Toowoomba.

Luke Clout is new to the Serco Yamaha team for this season. Image: Jeff Crow/Sport the Library.

Are some riders fussier than others when it comes to bike set-up?

Definitely. Some riders in the past couldn’t tell the difference if you made changes, but there are other guys who know exactly what’s going on. The best tester I’ve ever worked with was Cam Taylor; he’s one of the oldest guys and had so much experience racing and testing. I learnt a lot from having him on the team.

With our current riders, Styke is a lot more demanding than Clout, but that’s solely because of his experience with the team and on the race-track. Clout has been pretty easy to work with considering he’s a rookie. When he first rode the bike with Gibbsy’s settings he didn’t think the bike could get any better. We improved it with the settings we’d learnt from our testing with Styke and Clout’s over the moon now.

Great stuff. Who makes the final decision about what parts to use for the season? Is it a matter of horsepower, rider feel, or what the stopwatch says?

On the engine side of things I build the motors and make the final call on what hard parts we’ll use. I ask the boys if they think they can sacrifice bottom-end power for top-end gain or vice-versa, and if they agree, we head in that direction.

With suspension it’s up to the riders and how they feel. A couple years ago a rider had a suspension setting that I didn’t really like, but he was fine with it and wanted to run it. So that’s what we did.

What has been Serco’s major focus for testing for 2013?

Horsepower! It’s a never-ending battle on a 250F team, but at the same time you have to keep reliability in the back of your mind. We always make sure we find the balance between a finely-tuned engine producing good power and one that’s going to last two rounds of the series before it gets a rebuild.

Awesome, thanks for the chat. See you at Raymond Terrace.

Cheers mate.