KIWI RIDER AUGUST 2020 VOL.1 | Page 24

DEALER FOCUS EXPERT DYNO TECH Based in Paeroa, BRM Dyno is a specialist tuning facility owned by Brett Roberts. We had a chat with him about how it all started. I started back in 2000, working out of my building in Kaka St, Otahuhu. I was having a bit of frustration with the tuning of bikes and quads that I was doing at the time. We were basically ripping up and down the road (I had a very quiet back street) trying to figure out if the changes we made felt better or not. Back then I was doing a lot of Quarter Midgets (XR200 engines) and they were even harder to test. We were doing a lot of work for Robert (Cheese) and Shane Van Gisbergen at the time, Shane was racing anything thing that he could and Robert, his petrolhead father, wanted everything to be the fastest (that’s how Cheese is). It was his idea to buy a dyno. It sounded like a good idea, so I priced up a few new ones... and I can tell you there were a few frosty nights at home when I told my wife that a dyno would cost around $70,000. So, one day Cheese rocked in with an advert page he had liberated from an Auto Trader while at a gas station. It was for a secondhand Dynojet 150 that a guy had under his house on Auckland’s North Shore. A couple of days later I was the owner, and $19,000 lighter. I didn’t know anything about running a dyno, but we got it going that week and had a play with a few bikes. PROVEN GAINS In those days it was a DOS operating system, rather than a mouse/Windows operating system, and it had capability to measure the air/fuel ratio. We taught ourselves to read the graphs, and then, with a bit of trial and error, 24 KIWI RIDER