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RACE WATCH
Two-stroke swan song?
No question, the 500cc Grand Prix class is the pinnacle of motorcycle roadracing. Still, there are problems. For example, the upcoming season has been characterized as “the world’s biggest Honda Cup Series.” That’s because NSR500s won all the races last year and often filled the forward grid positions. Yamaha, dominant in the past, didn’t win a single event.
A second point is that GP racing has outgrown its sponsor base. It now costs nearly $1 million to lease an NSR for a single season, and the bikes come without brakes or suspension. A single Mitsubishi carbon-carbon brake disc is, by the way, $4000, and a trick Showa fork can be $30,000. Furthermore, you must go to Japan to assemble your bikes. Riders want payment commensurate with
the risks they take, which means mil lions. Salaries and travel add up. The
days of giant tobacco sponsorships are no more. Today's programs are
more often consortiums of lesser contributors, each of which insists upon the presence of the others as a guarantee against the dreaded “white-fairing effect.” Money is more important than horsepower.
The non-Honda opposition is in disarray. The gallantly begun Kenny Roberts/Modenas project failed to achieve the lighter weight allowed by the FIM for three-cylinder bikes, which was the fundamental reason for beginning it. Heavy vibration not only affected carburetion but prevented weight reduction; parts had to be heavy to survive the punishment. Two retired Japanese engineersOguma from Honda, Maekawa from Yamaha-have reportedly done some back-of-the-envelope recommendations for a redesign. The cylinders and pipes developed by long-time Roberts associate Bud Aksland would probably do just fine on a new-architecture crankcase with a balance shaft. Keeping Marlboro sponsorship in the face of slow progress and the lack of an established star rider is a natural question mark.
A major reason for Roberts/Yamaha friction and their eventual split was Yamaha’s modest rate of 500cc technical development. Roberts supplemented this by surrounding himself with capable people like Aksland, Warren Willing and Mike Sinclair (who has now reportedly left the team). The capability of this group later led to the Modenas project.
In the currently precarious East Asian economic climate, one view suggests that Yamaha and Suzuki would take the first adequate excuse to leave GP racing and attend more strictly to business. Yet, there is contrary evidence. When offered alternatives (quit, concentrate on World Superbike or four-stroke GP racing), even teams that are doing poorly say they must and will continue GP racing. Its prestige, they say, is very important in South American and Asian markets. Honda would add to that the unique training its engineers get from GP racing.
The years since 1972 are truly the golden age of 500cc roadracing, with at least three manufacturers active at all times. Honda shows no sign of interest in reduced GP activity, this year introducing an all-new NSR250 with a pivotless chassis and forward-facing carbs, as well as adding the seem>
ingly unnecessary talents of Max Biaggi (cross your fingers) and John Kocinski in the 500cc class.
Another question: Is 500cc GP roadracing a stale, sickly, one-man show? Honda knows that the public quickly loses interest in any racing class when the outcome is a foregone conclusion. But corporate bosses ignore this and insist on winning everything possible. This is a bind. How would you resolve it? During the Yamaha years, when Wayne Rainey dominated the class, these same criticisms were heard, and starting grids thinned alarmingly. After prodding from Kenny Roberts and the FIM, Yamaha did sell engines to outside chassis builders Roc and Harris, and then supplied design information to Cagiva. What is Honda doing today?
The official answer is the V-Twin NSR500V, for Honda has said the complex four-cylinder NSR cannot be productionized for sale. In the future, the response may include more. Consider Mick Doohan’s predicament. He has won four consecutive 500cc titles on a Honda, yet at presstime, he continues to refuse to sign a new contract with Honda. Why?
The first interpretation was that this was straight business. Early rumors of $10 million-plus conversations between him and Wayne Rainey or Suzuki supported this possibility. But as time has passed, and these possibilities have faded out, there is still no contract. This fueled rumors that the issue is independence. At first, it seemed that Doohan wanted a satellite team like Erv Kanemoto’s, to be headed by Jerry Burgess, Doohan’s long-time crew chief (who is characterized as knowing more about the NSR500 than anyone on the planet). Though that rumor, too, has been discounted, it may conceal the true cause: information flow. Setup information from Doohan’s bike is said to go straight to his Honda-mounted colleagues-Carlos Checa, Alex Criville, Tadayuki Okada and others.
Honda may have a policy of making a race where none exists, by helping Doohan’s Honda-mounted rivals.
If someone on a Honda is going to win the title, does it matter to management who it is? And if there’s good racing in the meantime, won’t that silence the critics and put life into the series? This is where Doohan’s reluctance to re-enlist may > originate. He can’t relish the prospect of spending another season battling young madmen on motorcycles whose suspension and engine settings have come straight off his own bike.
There is a historical precedent. When Freddie Spencer and Erv Kanemoto were winning GP races during the mid-1980s, Honda wanted to use the team’s information to raise
the state of the company’s art. Racers dislike sharing setups, and not just because others might use them to win races. Competition is dangerous-the more a star rider is surrounded by a buzzing horde of equally equipped competitors, the riskier it is for him to maintain his position. The present independence of the Kanemoto Racing organization is an outgrowth of this, and so may be Doohan’s apparent contract phobia.
On the other hand, information flow at Honda is not a matter of technicians in company caps trotting from tent to tent with notebooks. At races, the computers of the various Hondaequipped teams are reportedly linked, and the information available goes beyond a mere spreadsheet of this team’s gearing and that team’s ignition curve. Honda has reportedly developed something that is more like an expert system. You enter your settings, track data, etc., and any important problems you may have. You get back a menu of suggested possible fixes. As with any computer local area network, it’s possible to structure file data in shells, so that not all users have equal access. As tempting and useful as it might be to withhold one’s own settings, unplugging from such a system would mean losing something, as well. Furthermore, Doohan is now isolated, because the personnel he would need for any independent operation have already reportedly been re-signed by Honda.
Now, to add the spice of uncertainty, Honda has just announced that it will no longer manufacture two-stroke engines, except for select markets. The company has recently released a family of small-displacement, lightweight four-strokes able to operate in any position (see “Pit Bikes Plus,” Roundup, this issue), suitable for many of the jobs now handled by two-strokes. This fits with the announced intentions of air-quality agencies to set emissions standards for lawn care and chainsaw engines. Now that environmental degradation and global warming have taken over the bad-guy role from the former Soviets, corporate images must be increasingly green. Will this affect GP racing as we know it?
What could possibly replace the 500cc two-strokes? World Superbikes are occasionally as fast, but the GP series has its own separate infrastructure of television rights, racetracks, dates and sponsorships. That would not simply go out of existence if two-stroke engines were erased by green imagebuilding. Any new class would have to be a) faster than 250s, but not trivial; b) at least as fast as WSB, which implies at least 750cc Fours or lOOOcc Twins; c) greener and cheaper than > current 500s, which, again, sounds like big, production-based four-strokes.
If what I believe about current Japanese intentions is true, 500 racing isn’t under immediate threat, but it’s something to think about as we read about the Kyoto Conference and the ozone hole. For a time, low-emissions direct-injection two-strokes were being developed for automotive use, and this looked like the savior of two-stroke GP power. But Honda’s decision points another way. The two-stroke engine has been a wonderful racing powerplant-reliable, simple and extremely powerful-but GP racing may one day have to live without it. -Kevin Cameron Going back to its roots, the 20th iteration of this event kicked off in front of 10,000 spectators in Versailles, France, before routing through >
Peterhansel poised to capture sixth Dakar Rally
Hounded by an armada of KTMsponsored riders, Yamaha factory rider Stephane Peterhansel holds what appears to be an insurmountable lead in the 1998 Paris-Granada-Dakar Rally.
Paris and south to Spain for the boat ride to the Dark Continent. The first three stages were on European soil, but most Dakar competitors claim that the race doesn’t really start until you hit African soil.
That thinking seems to have held true, as Peterhansel, taking it easy in the Continental stages, vaulted into the lead after the first African stage. He subsequently lost that lead after a navigational error, only to recapture and retain it after Stage 7, his twin-cylinder Yamaha enjoying its last year of dominance (only Singles will be allowed next year).
It’s the KTMs, however, that are swarming, holding, on average, eight of the top-10 spots in each stage, though they’ve been unable to gain on Peterhansel’s powerful Yamaha. South African KTM rider Alfie Cox, in one of the faster stages, commented, “I’ve never ridden so fast, for so long, in my life. What you needed out there was Mick Doohan’s 500cc Grand Prix bike with knobbies.”
Doohan’s Australian countryman Andy Haydon, a first-time Dakar competitor, and Fabrizio Meoni from Italy, both on KTMs, have proved the most adept challengers, hanging in third and second place, respectively, after 15 stages.
This year’s competition has not been catastrophe-free: One rider remains in a coma after a crash, and a road accident involving a retired race car claimed the lives of five Mauritanians. Of the 17 scheduled stages, only three have been cut short, one due to a logistical error by the scoring team, another after a support truck was fired upon in Mali, then stolen by rebels (and you thought Baja was tough!) and one due to sandstorms.
BMW is back with a major factory effort, but with little to show for it, and the overall standings look like a KTM laundry list, with Peterhansel’s Yamaha perched atop it. At presstime, Peterhansel holds a 54-minute lead over Meoni, and barring disaster, is expected to break Cyril Neveu’s five-win record to become Dakar’s only six-time winner.
Paul Seredynski
Antunez leads Arenacross Series
Buddy Antunez put in an impressively consistent performance in rounds nine and 10 of the 28-round AMA National Arenacross Series to take a 12-point lead in the hotly contested indoor motocross show.
“Indoor” is a loose term for the Lazy E venue in Guthrie, Oklahoma, which is billed as the world’s largest arena. The 160 x 440-foot floor made for lap times of nearly 1 minute, twice the average arenacross goaround time.
Antunez captured the checkers in the 125cc main on day one, and placed second in the 250cc round. Day two had him flip-flopping, placing second in 125cc, first in 250cc.
For a series that saw eight different riders climb atop the podium in the first eight rounds, Antunez’s four > podiums at the Lazy E suggest his performance was anything but average.
Staying true to form, the PJ1-sponsored series offered plenty of competition. Denny Stephenson, Chad Pederson, Jeromy Buehl (who captured day one’s 250cc main event) and Cameron Tailor shared podium duty in round nine, Jim Chester and Stephenson split >
the third spot in round 10, while Cliff Palmer swapped the 1-2 spot with Antunez in round 10. Antunez, Palmer and Pederson head 1-2-3 into Rounds 11 and 12 in Hampton, Virginia.
Paul Seredynski
Emig wins AMA Pro Athlete Award
Reigning AMA Supercross and 250cc National Motocross Champion Jeff Emig received the 1997 AMA/ Speedvision Professional Athlete of the Year Award at the annual AMA awards banquet in Las Vegas. A former 125cc National Motocross Champion and six-time U.S. Motocross des Nations team member, Emig was selected from a distinguished field of nominees that included dirt-tracker Scott Parker, World Speedway Champion Greg Hancock and roadracers Doug Chandler, Miguel Duhamel and John Kocinski. Past winners include Jeremy McGrath, Rick Johnson, Freddie Spencer, Eddie Lawson, Bruce Penhall and Gary Nixon.
AMA/Prostar drag racer Paul Gast won the Professional Sportsman of the Year Award, and Team Oliver received the AMA Pro Racing Award of Mechanical Excellence.
Paul Ricard, 1909-1997
The man whose name is synonymous with France’s most famous race circuit died at age 88 after a long, fruitful life. One of the richest men in France, Paul Ricard was also one of the country’s most flamboyant characters. Born in Marseille in 1909, he invented the aniseed-flavored Ricard pastis drink that for many tourists is a must when visiting a French cafe.
Apparently, he began brewing his concoction illegally at age 19 in the cellar of a local barber. His activities were clandestine because of the drink’s similarity to absinthe, which was banned in France. Eventually the ban was lifted, Ricard merged with rival Pernod and the beverage became the world’s third most popular alcoholic drink, by volume. It was surpassed only by Bacardi rum and Smirnoff vodka, and had annual sales of more than $3 billion.
Ricard was a model employer, with an intensely loyal, well-paid workforce. Indeed, he distributed 40 percent of his company’s shares to his workers. He also purchased ski >
chalets and chateaux for employee gatherings and holidays. Once, Ricard took all 1500 of them for a Roman holiday to be blessed by the Pope!
But in the late Sixties, Ricard relin quished the reins of the company to his two sons, and threw himself into developing a variety of leisure inter ests in the Camargue region. One of these was the race circuit bearing his name, which opened in 1971. From his nearby home on the private island of Bendor, Ricard masterminded his circuit's growth into the venue of not only the French F-i car Grand Prix, but, more importantly in terms of spectator attendance, the annual Bol d'Or 24 Hours motorcycle endurance race and the French motorcycle GP. Both are still held there today. He'll be missed; so let's raise a glass of pastis to him-Ricard, of course!
Alan Cathcart
Exotic brakes banned in World Superbike
The Federation Internationale Moto cycliste has outlawed exotic metalbased brake systems from World Superbike competition. This, after nixing carbon-carbon rotors three years ago.
The ruling is aimed at outfits such as Brembo, known to be working on ultra-lightweight calipers based on those fitted to Formula One cars. Other manufacturers have experi mented with metal-composite discs, all in the interest of reducing un sprung weight and gyroscopic inertia.
Exotic, according to the FIM, will include esoteric materials such as beryllium, but also more commonly used metals such as aluminum, bring ing into question the goal of the FIM's ruling. Carbon brakes were banned mainly on the basis of expense. They're not cheap to begin with, and wear so quickly that they need fre quent replacement. This eliminates their inclusion on streetbikes, the ma chines Superbikes are based upon. Metal-composite discs, however, elim inate wear, and any vehicle could ben efit from the lower unsprung weight of lighter calipers and discs. The FIM's decision seems to run counter to the notion that racing can improve the breed, and makes one wonder what will be the next technology to fall under the "cost-and-sophistication" ax. Is fuel injection in danger?
Alan Cathcart
