M1
M1
Art at 200 mph: The Ethereal Creatures of MotoGP
KEVIN CAMERON
THERE IS NO MORE BEAUTIFUL MACHINE than a factory Grand Prix roadracer. I admit that F-l cars are vastly more different from Corollas than Val Rossi’s MotoGP-championship Honda RC21IV is from a 2002 GSX-R. Both are bikes with fairings, big brakes and the boldest of graphics. The differences-and the special beauty of factory bikes-emerge up close, where every smallest detail satisfies.
Sit down next to this Yamaha YZR-M1. The crankcase of its inline-Four engine is carved entirely from solid aluminum billet. The texture of the machining of its smooth geometric surfaces is iridescent. Here is the inspiration for what top sportbikes try to be. This is the real matte-brown of magnesium, treated to resist corrosion-not production browngold paint. If you could pick up the parts, they’d feel like balsa wood. An NSR Honda brake pedal impersonates the perfection of a computer graphic of itself. At the pivot is a needle bearing, with tiny seals to keep grit out. What does this part cost? It doesn’t matter-no one can own it. It can only be leased. Where the front brake lever bears on the master cylinder piston, there is a tiny roller. It’s there to improve the “feedback” of the brake lever-so the rider’s hand feels the brake, not the friction. An Aprilia’s carbon-fiber fuel tank has bulk, but not weight. It can best be compared in feel with a party balloon. Everywhere you look, the parts are as perfect as your imagination yearns for them to be.
Here are no cost-cutting compromises of volume production. The welds are Zen. Fasteners are titanium. Materials and processes have been determined by the conditions of use, not by clerks in green eyeshades.
The value in such machines is temporary.
Experience with them reveals how to make something better yet. The physical motorcycle is just a material snapshot of best thinking at the instant of its creation. It will be crushed into scrap at season’s end, while ideas bom in its use direct construction of something better. Don’t despair. The beauty of this thing is like that of a flower-something marvelous but temporary, containing the seeds of the future.
