Head Banging

Head banging

TDC

Kevin Cameron

ALL HAS BEEN CONTROVERSY IN U.S. roadracing. Daytona Motorsports Group bought AMA Pro Racing and announced new rules and classes intended to restore competitiveness. The manufacturers made counter proposals. Concessions were made, then rejected, and the head banging began. Yamaha took a moderate, let’s-seewhat-happens position, but Honda honcho Ray Blank was in the thick of it. Was it all a misunderstanding, because DMG’s Roger Edmondson and Blank had wrong email addresses for each other? That got fixed. DMG said okay to World Superbike rules in a “Factory Superbike” class, a proposal that’s been around for years because it makes sense. Oh, no, it seems a Honda-led coalition really wanted 2009 “Committee Rules” (rules the pre-DMG AMA had proposed before the sale). Edmondson, understandably irritated by such back-and-forthing, said, “Going, going, gone!” and the Factory Superbike class was (sort of) history.

Next we hear the Motorcycle Industry Council is contemplating a manufacturers’ series. Can they get tracks? Promoters? Is this just a bargaining chip? Tipsters gathered at September’s Indianapolis GP, whispering a meeting was planned for Sunday-nine rounds, bare knuckles, between Irresistible Force and Immovable Object. Mmm, should be good, but no spectators. Sorry to miss it.

This brings us to controversy #2, which is the #6 Suzuki’s crankshaft. AMA tech chief Jim Rashid discovers after the Virginia national that Mat Mladin’s crankshaft is in certain respects unlike the exemplar cranks supplied. Mladin is DQed. Volleys of press releases follow. The AM A’s release, apparently written by someone with mainly typing skills, says that the subject crank is sort of smooth and pinkish, and maybe has numbers or colored stripes or, anyway, something’s different. Nothing is said about how the crank gave Mladin any advantage. To succeed in this business, that release would have to be a knockout blow, not a wet noodle. It should have said, “Materials analysis laboratory X has determined that exemplar stock cranks are made of low-cost 1015 mild steel, while subject crank is made of bigbucks vacuum-arc-remelted 4340 steel. The obvious intention of the substitution is to make subject crank last longer in service before developing cracking or another failure. As the analysis shows, the two kinds of crankshafts are not of the same specification. Any idiot can see that the DQ is fully supported by the evidence.”

On the other hand, Suzuki screwed up in its own entirely unnecessary way. What they should have done was to go to their supplier of production crank forgings long ago and say, “Here, using our production dies and standard manufacturing technique in every way, take this vacuum-arc-remelted 4340 material and make stock forgings of it.”

Why? Because they would look identical to the stock forging. Then the raw blank would go through the factory machining line to emerge completely indistinguishable from a stock part. Mr. Rashid would look upon it and place an okay next to the item on his tech list. The crank would not have oil holes located slightly differently, it would not lack laser-marked numbers, and it would not be unusually smooth or pinkish or striped.

But no. Already in production are such things as “kit cranks,” and “endurance cranks,” used in other competitive disciplines. When stock cranks developed other cracks in just a few hundred miles, teams did what teams have always done: looked for solutions. A kit crank was probably the easiest. Why would a maker’s kit crank differ from stock appearance? Because the Japanese factories get many of their racing parts from smallvolume specialist vendors whom they have learned to trust over the years. Have a look at any issue of Racecar Engineering and you will find the ads for English versions of such specialists.

Or, they could have put a few kit cranks on the production line from time to time, and sent one to the AMA along with the stock one, saying the usual thing all tech inspectors have heard so many times: “We have multiple vendors for this part, so we have supplied you with examples of each.” Because magnets stick nicely to both kinds, it’s clear that neither one is made from anything tricky like lithiumsubstituted aluminum, so all parties go back to sleep and racing is business as usual.

Edmondson told me the AMA will have a show-and-tell at the Laguna season-ender, providing the specific data that should have been in that first press release. Thus, both parties have learned something. The sad part is that, whatever is built into the machines they are given, riders ride in earnest. All Mladin’s admirable riding skill went for naught, and I hate to see that. So do many others.

Now we hear that Immovable and Irresistible did meet on Sunday at Indy and discovered that, golly gee, their positions weren’t so far apart after all. No more talk of two racing series. Just a misunderstanding? Or mutual face-saving? You decide.

On to business! How about a pure stock race series? Heaven on Earth for privateers? Nope, that just means it will be dominated by whichever company has the hot new model that year. The other end of the spectrum-unlimited modifications-is the same. Whichever company goes racing 100 percent (Suzuki, for example) builds the fastest bike and fields a real race team. Somewhere between these extremes? Surely, but with realistic rules that allow spectators to know who won. If what spectators wanted was confused rhetoric and weeks of dueling press releases, national politics already offers a rich menu of choice.

Will U.S. roadracing arise from its six months of paralysis? During that time, executive energy was vaporized in confrontation, self-congratulation and counting “revenue streams” before there was any successful race series to generate them. Let’s hope racers and teams still have jobs and can at last get on with what they do best. □