RIDER, CREW CHIEF, AND TEAM
TDC
They have their exits and their entrances...
KEVIN CAMERON
When MotoGP practice ends, we see the classic pit box shot. The rider, helmet off, leathers tied at the waist, sits in a chair surrounded by his disciples—his crew chief and his specialists: engine guy, suspension guy, a tire tech, the data analyst, maybe even a psych coach. These are not mechanics. They are in the box, working on the equipment.
The crew chief has a circuit map on a clipboard. There’s a discussion of the practice that just ended. The corners are analyzed in order; the rider’s comments are recorded. The job is to improve the bike’s setup, to enable this rider to lap quicker and, if possible, more easily. Many times, a scheduled rider interview must be postponed because a debriefing ran longer than planned.
It wasn’t always this way. In the beginning, racing was personal, individual. The determined beginner rode his bike to the circuit, waved his entry, and rolled out to practice. This is how prewar British superstar-to-be Stanley Woods began his career in the 1920s, setting out alone to learn the 37 miles of the Isle of Man TT circuit in first practice. Woods had to maintain his borrowed bike himself, carrying tools and spare spark plugs out on the circuit. His success would soon bring him factory rides on bikes maintained by the usual professional race team mechanics.
People are surprised to learn that the crew chiefs of MotoGP and World Superbike teams are not engineers. Why not? Engineers are trained to solve explicit problems by established methods, a process that is becoming increasingly automated. What was once a tedious, hourslong matter of pencil-and-paper math has become one of entering data into a $30,000 pro software package in order to predict, say, the modes and amplitudes of crankshaft torsional vibration. Hit “Enter.” Sip coffee as the screen fills with the solution.
Yet motorcycle racing is too complex a problem to have such solutions. If such solutions existed, chassis setup at each race wouldn’t need four 45-minute practice sessions. We know those sessions are never enough to reach a best setup, because when Monday postrace tests are held, riders usually lap faster than they did during the race. Practice sessions are a race to create the most effective setup possible in the time available.
When the Japanese manufacturers first went GP racing more than 60 years ago, they discovered they needed people with experience on Europe’s racetracks. Also around those same tracks; they needed people who knew where, and by whom, to get things welded or machined after midnight just as much as people who knew an extra jet size or two at Assen was good insurance against seizure, as carburetion was upset by the bumps, or that cooler air drifting out of the forested sections of Hockenheim could be tricky. And none of this is taught to engineers.
Teams choose crew chiefs from among racing people, no matter what their formal training or lack of it. It’s valuable to have an engineer’s understanding of physics or metallurgy or mechanics, but the chief’s real value is in their ability to identify patterns in masses of seemingly random data. Not to mention an ability to understand and work effectively with the rider’s ways of thinking and feeling. The rider is alone in a place no one in his box can reach. So the job is to somehow connect that place with possible solutions. As veteran suspension tech Jon Cornwell has said, “Our job just looks like engineering, but it’s not. Our job is to give the rider confidence.”
“Our job just looks like engineering, but it’s not. Our job is to give the rider confidence."
The rider can’t go faster unless he has confidence that the front will not close, that the rear is not “moving around.” The crew chief must have the subtlety to suspect that a given rider may be confusing the flexibility of his footpeg brackets with incipient loss of rear tire grip. Never mind trying to talk him out of it. The rider’s sensations are his reality.
This is why crew chiefs are men like Kel Carruthers, 1969 250cc World Champion, who would be with Kenny Roberts through his three 500 world championships. Or Californian Erv Kanemoto; years with Gary Nixon, then world championships with Freddie Spencer and Eddie Lawson. Australian Jerry Burgess; five 500 championships with Mick Doohan, then more with Valentino Rossi, going with him from Honda to Yamaha in 2004 and continuing. There are no degrees after their names because experience is their only teacher.
Complication increased in the 1970s. Overcoming the high-speed instability of the team Yamahas at Talladega in 1974, Carruthers said,
“It looks like in the future we’ll be spending as much time on chassis as we do now on engines. Maybe more.”
How right he was. As engine power shot up, every technology became a fast-evolving specialty. As suspension gained sophistication, only specialists could get the best from it. As on-bike data recording began in the 1980s, more specialists were required to find useful meaning in squiggly lines.
The many high-side crashes of the late 1980s brought threats of intake restrictors from the FIM. Manufacturers responded with early electronic torque control and anti-spin systems. The evolution of electronics accelerated with the coming of MotoGP in 2002. Soon the room just behind each team’s box contained a long table where software writers sat at laptops, working out best strategies for adjustment of electronic systems for the next practice.
These new means of gathering information and controlling systems required more voices around the rider. Marcel Duinker, who was Tom Sykes’ crew chief in World Superbike, said, “Each specialist wants to be the rider’s best friend. Therefore it was necessary for me to make a rule. I will talk to the rider and the rest of you will talk to me.”
The reason for this is that the goal cannot be perfection in any one area, but rather a rideable integrated system adapted to the rider’s style.
In some cases the rider and the crew chief are partners, as in the great years of Rossi and Jerry Burgess or of Kenny Roberts and Kel Carruthers. When I asked Burgess how so many adjustments can be made in limited practice time, he said, “It helps if your rider is highly intelligent.” In others, the chief provides the best setup he can, and the rider accepts his decisions because they so often work.
The motorcycle remains an unsolved problem.
