- 2 days ago
What causes a world championship-winning rider/team owner to quit the factory racing world and build his own engines and chassis? FREEDOM! Kenny Roberts took the considerable talent of his Yamaha factory team and forged ahead alone, first with the Modenas KR3 and then the Proton KR5. Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer talk about the development of these bikes, and manage to get a few other Alternative Engines in such as the Aprilia Cube three cylinder. Listen now!
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00:00:00Welcome to the Cycle World podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer. I'm with Kevin Cameron, Cycle World's technical editor.
00:00:07This week's episode is Going It Alone in Grand Prix Racing.
00:00:11This was inspired by Kenny Roberts' departure from Yamaha to build his own engines.
00:00:17Did a KR3 and a KR5.
00:00:22And it's such a romantic notion, building your own engine, and ultimate freedom, right?
00:00:28We can do whatever we want, finally.
00:00:31Freedom from money, for what?
00:00:34Yeah, so it's, I mean, I had aspirations, you know, as a 20-year-old of building my own engine.
00:00:42And then I got talked out of it, and I didn't have enough, you know, drive or money to proceed.
00:00:49But, you know, Kenny had a long-established reputation.
00:00:52It's not only going to be Kenny's stuff.
00:00:54We're going to try and fit in the Aprilia Cube and some other power plants.
00:01:00And anytime I think about alternative engines, I always think of Paton.
00:01:05Oh, yeah.
00:01:06Always with the unusual two-strokes back in the 500 days when you could drive a motorhome to a race and have a trailer and show up and make something happen, which is not how it is now.
00:01:19But it was a wonderful, romantic time.
00:01:22And he's still showing up with bikes at TT, Isle of Man TT, at least in recent years.
00:01:29So, anyway, Kenny Roberts, let's start there.
00:01:32Sure.
00:01:33I think that it's – there was a long history of some disagreement between Kenny's team, which included smart guys like Bud Axelon and Warren Willing and Mike Sinclair, who were referred to as the Brain Trust.
00:01:58And Kenny's team, backed by Marlboro, when he was the Yamaha team, was referred to as the Evil Empire because it was the biggest team in the series.
00:02:12It was extremely successful.
00:02:15And just look out, you lesser beings.
00:02:17But all was not well below the surface because, for example, in 1993, Yamaha switched from their delta box frame, which was made from press-formed aluminum twin beams that encircled the engines, to extruded beams.
00:02:41And there's a wonderful little quote from Masahiko Nakajima, who was involved in this project, 0WF2, which was the 1993 Yamaha Grand Prix bike with the extruded beam chassis.
00:03:07He said, we had come up with a 10-horsepower increase.
00:03:12We knew that each time we added horsepower, we would have chassis problems unless we added stiffness.
00:03:20And so we turned to extruded beams.
00:03:25And, of course, what happens is, basically, they're warming up aluminum until it could be extruded, pushed through a die.
00:03:33And then they could make side beams that had internal webs and could be of any wall thickness desired at any point.
00:03:46And Mr. Nakajima says, the stiffness increase that we got was far in excess of what we had planned on.
00:03:56But we were pleased by that.
00:03:58What had happened in the past was, when 100-horsepower engines hit racing in around early 70s, the engines were far ahead of the chassis.
00:04:11So they added some stiffness, and that seemed to help.
00:04:15So they added some more, and each year, it worked.
00:04:18They added power.
00:04:20They added stiffness.
00:04:21They were okay.
00:04:23But in 1993, they ran out of dogma because they added stiffness, and instead it bit them.
00:04:32And at Eastern Creek, which was the first Grand Prix in 1993, there was Wayne Rainey delivering the keynote speech at the post-practice press conference.
00:04:49And he said, we have chatter, we have hop, and we have skating, and we don't know what to do about it.
00:04:59So when I asked Kenny about it, I attended that Grand Prix, and I asked Kenny about it.
00:05:08He said, I don't know what's happening.
00:05:10He said, we'll put a bunch of engineers on it, and we'll get something.
00:05:14So Wayne persevered in 1993 on this chassis, and then when they got to Catalonia, they switched to an ROC chassis.
00:05:33A little background on that was that the FIM had previously said, look, our grids are getting pretty light.
00:05:41Will somebody please make engines and supply them to competent chassis builders?
00:05:47So Yamaha agreed to supply chassis to Harris in England and ROC in France.
00:05:55And so when Kenny needed to move forward on chassis or at least move away from the extremely stiff 93 extruded beam variety, they chose the ROC.
00:06:07And we know from the career of Mick Doohan that what riders like least is change.
00:06:17They don't want anybody messing with the conversation between the rider and the chassis.
00:06:24The chassis is telling the rider, if it's properly designed, you're getting close.
00:06:30Oh, now you're getting real close.
00:06:32That's about it.
00:06:33But if the chassis is too stiff, it can't send this message, this stream of reassurance.
00:06:43Riders live in a very perilous state.
00:06:47I think fans like to think of them as sneering persons of godlike superiority.
00:06:54But in fact, they live with the anxiety.
00:06:57Oh, I'm going to crash.
00:06:59I'm going to crash.
00:07:01And Lorenzo spoke openly of, I'm afraid, he said.
00:07:07And so there's Wayne Rainey doing the very worst thing that a rider can do, which is to compensate himself for the shortcomings of something to do, anything to do with the bicycle, whether it be low power, poor turning, poor information, what have you.
00:07:30The rider, he's on point there, he's on point there, he's got to come up with the lap times.
00:07:37So he's leading this race, he crashes, he's paralyzed.
00:07:42It might be good to have a little background on changes that were going on at Yamaha, which are similar to changes that had gone on in other companies.
00:07:53Namely, a switch from the old way, which was the company founders in charge, big men giving orders, changing to collective management.
00:08:11And at Honda, for example, Mr. Honda had the reputation of throwing parts at an engineer whose work had displeased him while berating him verbally.
00:08:25And this had given rise to this new collective management, which was more humane and in line with changes in society as a whole and out with paternalism and in with wishy-washy collective management.
00:08:48And it could be that collective management had some hand in Kenny's dissatisfaction with Yamaha chassis.
00:08:58I don't know.
00:08:59I don't know if anyone knows.
00:09:02But in any case, Wayne had his accident.
00:09:09Kevin Schwartz won the world championship that year and then began the rule of McDoin.
00:09:17And he won five consecutive world championships on NSR 500 Hondas.
00:09:23And he saw to it that they were kept largely the same year on year because he wanted to know what he was talking to.
00:09:32And at the same time, although Yamaha's started in with Luca Catalora and so on, they really weren't getting anywhere.
00:09:49And as I was told by a Yamaha engineer in Japan in 2003, he said, we had a big problem.
00:10:04Wayne could ride anything we gave him.
00:10:07So he was unable to say that one's better.
00:10:10That one's not so good.
00:10:12And so he said, we had no guidance to know what to do next.
00:10:20And immense talent and also strangely a weakness.
00:10:26You know, that's really because and Freddie suffered from this as well.
00:10:30That he would put his hands up to the to the imaginary handlebars and get a puzzled look on his face and says, well, I don't know what I think I was in third gear.
00:10:42And you could rely on these men to do the right thing on the motorcycle.
00:10:49But there's a difference between a race winner and a test pilot who comes back bulging with information and commentary on all aspects of control.
00:11:01Well, there's there's there's those stories might have been Chuck Yeager, but stories of test pilots.
00:11:08You know, they had their notebook strapped to their leg.
00:11:10Yep.
00:11:11And the thing would be spinning out of the sky and they'd be writing notes before they eject.
00:11:15Wonderful stuff.
00:11:17Yeah.
00:11:17Yeah.
00:11:18So at Honda, the man whose department created the NS3, NS2, that three that that Freddie won the world championship on in 83, Mr. Miyakoshi, he said at one point, I am I am terribly sorry because I no longer know how to behave.
00:11:45Because these new standards of corporate behavior were required, the old timers who were still functioning to conform to the new way.
00:11:59So in any case, this all builds up until Kenny decides we've got what we need here.
00:12:10We've got our brain trust.
00:12:13We have tremendous experience.
00:12:15Why can't we build our own bike?
00:12:18So in 97, they broke with with Yamaha and they decided that the current rules contained a loophole, a lighter weight for a three cylinder engine, a three cylinder bike.
00:12:35And it was two hundred and two hundred and fifty three pounds versus two hundred and eighty seven pounds.
00:12:44That's not nothing, but it wouldn't be a great task to carry it in from the car in the form of a bag of groceries.
00:12:50So they got to work and Bud, Axel and the other the rest of the of the brain trust were going to draw the engine.
00:13:07And the chassis was going to be created separately and the fabrication of things that chassis side would be up to Tom Walkinshaw racing.
00:13:21And Bud Axel and Bud Axel shone some light on the difficulty of getting what you want.
00:13:32The team moved to the Banbury area, which is Britain's Formula One Valley.
00:13:39All these wonderful specialist firms who could make wonderful things.
00:13:44But it turned out, as Bud observed, that they had ABC levels.
00:13:52A was their essential Formula One customers.
00:13:55They got premium service, as you would expect.
00:14:00The B group were lesser beings.
00:14:05The German Touring Car Championship, other formula racing.
00:14:11They would get B level service.
00:14:14And the C group was for newcomers.
00:14:18Come knocking on the door, telephoning, sending letters.
00:14:23Oh, please help us.
00:14:25We want to have these parts made.
00:14:27Well, it was almost as though, as Bud described it, there was a kind of hazing that had to be understood and suffered through gladly.
00:14:38I have a friend who does business.
00:14:42I don't know what it's like now, but England being England, it's probably still the same socially.
00:14:50Manufacturer of and distributor of British parts for old motorcycles.
00:14:56And he went to England, you know, because he was starting, not starting, but he had bought the business.
00:15:04And he went to somebody who was doing, you know, big, big work.
00:15:07And was like, I'm American.
00:15:09Like, he's just doing what Americans do.
00:15:11Like, hey, hi, I'd like to do some business.
00:15:13Oh, you know, perhaps, you know, whatever.
00:15:16And knock on the door.
00:15:17And he got the lobby.
00:15:18He calls it the lobby treatment.
00:15:19Oh, I'm sure he'll be right with you.
00:15:23And he just sat there for hours in the lobby and then finally, finally left.
00:15:28Later, he was friends with somebody else and he had a party and they met socially.
00:15:33And then it was OK.
00:15:35Yeah.
00:15:36And he got out of the lobby.
00:15:37But it was it was it was quite a journey.
00:15:41And it's it's just interesting.
00:15:42We're so I mean, there's a lot of culture going on there.
00:15:45But yeah, so they would get parts and they wouldn't be usable.
00:15:50And it took time to cultivate the necessary relationship so that the drawing and the parts
00:15:58that resulted from its manufacture had some correspondence, one with the other.
00:16:03They wanted to build a very compact three cylinder.
00:16:06They chose to angle two cylinders down and one cylinder up with a V angle of 135 degrees between them.
00:16:18And just as Mr. Miyakoshi and Honda had limited the number of main bearings in the in their triple.
00:16:28The brain trust decided they were going to have only three main bearings and normally a three cylinder would have four.
00:16:42So what they did was they placed what they called a flying web between cylinders two and three, namely a disc with crank pins on it, staggered at such an angle that when the numbers two and three cylinders rotated, they came to get top dead center together and fired simultaneously.
00:17:09And the number one cylinder was sort of doing its thing on the on the left side.
00:17:19And unfortunately, the result was tremendous vibration.
00:17:26Now, a conventional inline three cylinder like the ones that Kawasaki built in the 1970s, H1, H2, S2, S3, 120 degree crank pins gives you an engine whose center of mass does not shake up and down, but the engine rocks.
00:17:48And the rocking in the case of the KR3 was such that foot peg brackets vibrated off, wiring chafed through and carburation.
00:18:07And then, because of the engine, because of the engine, because of the disturbance to the fuel in the float bowls, became erratic so that smooth acceleration was not always possible.
00:18:19So, at this point, the question is, do we try to cope with the carburation or with the source of the problem?
00:18:32And they decided to build their own carburetor.
00:18:37And I think from what's been written about it, that they, instead of using a float bowl, they employed a weir system.
00:18:47Carburetors require a reference head, a source of fuel at a known and constant pressure for their metering.
00:18:56That's why there's a float bowl.
00:18:58It holds the fuel at a certain height above the main jet.
00:19:01A weir does this by using a pump to fill a container with a float bowl.
00:19:10But basically, the weir is an edge over which the fuel flows and is recirculated.
00:19:18And this maintains a constant height without having to have a float and a float valve.
00:19:23Well, someone stepped on someone else's toes by casually referring to that $100,000 carburetor,
00:19:37which was, I would imagine, a way of implying, what if you'd applied that $100,000 to the source of the vibration?
00:19:47Well, we're talking about a lot of money here, a lot more than $100,000, because this, creating new engines.
00:19:59When you've built one engine, you are nowhere.
00:20:02You're like a pilot who has soloed.
00:20:05Now your experience as a pilot can begin.
00:20:09So, you've built one engine.
00:20:13Now you have to build a motorcycle.
00:20:16You have to start testing both of them for reliability and suitability for the task.
00:20:23And this is a recursive process.
00:20:26Build, break, redesign, break again in a cycle that will, we hope,
00:20:36end in a usable, raceable bicycle.
00:20:43So, in that first year, with all their troubles, they accomplished very little, but they made 160 horsepower.
00:20:55Remember that the H1R, Kawasaki's 500, made 75, and the H2R made 90 or a bit more.
00:21:06From 750.
00:21:09So, 160 horsepower shows they knew how to design a cylinder for a two-stroke engine.
00:21:15So, the second year, along came two volunteers from Japan.
00:21:25One was gruff, direct Yoichi Okuma, who had stood watching as the Yamahas were rolled into tech in 82,
00:21:40and it had spit upon them.
00:21:47We're big.
00:21:48What's it going to cost you?
00:21:50A dab with a hanky?
00:21:53Take care of it, somebody.
00:21:54Anyway, Mr. Okuma, and from Yamaha, a man known as Mike, I couldn't find his real name, Mayakawa.
00:22:04I've heard of him lots of times.
00:22:06These two men designed a balance shaft system that took away the rocking couple by creating an anti-couple.
00:22:15And people are always telling us, oh, a balance shaft eats big horsepower, man.
00:22:22Well, all it is is a shaft on ball bearings.
00:22:26Does it take a lot of power to turn that?
00:22:29Sure, it has eccentric weights corresponding to the shaking force of the engine.
00:22:35It doesn't eat power.
00:22:40It may slow acceleration somewhat because it takes something to spin the thing up.
00:22:46But it kept the foot pegs in place, which riders like.
00:22:51Yeah, that sounds good.
00:22:52Sounds like a reasonable trade-off.
00:22:54Sure.
00:22:54And the Mark II engine from 1998 was also the first engine, the first bike had the radiator under the seat, like John Britton's bike.
00:23:09And there were ducts from the front of the bike to the radiator.
00:23:15And this explains why it was built with one cylinder up and two cylinders down.
00:23:20Normally, you would want to concentrate the weight near the center of mass, which is somewhere around 22 inches above the ground.
00:23:31And so they, with two cylinders down and one cylinder up as the original, the Mark I, you could have air ducts passing on either side of that top cylinder.
00:23:42Now that the radiator had been moved to the front, they reversed it so that there were two cylinders up, two cylinders down.
00:23:50The $100,000 carburetor went to the museum.
00:23:55And there were three nice Kahin two-stroke carburetors facing forward with their big rubbery lips, inviting air to rush into the engine.
00:24:07And power climbed to 170 horsepower.
00:24:13Again, they didn't win races.
00:24:18I think they finished a high of somewhere like eighth or tenth.
00:24:24Later on, they would finish as high as sixth.
00:24:27But here's a special problem of trying to win races with a different kind of bike.
00:24:37A low-powered bike, mind you, the others were making 185 to 190 horsepower at this point.
00:24:45A lower-powered bike has to do corner speed.
00:24:49It doesn't have the acceleration to recover from a low apex speed, which the more powerful bikes do.
00:24:57So the so-called pointed riders, the ones who brake, brake, brake, very hard, very late, get to the apex, get the bike turn, and then use the rest of the corner for a drag strip.
00:25:10But they're going to cross the line of a motorcycle that is on the great circle route.
00:25:17The high corner speed guy is riding on the inscribed circle of largest possible radius.
00:25:26And the people with the horsepower always have the right-of-way.
00:25:31Well, torque, you know, having that flexibility, acceleration gives you some great flexibility.
00:25:37It gives you options.
00:25:38It gives you options.
00:25:39I watched an interview recently with Ed Iskandarian.
00:25:45And he was talking about the early days of making camshafts because it was, you know, it was cowboy time.
00:25:50Nobody knew what they were doing.
00:25:51He was just some kid.
00:25:53And he's like, well, I want to make 20, we said 20 camshafts a week and $5 each would be, you know, 100 bucks.
00:25:59And he was figuring out how to make cams.
00:26:03And, you know, they were working with like Ford Flatheads and stuff.
00:26:06And he was making his cams and he got a business going and he paid for an ad in the early issues of Hot Rod magazine.
00:26:13And some of the race guys, you know, in the southeast were like, hey, send us some of those cams.
00:26:20So he sent them out and then they just started ordering more and more of them.
00:26:24And he was like, he said, I was always afraid that somebody who knew what they were doing was going to come and tell me what I was doing wrong.
00:26:32But nobody knew what they were doing, you know, like they were really exploring it.
00:26:36And he made a cam for the Flathead working in the cam profile of a stock cam and regrinding it.
00:26:46You know, he wasn't like making custom cams.
00:26:49He was regrinding.
00:26:50Grinding the big circle down in order to increase the lift.
00:26:53Yeah.
00:26:53Yeah.
00:26:53And so he said they liked it because it accelerated.
00:27:00His cam accelerated better.
00:27:01And it was rapid opening with some duration.
00:27:05Yep.
00:27:06Not massive, you know, but rapid action.
00:27:09That was his trick.
00:27:11Yeah.
00:27:11And it gave them torque.
00:27:13And look at him now.
00:27:16Look at his ski cams now.
00:27:19So, yeah, that acceleration gives you a lot to mess with.
00:27:23It was also something I observed when Rich Oliver was racing in.
00:27:29Oh, shoot.
00:27:30What class was that?
00:27:31It was the alternative racing series where you could have like a GSXR.
00:27:38Whatever you wanted.
00:27:39Yeah, whatever you wanted.
00:27:40NASB, I think.
00:27:42And Rich was out there on his 250.
00:27:46And Rich could win if he could get to the front.
00:27:50Yeah.
00:27:51And his tires would also last.
00:27:53His bike was lighter, so his tires would last.
00:27:55And that's sort of what we're talking about here with the three cylinders.
00:27:57Like they were going for a lighter weight.
00:27:59They weren't making quite the power.
00:28:00They had to ride it a certain way.
00:28:02But it was in conflict with everybody else.
00:28:04And I think ultimately if you have the torque, you have more flexibility.
00:28:09Yeah.
00:28:10So.
00:28:10So they kept on with it.
00:28:13There was a Mark III version where the balance shaft was moved with the plan in mind to shorten the engine and make it more compact.
00:28:24And they were getting it.
00:28:28In the last year, which was 2002 of that program, Jeremy McWilliams qualified on pole in Australia.
00:28:37And I think that was the year they had a best of six, best finish.
00:28:44But they never got, they could never get close to amassing championship points.
00:28:50They might get 60 points, but the winner would have over 300 points.
00:28:56So those championship points, of course, are some measure of your performance during the year.
00:29:03Not necessarily fair, but ones that have been worked out by management to be, everyone's complaining equally about all the different features of it.
00:29:15So, you know, you're in the sweet spot.
00:29:17So.
00:29:212002 was the last, well, the first year of the, of the new series, MotoGP.
00:29:27And Kenny, so the story goes, was playing golf and met a Thai businessman.
00:29:39Now, in the West, what do you think of when you think of a Thai businessman?
00:29:46Maybe not terribly much, but here is an example of the modern Thai businessman.
00:29:53When Bernie Ecclestone, long-time director of Formula One, decided that he had to simplify family problems by selling his Gulfstream G650, retails for $67 million.
00:30:12He lined up a Thai businessman who did not want to wait two years on the waiting list to get a new airplane.
00:30:20He paid Bernie six and one half million dollars over list to get that airplane.
00:30:31That is a Thai businessman because in Thailand, a huge industrial revolution has taken place.
00:30:40They manufacture zillions of automobiles and motorcycles and all kinds of other things.
00:30:46So, these things aren't on the 11 o'clock news, but if you look for them, you can find them.
00:30:56So, this Thai businessman was something to do with the Proton Group who were manufacturing automobiles and presumably everything else.
00:31:05And he said, we've been looking for something to help us publicize our name.
00:31:11And, sound familiar?
00:31:16So, a vast sum of money was indented to create a four-stroke homemade MotoGP bike.
00:31:27The KR5, the KR5, and like Honda's RC211V, it was based on a superbike combustion chamber.
00:31:40Honda had the RC45 combustion chamber, which they took five of those and adjusted the bore and stroke appropriately
00:31:51and had something that made good power.
00:31:55And, Rob Muzzy shared his knowledge of the Kawasaki 750 superbike development.
00:32:05So, they had a strong starting point.
00:32:08Such that, although the engine was planned to run to 15,000, at 13,000, they were making 197 horsepower, which is good cylinder filling.
00:32:23That's great.
00:32:24If they'd been able to get that, to maintain that degree of cylinder filling to 15,000, they would have had 237 horsepower, which at the time was killer good.
00:32:43So, this program was not easy.
00:32:52It was not any easier than the KR3 program.
00:32:58They struggled.
00:33:03But, when MotoGP began, the president of HRC, which is sort of Honda's R&D operation, Yasuo Ikenoya, said,
00:33:19that Honda will use no exotic materials or technologies.
00:33:25MotoGP will be like superbike Grand Prix racing.
00:33:33Well, Suzuki, Suzuki.
00:33:36Ducati arrived in 2003 with Boku horsepower, causing Honda's representatives in the meetings that followed to burst out with the word pirates to describe Ducati,
00:33:56who were not about to maintain any gentleman's agreement about no exotic materials or technologies.
00:34:04And so, this was a difficult period.
00:34:12Honda won the first two years of the series, 2002, 2003.
00:34:19And then, Valentino Rossi made his famous exit from Honda, where he felt that his importance to the team was undervalued.
00:34:31And he went to Yamaha.
00:34:35And at Yamaha, he was given a sort of maverick engineer who basically changed everything.
00:34:51And it was a year of tremendous struggle and innovation for Yamaha, but they managed to win the championship.
00:35:02And meanwhile, Kenny is trying to incorporate new technologies from Formula One,
00:35:11one of which is using engine power to cancel engine braking.
00:35:20You close the throttle and begin braking for a corner.
00:35:25The rear wheel is now having to overcome engine friction.
00:35:29It can't.
00:35:30So, the rear wheel begins to hammer up and down so that the rider can now seat double.
00:35:37What an improvement.
00:35:40Entering the corner, starting to turn in.
00:35:43The back end slides out.
00:35:46Well, the quickie was always to set high idle.
00:35:50Yeah, that's what Roland Sands told me many, many years ago.
00:35:53I was struggling with this Honda 600, and the engine braking was too much.
00:35:58And I was like, yeah, I'm entering corners, and this is happening.
00:36:01He's like, dude, turn up the idle.
00:36:03I'm like, oh.
00:36:06Okay.
00:36:07Problem's mostly solved.
00:36:09So, Kenny Skies had been talking to the Formula One people through his ever-improving Vanbury connections.
00:36:18And they had learned about the throttle kicker.
00:36:22The throttle kicker is a variable high idle controlled by the engine control unit.
00:36:29A little old computer on a chip.
00:36:32And you would go to your laptop, plug in, and it would say,
00:36:38how much engine braking do you want to cancel?
00:36:41Enter the numbers you think are useful.
00:36:44Kenny showed me this at Motegi in 2003.
00:36:48Um, I'd never heard of it.
00:36:51It was wonderful.
00:36:54So, uh, again, this was an attempt on a smaller scale to build a fully competitive MotoGP engine
00:37:05and to do what everyone else in MotoGP was furiously trying to do,
00:37:10which was to apply Formula One technology where appropriate.
00:37:17And engine braking was one area.
00:37:20Another area was anti-spin.
00:37:23Uh, all these things were projects of great size.
00:37:28You needed to have a fleet of test bikes with people evaluating these various systems
00:37:36and finding how to make them work on race day.
00:37:41Um, Kenny had a lot of people working for him for a time there.
00:37:48He had a special department where there was a man doing nothing but making wire harnesses.
00:37:52And they were very nice wire harnesses.
00:37:54Um, they had John Barnard, who was a, a, a Formula One designer.
00:38:03Uh, he introduced the idea of replacing pressed and welded sheet metal chassis beams
00:38:13with machined, highly precise machined parts.
00:38:19The same thing had happened in aviation during World War II.
00:38:23An airplane factory was a sheet metal shop.
00:38:26They, they bent and formed and drilled sheet metal pieces and riveted them together.
00:38:33Oh, the drilling and the riveting.
00:38:36Yes.
00:38:37Oh my goodness.
00:38:38So, uh, when, uh, jet aircraft took the place of propeller driven, they found that rigging
00:38:48of surfaces precisely to drawing was essential because they would end up with a poorly trimmed
00:38:55aircraft.
00:38:56Otherwise, the solution machine, all the parts from solid and they, for airliners, they have
00:39:05these tremendous skin mills that are 150 feet long.
00:39:08They've got a gantry that carries three cutter heads and somebody has written software for
00:39:14this thing.
00:39:15Oh my.
00:39:15In three dimensions.
00:39:18What?
00:39:18There's Stan Bully.
00:39:19Where's she?
00:39:20Yeah.
00:39:20Yeah.
00:39:20Richard, Richard Stan Bully did his chassis when he was building up his bike.
00:39:24It was, uh, he's, he likes his machining.
00:39:28It's no question.
00:39:29And he likes his software.
00:39:31Yeah.
00:39:31So, uh, Kenny's team were trying to do what the other teams were not succeeding all that
00:39:43well at, uh, Max Biagi said that, uh, breaking instability, when you felt that first, which
00:39:55riders later called pumping, he said in a split second, you were in the gravel.
00:40:00It built up so fast.
00:40:05So they desperately needed to solve the engine braking problem.
00:40:09And ultimately it was solved.
00:40:11But in 2003, when I was at Motegi, I listened to bikes entering a turd.
00:40:18Kawasaki sounded like big old time sports cars.
00:40:21When they closed the throttle, the engine went bang, bark, pow, kaka-chooey.
00:40:25And that's all, um, idle fuel collecting in the exhaust system and being ignited periodically
00:40:32to make those cackling noises.
00:40:35They had no engine braking control.
00:40:38Uh, the Hondas, I could hear the engine running all the way to the apex.
00:40:42Why is it running?
00:40:46Kenny explained it to me.
00:40:48They're canceling engine braking to the degree the rider feels best.
00:40:53All this stuff required detailed development.
00:41:00And what do you do when you find out that your onrush to the problem has led you down a
00:41:06blind alley?
00:41:07Now you have to back out of the alley, seal the entrance with something that will remind
00:41:13you of your mistake and take a different direction.
00:41:16For a big company, this is a setback.
00:41:19For a company with one and a half dynamometers, it's more than a setback.
00:41:26And there's a lot of, there are a lot of anecdotes from, from this era.
00:41:36Uh, but, uh, Bud, um, Bud Axelon, one of my favorites was, he said, I don't mind an all-nighter
00:41:48every now and then it's a part of racing, but I don't want to live there.
00:41:54Uh, and, uh, at a point, um, Warren willing left to go to Suzuki with, uh, Kenny Jr.
00:42:08And the money ran out and the program ended, but they built so much stuff.
00:42:17They built engines with two different bores and strokes.
00:42:20They had the usual problems with crankshafts.
00:42:24Oh, this crankshaft is vibrating in such a way that even using the standard recommended
00:42:31fillet where the crank pin joins the cheeks of the crankshaft, little cracks.
00:42:39Oh, it didn't pass Magnaflux.
00:42:41Oh dear, what's happening?
00:42:43Well, we'll have to narrow the bearings and increase the radius until no more cracks.
00:42:51This, these are steps in development that you expect to occur.
00:42:57Cam drives develop instabilities.
00:43:00Teeth break off of the gears.
00:43:03If it's a chain cam drive, all sorts of things happen to the tensioners.
00:43:08The oil fills up with rubber.
00:43:10However, you have to overcome every single problem.
00:43:17Do everything perfectly and you're in with a chance.
00:43:21And it must have been a, well, some people say that Kenny lost interest.
00:43:31It just was a story too often told.
00:43:34Oh, well, this problem came up and we're working on it now.
00:43:39Well, what about all the things that we're supposed to be doing instead of that?
00:43:42Well, it's going to have to be postponed because there's no, tell that story too many times.
00:43:48Yeah.
00:43:48You can see this wasn't a good idea.
00:43:52Well, you know, if you're.
00:43:56In terms of winning races.
00:43:58Yeah.
00:43:58How many times have we heard the stories?
00:44:01Like how, so how enticing is it to say, I will build my own engine and I am connected to exactly what's happening on the racetrack and I will bring the answers from the racetrack to the engineers and we will solve the problems directly.
00:44:17And that's, that's good because the factory is at such a distance from all that.
00:44:22Well, that's where I was going.
00:44:24They hear the roar of artillery, but they're never hit by any of the shells.
00:44:29And that's, that's what I was getting at is that, you know, you have a big company and then there's such great distance and you have engineers who are, you know, I'm sure they're massively talented people doing their thing, but they aren't there in the trenches.
00:44:44It was always the farmers versus the engineers.
00:44:46It was not Al Ludington Mathers, I think.
00:44:51Yeah.
00:44:51Gary Mathers.
00:44:52Gary Mathers, you know, when he was working with Honda, I said that he said, well, you know, that the engineers do their thing over.
00:44:58We're there and then they give us the tool and we're, you know, we're at the racetrack and it's like, we have to make the harvest.
00:45:05You know, we see the rain clouds in the distance and we've got to make the harvest.
00:45:08So the stuff's got to run and we just got to figure it out.
00:45:11And then that was where the farmers came in.
00:45:13That was like Cal Carruthers.
00:45:14Let's cut the steering head.
00:45:15Let's, oh, well, I'm going to weld this cylinder and we're going to change the base.
00:45:20And like, okay, now we got power, right?
00:45:22You know, so, you know, cutting that distance out and having that, having a small team, very skunk worky.
00:45:30And that's so enticing, such an enticing idea.
00:45:33But then you also don't have the cubic volume of an HRC with a row of dinos and a row of workshops.
00:45:42And you go into shipping and you see these race engines, 10 or 12 of them, in their sealed caissons, ready for shipment.
00:45:52And you say, how many engines in this program?
00:45:56Oh, 36.
00:46:01What do you do when you have one and a half dinos?
00:46:04Really?
00:46:05Yeah.
00:46:05And I used to get grilled by Steve Scheibe, who was working on the Harley VR1000 program at that time.
00:46:13He says, oh, oh, you visited Aprilia.
00:46:15How many dinos do they have?
00:46:17And I said, well, I hate to tell you this, but they built a new dino center and racing has been given the old one.
00:46:23So they have 18.
00:46:26Half of them are being used for storage.
00:46:30You could see the headache coming to him because supposedly you can't beat the house.
00:46:41But on the other hand, you know that Kenny Roberts and his riders, Bud Axlund, Mike Sinclair, and the late Warren Willing,
00:46:55that is a wonderful nucleus of up front, in your hands, MotoGP knowledge.
00:47:04How can you translate that into a race-winning program?
00:47:12Well, when...
00:47:14200 employees running lots of dinos and machinery, you know, making parts.
00:47:20When Ducati were about to join the series, or they had just joined, I'm not sure which it was,
00:47:26I was talking with Claudio Domenicali, who is now the CEO there.
00:47:33Last time I almost saw him, he was swept away in a large Audi.
00:47:40He said, we believe that it will cost us $32 million to get in,
00:47:46after which there will be $10 million per season for operations.
00:47:51Well, they talk about bigger numbers than that now, of course,
00:47:57because there's been like 80% inflation since that time.
00:48:03So these are fair-sized numbers.
00:48:08And a big company has dino cells, but a little company has to create them.
00:48:15The little company has to figure out, well, shall we go with the French Sky Crankshaft Company
00:48:22or the Banbury Crankshaft Company?
00:48:24How are we going to find out?
00:48:26We'll order from both of them and see how it goes.
00:48:30But this is a game, like warfare, in which time is much more valuable than money.
00:48:37That was what Pratt & Whitney learned during World War II,
00:48:43that in order to stay in the game, not have their program canceled
00:48:49and their machine tools shipped to somebody else more competent,
00:48:53if a problem came up, they had to think of every possible solution
00:48:57and implement all of them simultaneously.
00:49:00Because if they did it in the automotive fashion, well, that wasn't it.
00:49:06And that wasn't it.
00:49:07And we're not sure about this one, but we'll know at the end of the week.
00:49:12Here they come with freight cars.
00:49:14They're loading up your machine tools.
00:49:16They're taking them to San Diego.
00:49:18So, that was what they called trampling problems to death.
00:49:25And you would like to be able to do that.
00:49:27But that first year when they had vibration, they couldn't fix that in a week.
00:49:35So, when Honda went racing with the Oval Piston NR500,
00:49:43they dumped a bunch of money into that.
00:49:46The program began in 1977.
00:49:48They raced 79, 80, and 81.
00:49:52And it wasn't working.
00:49:53So, they said, okay, put the two strokes in.
00:49:56And Mr. Miyakoshi was ready for 82.
00:50:03Here came the three-cylinder, two-stroke.
00:50:06Freddy won two races the first year, and he was champion the second year.
00:50:11Now, of course, the problem comes up.
00:50:14Why are Honda and Yamaha unable to match the Europeans in MotoGP?
00:50:20Have they such fossilized procedures that they might as well be a little shot with 12 guys in it?
00:50:30I don't know.
00:50:31I don't know.
00:50:35We'll have to await the fullness of time for the answer on those things.
00:50:40We all had confidence that, for example, Yamaha would get back to doing it.
00:50:49But how long has it been?
00:50:51It's been four years, I think, that Corderaro has been sort of tapping on the desk and looking at his watch.
00:51:01Tested a V4.
00:51:03Yeah, they tested a V4.
00:51:05But is that the magic pill?
00:51:07Don't know.
00:51:08Drop a couple of these before dinner and you'll be fine tomorrow.
00:51:12Yeah, it's going to cost a lot to find out.
00:51:16So, yes, they were bold attempts and they had good reason to believe they might, in some degree, succeed.
00:51:29It was worth trying.
00:51:30And there's always the feeling with these small projects, well, you know, there's always the chance that an angel will float down and magically make this happen.
00:51:42In the form of, if you play golf with the right guy, you could be in with a big budget.
00:51:50So, and I think that's one of the things that happened with the Ilmore V4.
00:51:57They built a bike.
00:51:59It had many of the features that are now absolutely standard in MotoGP.
00:52:05So, Mario Ilion, the designer, had just sold his company.
00:52:10He had a bunch of money.
00:52:13He liked how the MotoGP technical rules looked.
00:52:18And so, he went ahead with this project.
00:52:21But it didn't happen.
00:52:28They ran a couple of races.
00:52:32They hoped for a sponsor to come forward.
00:52:38But MotoGP was changing at that time.
00:52:41In 1976, Suzuki were so confident of the RG500 that they had built to run during the 74 and 75 seasons,
00:52:57which were their sort of teething project to bring the thing to maturity that they built 58 replicas of that bike.
00:53:13And they sold them.
00:53:15And at one point, something like 30 out of 35 point-scoring riders rode Suzuki RG500s.
00:53:29I mean, their motorcycle was so superior.
00:53:33And there were so many good privateer riders.
00:53:37That's the way racing was in those days.
00:53:39They bought those bikes.
00:53:40They went to the races and did what they knew how to do.
00:53:44And they did okay.
00:53:45But MotoGP was feeling its way.
00:53:51Well, do we want claiming rule teams who are running superbike kit motors in cast-off Moto2 chassis?
00:54:02Oh, they're 10 seconds slower a lap.
00:54:04Well, it doesn't look too good.
00:54:06Maybe we could pressure Honda into building a production racer.
00:54:10Why, certainly we could do that.
00:54:12We'll give it steel valve springs instead of pneumatic.
00:54:16Oh, it's down 10, maybe 15 horsepower.
00:54:20Hmm, production racer, maybe not so good.
00:54:24So then somebody hit on the idea, rather than rolling those last year's bikes into the rubbish compressor
00:54:34and making bricks out of them,
00:54:37you could supply them to teams that Dorna will assist.
00:54:47They are fully engineered race bikes.
00:54:51It proved to be the solution.
00:54:54Unlike any other series in racing,
00:54:58MotoGP is 100% factory engineered race bikes.
00:55:03There are no privateers because all the seats in this congregation are by agreement.
00:55:11You can't just come there and say,
00:55:14well, I did good in British Superbike.
00:55:17And can I, you know, get in your series somehow?
00:55:23Get lost, kid.
00:55:24Go through channels.
00:55:28And channels are often put there for the very purpose of arresting the momentum of incoming unwanted persons.
00:55:37So, once MotoGP had changed, there couldn't be 58 RG500s.
00:55:50Nobody is going to build, Ducati are not going to build a fleet of 2024s for upcoming graduates of Superbike Series in other nations.
00:56:06But, it's a closed club.
00:56:10Now, Aprilia is currently the closest to Ducati of any of the teams in the series.
00:56:24And they are also recognized as pioneers in aero.
00:56:29They do stuff, they do it, they go adventuring in the wind tunnel.
00:56:35Same as Ducati.
00:56:36They know what it takes.
00:56:40But, at the beginning of the series in 2002,
00:56:47they decided that they wanted three things.
00:56:51They wanted to do something different,
00:56:53which they give as the reason for doing three cylinders.
00:56:57Another reason for doing three cylinders is it's close to the bore and stroke of one of the V10 3.5 liter Formula One engines of the time.
00:57:07They wanted to apply Formula One technology to MotoGP early and thus gain a march on the others.
00:57:23And I'm forgetting what the third point was.
00:57:25But, at any rate, the three-cylinder cube was built and supposedly it pulled from 7,000 or 8,000 all the way to unknown numbers in the lower stratosphere.
00:57:44And riders, such as Colin Edwards, said that it had no front-end feel.
00:57:55It had both front and rear chatter, which we know today is probably chatter beginning at the rear and being transmitted through the chassis to the front.
00:58:05It wheelied frequently and loftily.
00:58:15There's nothing that interferes with the rider's acceleration off the turn than having a front-end jerked off the pavement.
00:58:22Hey, I wanted to steer with that.
00:58:25You know, the Colin Edwards thing on Aprilia was a very interesting time because he had won Superbike, World Superbike,
00:58:33with the V-Twin.
00:58:36And so he was like, yeah, finally I'm going to MotoGP.
00:58:40And he was presented with the choice.
00:58:42It was like the seventh or eighth Honda.
00:58:44Like it was the last available, you know, yeah, you could have that thing in the back.
00:58:49It's a little dusty.
00:58:51Sure.
00:58:52So it was that or it was number one at Aprilia.
00:58:54And that was the choice that, you know, Colin was presented with.
00:58:58And he chose Aprilia.
00:58:59And then there's the famous fireball shot where the thing is exploding into flames
00:59:06and he's heaving off of it to get away from that.
00:59:11Yes.
00:59:11Well, then there's the Jan Witteveen was the racing director at Aprilia.
00:59:20And Ivano Beggio was the CEO going to his office and you're confronted with creations of sort of semi-industrial art.
00:59:35There were Le Corbusier, two opulent black leather Le Corbusier sofas.
00:59:42He had weird lamps designed by somebody else.
00:59:47The place was just bristling with designer stuff.
00:59:52Well, I think he wanted to get into this new series because Aprilia had been very prominent in 125 and 250, two strokes.
01:00:02And they wanted to go in the big class.
01:00:04And I went to talk to those people and I was given an interview with Jan Witteveen.
01:00:16And at the time, the hot topic was laterally flexible chassis hook up better at lean angle.
01:00:23They don't, they send good feedback to the rider.
01:00:29They don't require him to say, I'm going to guess that this entry speed will go through this corner.
01:00:36When I mentioned this concept to Witteveen, he acted as if I had blasphemed.
01:00:49And he told me in no uncertain terms, the only element of the chassis that can flex is the suspension itself.
01:00:59Everything else must be made as rigid as possible.
01:01:03Well, there you've got your lack of front end feel, your chatter, all these things.
01:01:11So it's hard in the end to say, well, was the engine on the Formula One side unsympathetic to driving through a single tire of which only one third is on the pavement at any given time?
01:01:27Or was it the stiff chassis?
01:01:34We don't know.
01:01:37They had big plans for 2005.
01:01:40Program canceled.
01:01:42Bikes went to storage.
01:01:46Mr. Witteveen retired.
01:01:49He's, he enjoys going to the races now and then as a spectator.
01:01:57And supposedly early in this year, one of the cube bikes was rolled out and started in front of the assembled company and made that beautiful three cylinder sound.
01:02:13Once again, it was a small but ambitious company with a great deal of chassis and suspension background, but the background was rigid.
01:02:30So, they were climbing a steep hill.
01:02:38Program ended.
01:02:40That was it.
01:02:42Aprilia turned in different directions.
01:02:45RSV4.
01:02:48And then they used that as a springboard to get into MotoGP where they're doing okay now.
01:02:56Second, among the Europeans, this is the strange thing, is that MotoGP started life as basically a Japanese series to which Ducati were admitted.
01:03:13Ducati did poorly in the series as on a championship basis, but they could win races.
01:03:22In 2007, Casey Stoner was world champion on the 800cc Ducati.
01:03:35And after that, it was mediocrity.
01:03:44And it was only through a program that ran for several years that finally success was achieved and Ducati are now dominant.
01:04:00To the point that people are saying, well, who's going to come and compete with those guys?
01:04:08Well, they've earned it.
01:04:10We can't criticize them for using what they know to win races.
01:04:15Think back to when somebody said, why doesn't that uppity Mick doing slow down a little bit and make a race of it?
01:04:23And frankly, the Japanese companies have turned to the new middle classes coming up in Southeast Asia.
01:04:41That's where they're selling.
01:04:42Their markets matured elsewhere in the U.S., a generation of men and women grew up as the nicest people you meet on a Honda with 50 cc's, 90 cc's, 125, 250, 350, 450.
01:05:02Sky's the limit.
01:05:03And as the market matured, the little starter classes fell off the bottom.
01:05:10So there was no longer a way in.
01:05:13Motorcycling had established itself in the U.S. in a certain form.
01:05:19And it's not 1965 anymore.
01:05:27From 65 to 70, the market doubled.
01:05:30From 70 to 74, the U.S. market doubled again.
01:05:35Those volcanic increases, I can't predict when the next one will be.
01:05:44Well, to Honda's credit, they're busting out a zillion small bikes.
01:05:49The 125 stuff, the Trail 125 and Groms and you name it.
01:05:54They got a lot of action.
01:05:56Yeah, good fun stuff.
01:05:56Good fun stuff.
01:05:57Real affordable and practically, you know, close to, as close to zero maintenance as you could have for a combustion.
01:06:06So easy, easy to get into.
01:06:08They're back doing that.
01:06:12But this is, it's, there are no small outfits in MotoGP.
01:06:19And the satellite teams, their engines are managed by people who understand them.
01:06:28They don't just wheel them out and say, well, this one's blowing the dust off the data plate.
01:06:36This one's a 2023.
01:06:39I don't think we have any more 24s.
01:06:41You'll have to make do with this.
01:06:42And they wheel it out to the truck and it's theirs.
01:06:45No, that's not how it works.
01:06:48The secrets are not made public.
01:06:50So these were ambitious projects.
01:06:59And one thing that's, that's the same among all of them is that they wanted to bring what was good, what was usable from Formula One to MotoGP or to Grand Prix racing.
01:07:14And they showed that it was very difficult, that you needed a big program, you needed test teams, you needed test riders, you needed a horrible bureaucracy behind it to make sure that everyone didn't take a day off on the same day.
01:07:36Well, you needed everything happening at once, as you said, you're going to solve all the problems, every possible solution simultaneously tested.
01:07:44But these different efforts had a lot going for them in terms of up close, hands-on knowledge, especially KR3, KR5, because those people were the nucleus of a highly successful MotoGP team that put Wayne Rainey into the championship top.
01:08:14They went to the top spot three times.
01:08:16And they were on their way for a fourth when tragedy occurred.
01:08:22So you could say there were no, there was no group of people anywhere better qualified to do this.
01:08:31And at Aprilia, Aprilia had a great racing history.
01:08:41There were some problems, people said the RS250 was a rigid motorcycle, not easy to ride to its limits.
01:08:52And the bike that they built, the Cube, was not easy to ride to its limits.
01:09:00At the very end, Shane Byrne, who was injured, was replaced by Gary McCoy for the last three races of 2006.
01:09:14And he amused himself in last place by laying long blackies through the turns at Valencia.
01:09:26And the crowd loved it.
01:09:28Yeah, Gary's good at that.
01:09:30He was always doing that.
01:09:32Yeah.
01:09:33And of course, this is always a question.
01:09:39I remember being horribly offended at Laguna when it seemed like more attention was given to the burnout contest than to the Grand Prix.
01:09:51But we all have to deal with reality.
01:09:55Yeah, those days camping at Laguna, there was a patch out there and into the night people would do a big smoky burnout.
01:10:04Somebody brought a two stroke and I watched the pistons start to come out of the pistons were coming out of the tailpipes.
01:10:10Yes.
01:10:11And then everything stopped.
01:10:13The nucleus of talent reminds me of Dan Gurney and Chuck Palmgren working on the Moment Canceling Twin, which is perhaps a topic we should address sometime.
01:10:26Yeah.
01:10:27But it's not widely known.
01:10:32We published a few things about it.
01:10:34You know, Dan had died during that work, but they had engines running on the dyno.
01:10:40And Chuck, Chuck showed me the flow bench.
01:10:43And it was a great flow bench.
01:10:44You know, it was just like a long clear tube, bolted to the walls, you know, something they'd made there and had been using a long time.
01:10:52And he was getting an incredible amount of flow out of the cylinder head.
01:10:56And it was, we got to ask Dan, like, how'd you, you know, he's like, Oh, a couple, you know, a couple old guys.
01:11:01We've seen a lot of things.
01:11:02We tried to put everything that we knew together into one engine.
01:11:05Yep.
01:11:06And it was making, I think it was 300 horsepower out of, anyway, very high specific output.
01:11:14It was really, really pumped.
01:11:16Background.
01:11:17The background of this, of course, was his alligator, which is a feet first motorcycle, originally powered by singles and twins.
01:11:26And he wanted to build one with serious power.
01:11:31And so he built a V twin, put a V twin in it.
01:11:34And I remember seeing him at, at the quail.
01:11:37Uh, I saw that bike and it just vibrated his teeth loose.
01:11:42Oh yeah.
01:11:43Well, that was the 45 putting a, a big, big twin Harley in it.
01:11:46Yep.
01:11:47And so he, he decided that he had to build a self-balancing engine and he chose a, uh, a way of doing it and pursued it.
01:12:00And we'll talk about that another time because there's a lot to be learned there.
01:12:05Um, but you were saying that, that this was another nucleus of talent that was applied to a, to a, uh, a limited goal and seemed to be well on their way to something good.
01:12:18Yeah.
01:12:19Very interesting project.
01:12:20We'll talk about that next time.
01:12:21Well, thanks for listening folks.
01:12:23We're going to wrap it up.
01:12:25See you in the comments.
01:12:27Uh, if you liked the podcast, share it with your friends.
01:12:29If you've got anybody who's a likely future fan, share it with them.
01:12:34Uh, we'll love to, uh, we'll, we'll, we'll keep it going.
01:12:37We'll see you in the comments.
01:12:39Thanks for listening.
01:12:40Yeah.
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