Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1980's

with both doing lots of sliding, and the Suzuki won the battle. From lap one onwards, Schwantz drew' away rapidly, until he was 9.6 seconds ahead on lap four , almost half ' distance. His Michelins were working well, but Rainey's new Du nlops were taking time to settle in. ' By lap eight, the nine-second- gap had dropped to four seconds . .. quite possible for Schwantz to defend over th e. last remaining lap. But he wanted to be absolutely sure, and turned up the wick. It was a fatal error. In the long downhill right-hand U-bend at the top of the hill, he flicked it in too hard, lost th e front wheel, and slid off into the dirt. "I hadn't had any trouble during the race , and I must have hit a slick patch ," was his official exp lanation , but uno££icially he admitted that he had been panicked into going too fast. It was his third such error of the year, and his second while holding a commanding lead . Thus Rainey inherited another win, on the road and on aggregate times. Kocinski was ·10 seconds adrift, Lawson another six seconds, with three more to Doohan. Mamola had put up a .sp irited wet-w eather. ride to take fifth; Spencer won a lastlap .tussle for sixth from Sarron, Mackenzie and Chili , 1.5-seconds covering all four. A miserable Magee , 10th in the heat after McElnea seized on the last lap, was another 20 seconds back. " I was going okay until I started getting cold, then mykriee sti££ened up and I could hardly move around the bike,' : he said. Aggregate times were issued at once, and th ey put Lawson second Off the track The root cause of the degeneration into farce of the Belgian 500cc ' G P was the immutab le fact that 160horsepower 500cc racers on slick tir es are unrideabl e and ridicu lously dang~ous _o~ wet track. The sub sequent shenanigans, however. fell under a wide variety of influences - ranging from a desire to placate a potentially troublesome cro wd to the convoluted politics' of this year' s FIM presidential ele~!!().!!s.. .. _ _ .__ The protagonists, apart from the competitors themselves, were the official management structure of th e race. The chief executive is the . Clerk of the Course, who makes all the decisions. The "board of directors" is the international FIM jury, who are presen tto homologate all race results, which remain provisional until they have done so, and to adjudica te on any other matters that may arise. At Spa, the Clerk of the Course was Claude Danis, a man with a' good track record; while the seven member international jury was presided over by Max , Deubel, former sidecar World Champion. In the course of this extraordinary day, the rule book was squeezed and bent by the unfortunate Danis, very much a victim of circumstances; doing his best to keep the show on the road, and personally sanctioning an unprecedented third leg of the race. Then the international jury voted to set it all straight again. . cancelling the third leg. Not surprisingly, this enraged to Ra iney, with Kocinski th ird; then . Doo han , Sarron, Chili, Spencer, Mackenzie and Magee ninth. Marn ola's first- leg non-finish dropped him to 13th , behind top privateers Gentile, Laycock and Buckmaster. But then it turned out-that this had ai r been a waste of' time, not to mention a foolish risk of life and limb, for the jury decreed that with no third restart mentioned in the rules, the third heat hadn't been part of the Grand Prix at all . 250cc Race The -second race of the day , this .started 10 minutes late with the track damp, but the racing line already almost dry. Front tires were intermediates or cut slicks, most people were on cut rears, with a few slick-shod dissenters including Jacques Cornu 's Honda and the Aprilias of Didier de Radigues and Martin Wimmer. De Radigues had qualified for his home GP on pole, h is first since his 250cc class return, and hi s works Aprilia having undergone an ap parent transformation over th e course of the last three races. Cornu was al so on the front row, slower than Carlos Cardus's Honda, but quicker than H elmut Bradl's Honda and J eanPhillipe Ruggia's Yamaha. Reinhold Roth (H onda) led row two from World Champion elect Sito Pons (Honda), Wimmer and Reggiani . Puig's factory-backed TZ Yamaha led row three, faster than the works bikes of Cadalora and Garriga. De Radigues led o££ the line, but the lights were red at the time, and the rest stayed behind. With Sito Pons gesturing angrily for the Belgian rider to be hel d back while the not only dispossessed teams, but more especially the riders who had' ridden one of the world's most dangerous circuits in the mistaken belief that they were racing for World Championship points. At first , things -wen t by th e book. When it rained soon aft er the start, th e race was stopped and results co unte d from th e end of th e pr evious lap . The machines were allowed into the pits to change tires , and reas sembled soon afterwards with th e track dry again. Crasher Sarron 's m achine change was also quite legal , but th e jury noted with some disquiet that Mamola was permitted to restart on his spare bik e, even though he had pulled in to the pits to retire on the lap before the race stoppage, They felt th en that they should have been consu lted on the make-up of the starting grid. . . The second leg was even more short-lived, with the riders slowing at the start of lap five, and results eventually taken from la p three. . . Now, according to precedent, and to the jury's subsequent reinterpretation of the rules, they were atIiberty to change tires, or to retire, as they wished . . . but the race must go on. But Danis made a nother quick decision callculated to p lease the riders ("capitulated to the riders," as one .FIM man said) and stopped the race. Since it had stopped by itself anyway, maybe he h ad little choice . , . but Schwantz's team at least was expecting to change his tires and send him straight out again, when instead they saw the red flag . Now Danis had a dog's breakfast on his hands. To complicate matters, he later explained, th e race started, they instead signalled engines stopped, th en sent th em o££ . for another warm-up la p for a race shortened by one lap. The next start was clean, with Cardus making the running, Cornu moving through when they came back down the hill, and Ruggi a pushing up to second o n the fast p ub lic-roads section. Into the hairpin, the young Frenchman dived inside under brakes, and his Yamaha led lap . one. As ' he said before the race: "This is a track where some technical p ortions allow better riders to take an advantage." And now he was attempting to prove it to Cornu and Card us, followed by Wimmer, Roth, Bradl and Pons all . in a bunch. Already, de Radigues had fallen on the exit from the hairpin , chasing the leaders too hard, Cornu powered back into the lead up the hill, with Ruggia catchingup again on the twists, looking for a way past. But once again he was .trying too hard - he got off-line onto th e damp in th e twists at th e bottom of the hill, and crashed. Cornu led until lap four, but Roth was making his bid on intermediate tires, passing Cardus on lap three, and rushing past Cornu the fifth time up the hill after Eau Ro uge at the start of lap five. By this time, Pons had worked his way into a clear fourth, and was starting work on ca tching the leading trio as the race passed half-distance. . By lap 'nine; Cardus was also on the move , and took the lead. At this point, Wimmer, his visor misting, mi sjudged a slow corner entry, and crashed out of fift h. Cornu got past Roth a lap later, the German now fading on slithery police chief at the track had told him that if he didn't put on some sort of a 500cc race, they could not guarantee to keep angry fans out of the paddock. _ He did what may have been the only thing possible - sanctioning aIirst-ever third G P start, with a race of nine laps.. Now he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lam b, and he also took the irregul ar step of allowing Kocinski to race on a machine he had not ridden in practice (in fact , Magee's . spare). At th is stage, a -rnember later said, Deubel had tried to tell Danis that th e third start was illegal. Placed on opposite sides ' of th e track, the ir only possible contact wa s by tel ephone, and Danis . either cou ldn' t or wouldn't be reached. This compounded 'the " series of errors that made us very worried," as a jury member said. Half-an-hour after the last race , the jury automatically meets to homologate the results. This was devoted to discussing the 500cc race , and examining th e rules; which made no mention of the possibility of a third leg , though th ey do not specifically forbid one either. In the end they voted seven to four that the third leg was invalid. Delegates from France, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden were in favor of su pporting the Clerk of the Course; but they were over-ruled by Ireland, ' German,' Spain, Italy, Venezuela, Great Britain and the Netherlands. Amid accusations of votetrading in election year, the jury now followed the rule-book to the .Ietter. Sin ce less than 75% of full distance had been completed, only half points are awarded, . Both Lucky Strike and Gauloise team s immediately protested the decision, th e Frenchmen very tires. Then Pons moved past him to take a threatening third. It was all the spur Cornu needed to pull out" all the stops. He dived past Cardus into the fla tout open-road left-handers before the chicane, and soon stretched his lead to better than one second. Hardly enough to be comfortable, with Pons moving through to second in p ursuit . Cornu arrowed between the damp patches, making full use of his slicks, and .Pons could get wi th in half-asecond of him, but couldn't do any more. He made the Swiss 36-year-old rider work hard for his first GP win of the season, while Cardus, three seconds down, also earned his first rostrum p lace of the year. Roth was a lone fourth , more than 15 seconds ahead of Cadalora's YZR. The Italian had passed Bradl on the last lap, having climbed gradually through the pack after an II th place start. Garriga was a solitary seventh, having been relieved in the closing stages of the unwelcome attentions of Puig's TZ, wh ich lost power and dropped to 13th, as well as Wilco Zee lenberg's Honda, which also dropped right back, to 19th. This left Fausto Ricci (Aprilia) eighth, and Masahiro Shimizu's works NSR ninth.' Andy Leisner qualified, but fell victim to the . conditions, sliding off on lap six. Pons maintained a 61-point title lead, btit now Cornu is second from Ro th , in a battle of the baldies (Roth is five weeks older than 36-year-old Cornu). .. 125cc Race Ezio Gianola's Honda led the first three laps, with Spaan in hot pursuit, nobly, since their man Christian Sarron actually came o££ much better the jury's way. Certainly, nobody at Honda was anxious to join in, and thus remove a badlyneeded if rather fortuitous race win 'from Eddie Lawson. PierFrancesco Chili also joined the protest. ·T he meat of th e protest lay in the assertion that th e rules, like so many framed by th e FIM , were no t clear, and did not forbid Mr. Danis's interpretation. A week after a 125 turned up a t Assen, clearly a twin , but fitting. th e . FIM's legal description of a single, th is suggestion found widespread support. Now we are left with no results at all, but the FIM said on Tuesday ' after the race.that a special emergency session of the appeal com- . mission would be held so that a decision could be announced before the French GP, less th an a fortnight away. Meantime, prize money was frozen for a month. Informed observers can see only ' two possible solutions - either that the FIM will support the decision of their jury, or they will declare the whole race null and void. Either way, there could be some legal actions coming up, with the Belgian Federation the most likely target. As with th e riders' strike at Misano, the real loser was the image of the sport, particularly vis a vis th e TV networks, who were once again left with jagged holes in their timetables as the motorcycle racers did everything but what had been pre-arranged. And at the end of this befuddled display of just how vu lnerable bike raci ng has become to the weather, they couldn't even announce a result.

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