Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

~ INTERVIEW Road racer Chris D'Aluisio e • By Henny Ray Abrams hris D'Aluisio comes to the 1993 season as one of the prohibitive favorites to win the AMA 250cc Grand Prix National Championship, something that's eluded him in his relatively brief, but progressive career. For the last two seasons he has finished second. First to Jimmy Filice, who with his Otsuka Electronics/Wayne Rainey Racing ride looks to be the other main contender for the title this year, and last year to his ascendant teammate Colin Edwards II, a rider he considers the best he's ever raced against. For 1993, he's back as the senior rider for Southwest Motorsports, the team founded by Eric Klementich and run by longtime D' Aluisio partner Dave Harold. Danny Walker comes to the team from Moto Liberty and the two veterans are joined by rookie Chris Taylor as the team expands to become the biggest in the 250cc GP class, the only pure racing class left and one that allows for the sort of experimenta tion tha t drives men like Harold and D'Aluisio. Ultimately, they would like to go World Championship racing and this year will cross the Atlan tic to race some of the world's best in the new-for'93 Ducados Open series in Spain. The opening round at Phoenix didn't go as planned. The team made a wrong choice on jetting and suspension and· D'Aluisio crashed in a futile chase to catch Filice. He re-mounted and finished third to Filice and teammate Danny Walker, the riders most likely to be involved in the title chase. When the 29-year-old residen t of Bethel, Connecticut, isn't at his computer designing bicycles for Cannondale, he's training to be in top shape for the season. Working for a progressive company like Cannondale allows him the flexible schedule to pursue both of his passions. For the time being he and Harold are concentrating on winning in the AMA series and getting ready for Daytona. Harold- will be preparing the machinery in Texas while D' Aluisio deals with the harsh New England winter. Daytona seemed like a good place to start. How's your luck been at Daytona over the years? It hasn't been real good. I got second last year to Colin (Edwards). That didn't go as planned. He just got a better last lap to me and that just worked in his favor. My bike ran great. We pulled away from the field together, but things just went to him_ The year before that I was supposed to do real well and the bike wasn't running real well and I think I got fifth. I think I got fifth the year before that too. What's the hardest part about riding a 250 at Daytona? I think that top speed's important because you're at top speed for a long time. But I don't think it's as important because if someone else's bike's as fast you can stay in their draft. The thing to do is try to get away in the infield. Try to make each little break you can in the infield so that the people behind you are trying to make it up in your draft or having to work together to catch back up. Our bikes haven't really gotten C 26 , faster on top speed. We've run the same gearing the last couple of years and I've dropped like four seconds within the last year there and a lot of that has to do with tires and setup, and really, really going hard through the infield. When you tested there in the fail did your times improve? No, they were a little bit slower because it was about 55 degrees. And I think it was pretty windy, too. How much faster do you think the qualifying times will be this year? I'll bet they're a fair amount faster. I didn't get to ride the new bike there. I rode last year's bike. But Danny (Walker, D'Aluisio's teammate) rode the '93 and it was four mph faster than my bike on top speed, and we know that the new bike has a lot better mid-range than the '92. Those things together - that should be an easy second. But it's also dependent on the weather. It's hard to go fast there in the cold. Most people see this season as a tworider battle between yourself and Jimmy Filice. Do you think that's the way it's going to be at Daytona? I don't know. I read in Cycle News that there are a couple of Europeans that are going. And, of course, Jon Cornwell, he's always got his bike going good. And Rich Oliver. I guess he wasn't ready for Phoenix. How much help was it that Phoenix took place before Daytona? I'll bet it helps a lot. It helps in that it was warm-up riding for me. We screwed up a lot on the jetting, which Dave (Harold) doesn't normally do. Plus it's good for the team. We have a bunch of new people. So it's good to work as a team because Daytona's a long week. We're doing CCS also so we're going to be getting on each other's nerves after all that. How do you see the rest of the season and what can you do this year that you didn't do last year? You seemed to have problems at almost every race. We (Colin and I) only had the same problems twice. That was ignition. Well, it wasn't really ignition. We thought it was ignition but it was spark plugs at Laguna and we had that same problem in Brainerd. But that turned out to be the tach. 1 can pick apart each race. And I was going great at each one. My riding was really good, but a couple of things happened. And all the other ones were different problems. Wisconsin was probably the best race because I won. Daytona was fun, but there wasn't much to it. The other ones stunk. I was just riding over my head to stay with anybody because of the way the bike was. How much did injuries affect you last year? Marcello (del Guidice) took me out at Charlotte and I broke my pelvis. It only affected me for that race. I was able to race at the next race, which I think was Wisconsin, and I won that one. Do you think being able to recuperate so fas.t has anything to do with all the training you do? Yeah, it really does. I heal very fast because I'm in top physical condition pretty much all the time. And when I do get injured I focus on heaTing. During the season I ride my bicycle about 300 miles a week. In the winter it's around 200, but when it's frigid like this I ride mostly inside. It's at least two hours a day and I work out in the moming. My rides encompass lunch and it's workrelated, but our work isn't nine-ta-five. I get there at seven in the morning and I was there until after seven tonight and that's standard. You work as a mechanical engineer at Cannondale, designing bicycles. Yes, I didn't go to school for that. I went to school to be an aircraft mechanic. I have my A&P (Air and Powerplant) license. But, basically, I'm an engineer. With computers the way they are now, I don't need to know all the math. My title at work is advanced concept engineer. So I just work on wild things and develop them. The latest bike is called the Super-V. It's a suspension mountain bike and it's definitely the hottest bike on the market. We just started producing it two weeks ago. And what input did you have in that? It's mine from the ground up. More development is going on with mountain bikes. There's a lot of room for improvement, especially with the suspension. So even though the Super-Vis done now and it's in production, I'm already working on the 1995 model. It's going to be radically different. Always radically different. What sort of constraints do you work under? I try to keep in mind the model year and just work with that in mind. There are other aspects of my job, watching after projects that are already in production that I worked on and updating those. Like this 5uper-V is a '93 model, but it's being carried over to '94 also, so we'll do some updates on it. How much does that retail for? $3300. Did riding bicycles get you interested in motorcycles? No, I don't think so. I just went to a motorcycle race and saw it. It was a WERA race at Loudon. One of those enduranc.e.races, a six-hour one in 1985. I owned a 500 Interceptor then and it was the first bike I raced. It was an AAMRR race at Loudon. I finished seeond there. I raced with my younger , brother Gary and we used to clean up. We got one-two in just about every race we did. We tried 250s together in 1987, Honda RS25Os, I was working on both of them and he just got beat up on them. Actually we had a pretty good year. I got 12th overall in the AMA 250 championship on a year-old bike. And Gary just got worn out. He quit about two years ago. When did you first start to get noticed? In 1989. That was my first year on the new bike. I was on a new Yamaha and I had Kurt Kiyota helping me tune the bike. And I didn't know anything. We didn't know anything. I didn't learn that I had to change things until the year after when I started working with Dave Harold. And working with Cannondale since 1984, weren't you able to translate that knowledge to motorcycles? At that early stage, suspension on mountain bikes wasn't that important. Actually, we had the first production rear suspension bicycle, a good one. Unlike a lot of the cosmetic suspension bicycles. This one actually works. It all started there and that was my original design also. I have a ton of patents, pretty much everything that has a chance to get a patent for, we get a patent. Both U.s. and European. In your first year with Dave Harold, was he sponsoring you? No, no. I paid him. I paid him a lot. I spent so much money. Last year (1992) was the first year I didn't pay to do it. 1990 and 1991 were the two most expensive years for me. I had some product sponsors. No one's ever given me cash. I had Dunlop for tires and stuff like that. But I paid for all the plane fares. I couldn't drive much; I had to fly back and forth and a lot of times Dave was flying back and forth, too. And the bikes were moving with whoever could drive them. We tried hard to look for sponsorship and that costs a lot too. Since joining Southwest Motorsports what's changed? Are your expenses being paid?

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