Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

eTEST e A riliaAFI250V Aprilia became a serious threat in the 250cc World Championship in 1992, winning six of the 13 Grands Prix and twice making a clean sweep of the winner's rostrum. By Alan Cathcart Photos by Patrick Gosling n the 1991 Grand Prix road race season, after six years' quixotic attempts to defeat the might of Japan in the red-hot 250cc GP class, Italy's Aprilia finally came good. By winning two GPs against the fleet of factory NSR250 Hondas, Aprilia showed they were knocking on the door of GP supremacy. In 1992, though, they simply kicked the door down, winning six of the 13 GP races held last season, and twice making a clean sweep of the rostrum positions, in Germany and South Africa. If not for the combined talents of Luca Cadalora and Erv Kanemoto, Honda would have been blown away by the Italian onslaught, all the more notable for the fact that their three factory-backed riders - Loris Reggiani, Frankie Chili and newcomer Max Biaggi - all tasted victory at least once in the season. And even Cadalora only won his second successive 250cc World Championship title thanks to the early points lead he racked up in the first three races, all held outside Europe, while Reggiani recovered from a winter testing injury, Chili got himself cranked up to win races, and Biaggi got used to GP-dass competition. By dint of finishing on the rostrum in every successive race - something Cadalora failed to do in three such GPs - Loris scored more points than Luca from Spain onwards,. en route to a convincing runner-up slot in the championship table - the highest I 32 position an Aprilia rider has ever finished in. With Chili third, Biaggi fifth, and Alberto Puig sixth on a semi-works bike, it's not surprising that Aprilia came within a whisker of snatching Honda's coveted manufacturer's title away from the Japanese factory, only failing to do so by the slimmest of margins. Losing that title would have really men responsible for Aprilia's steady but irresistible climb to the top of the 250cc GP tree, have chosen their men well, . and given them direction mixed with enthusiasm, dedication with brio, in a successful blend of Nordic and Latin temperaments epitomized by the two men themselves. Riding Reggiani's and Chili's 1992 put HRC's corporate nose out of joint! As it is, nobody except Cadalora managed to defeat the entire Aprilia team all season after the first two races. The fact that 1992 was the debut season for Honda's all-new NSR250 perhaps had something to do with this, but much more of a factor is the steady process of refinement of the twin-erankshaft, rotary-valve Aprilia wrought by the factory development team headed by Dutchman Jan Witteveen. Numbering just 38 men in total, Aprilia's inhouse racing department is tiny by Japanese standards, but incredibly focused and motivated: Witteveen and team manager Carlo Pernat, the GP mounts on an initially wet, then later drying Mugello track in Italy at season's end, underlined the pragmatic approach to GP development the 250 Aprilias represent. Because the Italian bikes don't sport some of the electronic hardware their Japanese rivals do, because they use a supposedly unfashionable rotaryvalve engine design, and because they look unprobably beautiful to be so totally effective, the Aprilias delude some observers into dimissing them as relatively low-tech bits of hardware that are only successful because of their rotaryvalve motor's traditional tum of speed, coupled with the brilliance of their riders in making up for associated deficien- cies, like lack of midrange and a sudden power delivery. Look - the ellipticalchoke 39mm flat-slide Dell'Ortos don't even have a powerjet, and they use pneumatic powervalves, rather than an electronically-controlled design. How low-rent... Wrong! A 250cc GP engine which comes on strong at under 7000 rpm like the Aprilia does, hits strong power at 8000 rpm but without the sort of step in the powerband that will unhook the back wheel, especially on a slippery surface like I was riding on, has such ferocious engine acceleration between 1113,000 rpm when the British-made Scitsu revcounter's needle scuds round the dial faster than the eye can keep up, and yet runs cleanly to 14,000 rpm if you really insist (and Chili's bike was undergeared for Mugello's long straight, so I did!) without substantial power droIHlff, is the stuff GP-winning dreams are made of - dreams that came true for Loris 'n' Frankie 'n' Max six times last season. An engine moreover that was fleXlble enough to take the first three places at slow, twisty Kyalami - yet earlier in the year was powerful enough at the top end to blitz the Japanese teams in the Hockenheim speed stakes. Though Aprilia coyly admits to "over 84 bhp at 12,500 rpm" in their published spec sheet, Witteveen is justifiably proud enough of his achievement in breaking the 90 bhp barrier to admit that's how much the engine really delivers - at the gearbox - at U,800 rpm.

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