Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/127604
eRACER TEST Kevin Schwanlz's Suzuki RGV500 ~ By Alan Cathcart Photos b y Emilio Jimenez ell, he d id it . After six lon g years of eve n tfu l p u rsuit of Grand Prix raci ng's ult ima te honor, Kevin Schwantz has finally won the 500cc World Championship, a title that many of his numerous fan s were beginning to qu estion would ever be his. A decade after Suzuki last won the 500cc crown, with Franco Uncini back in 1982, the Japanese facto ry's small-but- . dedicated race department, fronted by former works Suzuki GP rider Mitsuo Itoh, has defea ted th eir Honda and Yamaha rivals to win road racing 's most glittering prize. They did so with the lates t XR79 version of their twin-crankshaft, crankcase reed-valve V-four racer, theRGV500. As the chance to ride the Suzuki at . one of the team 's end-of-season sessions' at Jerez in Spain proved, the bike that took Schwantz to four GP wins and the title in 1993 (and teammate Alex Barros to his first-ever GP victory, after two close misses earlier in his debut season with the Lucky Strike Suzuki team) is a reco gn izable d evelopment of its 1992 XR78 predecessor, which I rode just one yea r ago at the Suzuki test track at Ryu yu . It is perhaps closer to its fore runner than any previous Suzuk i works 500 has be en, since the factory announced its return to racing at the W 14 end of 1986 by unveiling the first of its V-fou r racers, the XR71, at the final GP of the year at Misano. Evolution, not re volution, made Schwa nt z World Champion atlast. Though he's much too modest to admit it, the key to Kevin's crown was Suzuki' s recru itment of Stuart Shenton as race enginee r at the start of the 1993 season. A former Kawasaki (during th e Ballin gton/ Hansford era) and Honda GP technician, who had worked wi th HRC ever s ince the Fredd ie Spencer d ouble 250/5OOcc World Championship season of 1985, Shenton underst ood the value of linear development of an existing design, rather than making sweeping changes from one year to the next, often without any sid e-by -side or back-toback comparison. This wa s, frankly, Suzuk i's modus operandi: decide at the end of the season what im p rovements sho u ld be wrought on the bike for the follow ing 'year, de sign a new bike around them, incorpo rati ng the latest and g reatest . from their component suppliers, and hope to get it finished in time for testing at least a mon th befor e the firs t GP of th e se ason - in those da ys on home grou nd in Japan. The fact that, more often than not, Schwa ntz succeeded in inflictin g maximum embarrassment on Suzuki's bitter Honda rivals, by defeating the might of their factory team on their home ground at Suzuka, disguised the fact that this wa sn't the ideal way to go about things as Schwantz more than anyone came to realize. The Texan especially wanted to do more off-season testing, to try to keep up momentum and evaluate various modifications in terms of a direct comparison w ith what was on the b ike alread y, rather than throwing new stuff at it and hoping it would all work. This completely mirrored Shenton's own empirical philosophy and , to their cred it, Suzuki's engineers went along with it and chang ed their dev elopment policy accordingly. The 1992/93 off-season was Shenton's first at Suzuki and it was a very different winter's work from wh at had gone on before, as he recalled for me in the Spanish sunshine at Jerez. "We started our winter test program just two weeks after the final GP of the '92 season at Kyalami," Shenton said . "And ran it right throu gh up to tw o weeks before the opening '93 round in Australia. Suzuki engineers told us it was the most comprehensive off-season test sched ule the company had ever undertaken, and we did a lot of work in four main areas: power delivery, grip , the balance of the bike, and suspension - Kayaba did a huge amount of work with us, too. The result is that we started the season much better prepared than before, which allowed us to take the initiative and make the others worry about keeping up with us. But the reason we could do this is because we built on the strengths of last year's bike, and produced an improved version of it, rather than throwing it away and starting again with a clean piece of paper. For example, the chassis we started the season with was almost identical to the '92 bike, and the only update we had all season was a new one for Jerez which was the same as before, but had a greater range of adjustment. " Evolution, not revolution...