Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

Cycle News 1994 04 06

Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles

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·'i·IN ER rE../.;: Smokin' Joe's Racing team owner Martin Adams T .... Y V . ;' ut1 . .' , ' .. ' By Dean Adams Photos by Henny Ray Abrams artin Ad ams began his asso ciation wi th co ntemporary ro ad racing in the late 19805w hen he convinced Ray Plumb at American Honda to allow him to bu y an RS750engine for a Twins bike he was building. That motorc ycle, run under the Commonwealth Honda banner, eventu all y wo n th e Pro Tw in s Championship with Randy Ren frow a t the control s. A land specula tor fro m Kentucky, Adams is a man with a lifetime of motorspo rts enthusiasm a nd sp ectating under his belt. A voracious reader with the vocabulary to match, Ad am s has a degree in journalism and political science . He was drawn to the rom anticism and rawness of racing and soon de sired more than just Pro Twins class racing. With minimal support from American Honda, Adams fulfill ed hi s dream of go ing superbike racing. From tha t less-thanauspicious start, Adams has plowed the many su ccesses and heart-breaking failur es into what is now the Smokin' Joe's Honda road racing team . It doesn 't take much of a memory to recall that only a few seasons ago the team's motorcycles and other equipment wer e housed and transported across country in a box van driven by An n Plumb. The increase in the size an d success of the team is evid ent b y the size of the t ransporter th ree or four of those box vans would easily fit within the walls of the current semi. A ll of this is a d irect result of Adam 's ha rd wo rk an d tireless d rive and he loves every bit of it. His motivation to go raci ng and to w in is p u r e - he ' s n o t her e to se ll exhaust pi pes or ge ne ra te income for hims elf. In fact, fun ds generated by the team are plowed back into the effort or into personnel. But all this comes with a higher personal p rice tag when the team is not as successful as he wo ul d like. With that thought in mind, we sat down a week or so after the Daytona 200 for a question and answer sessi on wi th th e man behind Smokin ' Joe's Racing. Tell me about the1994 Daytona experience for Martin Adams. I don't know anybody who has worked an y harder than myself to put together the program that we turned up with at Daytona, and our sponsors and our crew worked harder than they ever have before. Everybody has truly broken their tail to put this thing together. We virtually have an all-new team in every d imension: new colors, a new sponsorship p rogram by the Camel brand instead of Sports Marketing, new bikes, and two out of the three riders are new. I added additional personnel to the team and negotiated ever so many more contracts... I don't know that I've ever worked any harder than for the buildup of this season. However, that's been complemented by the fact that Gary Mathers (from American Honda) has assisted to a great extent this year, and that's going to be a long-range plus for the team I'm convinced . Ra y Plumb - to say something positive about Ray Plumb he 's once again the fireman who puts out the fires after we send out the dispatch call. He certainly rose to the occasion again th is year and arranged all sorts of details - not only building the motorcycl e, but clothing all the crew and painting trucks, etc. So without question, he is one of the best organizers and most motivated people I've ever met in racing. Frankly, I probably ow e " : .:' him a debt of gratitude bigger. tha n any body, As for our Daytona experience, again I'm very ple ased with the cosmetics and th e en tire promotion built around our race team . I was also pleased to see that our team succeeded for the third time in four years on the 600 - which is without qu es tion th e most outstand ing b ike American Honda has ever sold, and perhaps that Honda has ever designed. The superbike, on the other hand - I gu ess we had hoped for more. We had twice as long as it would on a more conve n tio nal motorcycle, that definitely hinders your performance envelope for th a t week end. You're spending more time doing the routine simply because of servicea bility. That's the nature of the V-four RC3 0 and the V-Iour RC45 . Ducati faced tha t problem back in 1989 their first-generation 851s were not terribly well sussed as far as packaging and user fr iendliness. They seem to have organized th at ve ry w ell, now, and elim ination and simplicity seems to be hoped that it would be better tested and more re fined, and be in a position of (having) more capabilities in more areas than, in fact, it was. But there is an old cliche in racing: For success tomorrow, the price is often today. Perhaps that's what it is - our courtship for today is going to payoff tomorrow. I can only hope so. The bike is full of new techn ology. I think, not being an engineer - one must qualify whatever I say by my lack of credentials - and this is merely an opinion based upon years of exposure to different racing environments, from cars to motorcycles, etc., the RC45 is still a very d ifficult-to-service- motorbike. At races, time is at a premium. When you have a task on a race weekend that demands routine serviceability and the task takes the key. In racing, whenever possible, one of the key adjuncts should be simplifying, and that is perhaps the one failing in our design. On the other hand, you open the hood on any modem automobile and you look at the complexity that is within...and see how reliable and how vastly im p rove d the performance sphere of new automobiles (is), and you can only tell yourself that is the future. But for one that has been weaned on the past, staring the future in the eye is a fairly frightening and bewildering prospect. Our rid ers did an outstanding job. Mike Smith again proved himself to be the master of Daytona when riding our Supersport bike. Smith seemed to be much more relaxed and more focused; more confident even when he was d is- appointed with some of the initial setup bugs in the bike. He seemed to stay up-beat, and left the race with something in his pocket. I know that Mike Hal e had hoped for better, but he did outstanding. To run as high as third in the Supersport race and finish sixth in his first real outing with our team is simply marvelous. It bodes very well for his future. We have a twoyear contract with Hale and that is the future. I'm confident he is going to get better, but get better at a pace that he d ictate s. As for Kevin Magee, Kevin suffered from some sort of cartilage problem while stretching in our garage, and it certainly crimped up his knee. By his own ad mission, his leg was only good for about 30 p ercent of its normal strength. He literally had to be assisted from the motorcycle at the red flag, and it (th e inj u ry) is probably going to d emand som e sort of orthoscopic surgery to get that straigh tened out. The opportunity for that probably won 't rear its head until post-Pomona (April 10), so that doesn't do his physical situation any good. But Kevin is also a very intellectual fellow and has been around rae. ing a long time - he knows that the champ ionship will be w on in the last race of the season, not the first race of the season. So the important thing now is to sort (ou t th e problems wi th) the bike and finish races and work towards getting a race setup. If there is anybody capable of doing that, it is Kevin Magee. Would you say that you are frustrated wi th th e RC45 and its lack of distinct, dominating capabilities? I'm not frustrated in the prep aration. I'd say specification is where I'm frus trated wi th it. At this point it is a competen t su perbike, bu t it will have to be dev eloped into an outstanding superbike, I guess w hat we had hoped for is something tha t was beyo nd compe tent and into the realm of outstanding in some area. At the moment there is no area of ou tstand ing ability. That's something tha t is p retty u nus ual to find - a race machine that begins w ith competenc y. Perhaps I've fooled myself on this sort of thing, believing that we would hav e a totally refi ned package. I gu ess that's because of the long gestation period that the RC45 has been involved in - I believe we 're talking about something like three years here. (For it) to be capable of running as well as our RC30, virtually as well as ou r RC30right now, I guess bodes well for the future. But, again, being human, naturally we had hoped that some portion of the new bike's overall envelope - power, handling, general characteristics of braking - would be dramatically su p erior to anything we've experienced in the past. There is nothing dramatically superior, but at the same time there is nothing dramatically inferior, either. It simply comes down to a case of development and logging enough data and experience to maximize what's there, and to learning what's there to plumb. At Daytona you commented that the difference between Doug Polen's bike and your machines was negligible, and that any performance advantage he had was because of his experience in riding the bike in pre-season testing. Would you expand on that? First, they (HRC) had far greater knowledge - some of which they shared with us - of solving the problems. Also, they have a computer on board the bike that would help them determine a setup a lot sooner than we have. That is also complemented by the fact that Doug Polen has done three previous tests on the bike and we had done none. Doug's bike had something like a two horse-

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