Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

IIII In The Paddoc k BY MICHAEL SCOTT onda has dominated SOOcc Grand Prix racing for so long now tha t some people in the paddock can't remember it any other way. For more than five years, the Honda NSRSOO was the bike (and had the riders) to beat, and for the same length of time the accomplishment of this goal was so rare that any non-Honda GP win was a jubilee even t. Things might be set to change in 1999. Years of domination have offered HRC's engineers a dangerous Valhalla of complacency. And this year, Max Biaggi is riding a Yamaha. Both statements offer a wealth of implications - the most prominent being, perhaps, that for the first time since its catastrophic loss of Wayne Rainey in 1993, Yamaha has been able to a ttract a gen'u ine winning rider to take his chances along wi th the crossed tunli,g forks. This follows years of a migration of talent to Honda. Since Mick Doohan's factory bike was so obviously the best thing out there, every rider worth his mettle wanted one, to show' what he could do on it. All this proved, during Doohan's unbroken reign, is that nobody is a patch on him as a rider. And Doohan himself, though coming close to switching to Yamaha for 1996, has in the end remained a steadfast Honda man. Thus, in 1998, there were seven Hondas out there, attracting the cream of the riders, leaving their would-be rivals Yamaha, Suzuki, Modenas and MuZ sucking on the hind teat even before the start of the season. The defection of Biaggi, however, as well as Carlos Checa for 1999, has changed the balance of power - and left the Honda army looking rather tattered. There's nothing wrong with Mick Doohan, of cour e; but it gets harder each year to take Alex Criville seriously; Alex Barros is a long shot at best; H Tadayuki Okada is long in the tooth; and John Kpcinski (who will probably take Biaggi's place with Team Kanemoto) has been a dark horse for so long now that it's often quite hard to see him at all. Yamaha, on the other hand, backs Biaggi and Checa with two other previous GP winners - Simon Crafar and orick Abe - while Suzuki (whose own hoped-for post-5chwantz revival is proceeding a year or so behind Yamaha's) field two hungry riders, with Kenny Roberts Jr. joining Nobuatsu Aoki on an upgraded bike. Modenas has regained Jean-Michel Bayle, who might be joined by World and AMA Superbike ne'er-do-well was firmly rejected by Doohan, if not all the others. And to be fair, why did they need do more than fiddle? Their engine was not only reliable and serviceable, it also won race after race after race. The century was locked up by mid-'98. But by then, the cracks were showing. It was the unleaded gas that demonstrated how far HRC had sunk back on their heels. For complex chemical and metallurgical reasons, the loss of lead hit the V-fours' long crankshafts hard. Dooha n' s broke in the first race in japan, and thereafter, service life was slashed from 925 miles to 300 or less. This obviously tripled demand for the pressed-up units, the longest in racing, Mike Hale (is this the world's first rhyming rider lineup?), willie MuZ has none other than 125 and 2S0cc multimamp and SODcc GP multi-winner Luca Cadalora alongside Dutchman jurgen van den Goorbergh on its upgraded team. The charge of complacency is twofold. Firstly, technical: Honda, having developed and perfected Big Bang technology married to an engine of enviable power pedigree, has done little more than fiddle with the package since 1992. Their fuel-injection program was a failure, while most of the electronic enginemanagement trickery they also tried and notoriously wand-like and difficult (and expensive) to make with the required degree of accuracy. And with seven bikes to keep supplied, HRC spent the full season with design and development ideas cast aside, and all hands to the pump to keep up with demand. How they recover from this will be important: Early news is of yet another revised firing order, intended to serve all their riders - in 199 , Doohan rode a 180-degree "Screamer," with the rest of the pack on Big Bangers, timed at around 70 degrees. But Honda isn't likely to fall short in the engine department; their weakness comes from with- 30 YEARS AGO... FEBRUARY 4, 1969 ick Smothers, the "smarter half" of the comedic Smothers Brothers, was captured on our cover as he tested out a new Montesa street scrambler. On page 11, Smothers could be seen riding with a few of his buddie - guys like Parnelli jones, Dan Gurney and Swede Savage. Smothers was described as a conservative but skilled rider... Motorcycle theft was, as always, a huge problem, and we ran a story on how you could best protect yourself in the event that you did lose a motorcycle. Proper-ownership papers were essential in retreivi ng a recovered bike that may have had its frame and engine numbers altered... In our test of the Ossa 250 motocrosser, we found tha t the bike was' "built for serious motocross" ... Mark Brelsford was named Motorcycle Rider of the Year at the Motor Sports Press Association's annual awards dinner in San Francisco. D 60 20 YEARS AGO... JANUARY 31, 1979 n item in The A Latest Poop informed riders of the potential dangers of riding at the Clear Creek ORV area in orthern California due to the asbe tos content that had been found in the dust. Riders were being warned to ride the area only with respirator masks or to consult their physicians... Jeff Ward (Kaw), Danny "Magoo" Chandler (Mal) and Danny LaPorte ( uz) were the. big winners during the third round of the CMC/Suzuki Golden State MX Series at Indian Dunes. Wardy went 2-2 for the 12Scc win, while Magoo was able to eke out the 2S0cc win with 4-2 scores. LaPorte went 2-1 to win in his first race aboard Suzuki's new RN420 works machine... Our riding impression of the Yoshimura Suzuki GSI000 superbike was punctua ted by the revela tion tha t although the . bike made a brutish.130 horsepower, it was very ridable... We interviewed California's Canadian MX Champion, Jim Turner... Our Championship Enduro riding-tips feature was continued in this issue. This time the subject was Timekeeping to Win. out. For the other aspect of complacency is the effect it has on your rivals. It would be kind to say that either Yamaha or Suzuki was galvanized into action, for it has all ha ppened rather more slowly. Yet each has come through similar difficult circumstances, including injury and loss of sponsorship, and their resolve has remained unbroken: to oust, by steady technical development, the dominant giant and regain their former glory. Yamaha is one step ahead. Last year's bike was already a major improvement, and they have promised to sustain development for the 1999 machine. They also have five riders, ensuring a lively feedback of ideas from all sources. Suzuki still has only two riders, but has also unobtrusively improved its position. Last year its bike lacked nothing in top speed, but tricky handling frightened off Cadalora and restrained .regular rider Aoki from achieving the confidence he needed to ride aggres~ sively. This year, in addition to gaining Roberts as a rider, Suzuki has added Warren Willing, a veteran engineer with fhe task of sol ving the chassiS problems so that Suzuki can exploit its strong engine to better effect. All the signs are there; the tide could be turning. Or it could have already turned. And while Honda might keep on winning as long as it has Doohan on board, that time limit is. clearly drawing near. And when he does go - most probably at the end of this year - it will be Honda's turn to suffer its post-giant shock, as Yamaha and Suzuki have done before. If Honda is to clear that hurdle successfully, it will need more than a tattered army of leftover riders and an obsolescent motorcycle with a fragile crankshaft to see them over. eN 10 YEARS AGO... JANUARY 25, 1989 I n our s,upercross preview is'sue, we in~ewed twotime AMA Supercross Champion Rick Johnson, who felt confident that he could capture the supercross crown for a third straight year... Our actual supercross series preview feature told you who would be riding for whom, whim stadiums you could expect the series to visit and what steps the sport in general was taking in its journey toward acceptance as big-league motor racing ... Dan Ingram won round five of the AMA lnvita tional Indoor Pro Ice Race Series in Peoria, Illinois. Garth Brow ~Hon) won. round four in Danville, illinois, just one night before that ... Dan Smith (KTM) won the Gold Strike VI Hare & Hound in Jean, Nevada, while Dale Knapp won the 250cc class on a Husqvarna, the Swedish brand seeing noticeably fewer desert wins since Smith's departure from the fa.ctory team... A 37year-old Kenny Roberts hosted a birthday bash/junk stockcar race on his ranch property, inviting his friends Eddie Lawson, Wayne Rainey and Bubba Shobert. Of course, King Kenny took the win. CII I

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