Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

t is not hard to imagine how Olivier Jacque felt last year: 24 years old, France's great hope, winner of three 250cc Grands Prix, and now - with Max Biaggi gone - Honda's top rider. And the world's largest and most successful motorcycle corporation had built him a brand-new, ground-breaking motorcycle. A highly rationalized chassis with a proper double-sided swingarm carried an all-new engine. This could be his year. How dismayed was he when the bike showed up late and in short supply? The handling was, well, okay. But the new motor was, in a word, gutless. Especially next to the flying ApriJias, which had somehow found an even greater turn of speed with the switch to unleaded fuel. Jacque responded like a real racer. Face set grimly, he 'rode the wheels off the thing until, inevitably, he fell off and hurt himself. And with that, his title challenge was over - as was his relationship with Honda. He's switched to the revived Yamaha factory 250cc team for this year. Shuffle the names a bit, move forward 12 months, and put yourself in the boots of Biaggi. Having switched likewise from Honda to Yamaha, and after a couple of reasonably promising runs on an early prototype, he was first beaten by Kenny Roberts Jr. on the hitherto illfavored Suzuki at the Malaysian tests, and then had even more trouble at Jerez, where (in the absence of the' top Hondas) he placed only seventh, behind Alex Barros and John Kocinski on Hondas, Roberts again, Tetsuya Harada on the twin-cylinder Aprilia, Norick Abe and even Jean-Michel Bayle on the Modenas. It was probably Abe's lap time that worried Biaggi most - the Japanese rider (known to be something of a practicelaps slug) rode a 1998 Yamaha, against Max's 1999 prototype. Meanwhile, teammate Carlos Checa, as well as 1998 British Grand Prix winner Simon Crafar, were also struggling with the new bike an ominous sign that perhaps, like Honda's NSR250 last year (and count- Olivie,r Jacque thought his factory Honda would bring hima World Champion· ship in I 30 YEARS AGO... APRIL 15, 1969 1998. It didn't. Now he's switched to Yamaha for the 1999 250cc Grand Prix Series. less other examples), Yamaha's close, season progress has been to develop its motorcycle in order that it may go slower. These are only test times, and racing is rather different, All the same, the stopwatch is the rider's deadly enemy, and being 1.5 seconds off the pace in this mixed company must surely have continued playing on Biaggi's mind even after a rather more reassuring outing later in the week at Barcelona where he and Checa both set very competitive times in cold conditions, and pronounced that they had established a promising .direction of development for the new chassis. It is thus much too early to suggest that Yamaha has developed its bike to make it slower - but it wouldn't be the first time for them, and ,they would be in good tompany. Suzuki has achieved it over the past two years or so of "development" of their ex-Schwantz V-four - a matter that new rider Roberts Jr. is making a good go of putting to rights, showing the importance of having the right guy in the saddle. Obviously. But it's surprising how often the obvious can be overlooked, when engineers who should know a lot better decide that it's time to fix something that ain't broke yet. . eio~1 ~_.~ ad news was plas'" ...,... ,... '.......,_ , ....,,, ... __,ot" W ST 25C r , tered all over the cover of our unlucky issue #13. It seems that a sneaky new federal law had been enacted, with the FROM pUBLIC :. potential to ban ;:;; LAND""" ~ :: motorcycle riding ;; SECRET LA W and racing on any :: COULD ISOLATE :;" public land in the z BIKES IN CONCEN- 'I. United States. We e TRATION SITES ~ told you what was going on and what to do about it... Dan Haaby (H-D) garnered the first Expert win of the season on the Ascot Park half mile. Haaby outran Mert Lawwill (H-D) and Shorty Seabourne (BSA)... Saddleback Park hosted a big-time minibike race, a far cry from the Ponca Cities and Loretta Lynns of the '90s. The average minibike was powered by some variant of a lawnmower engine... We tested the new Husqvarna 360 Sportsman, and brought you a story on the many record runs laid down by BSA at Daytona, making the Rocket 3 the fastest production motorcycle in the world. B ;; M010RC~Cl£S ;;-' : BANNED 1 ~ There are two main culprits. The first is a very understandable and admirable love of engineering adventure. It is in this particular playground that Honda is first in the line for the helter skelter and (somewhat inevitably) where they are often to be found face-down in the sandpit. ' But it's not their wildest excesses such as the magnificen t yet hopeless 23,OOQ-rpm V-four four-stroke NRSOO of the '70s (the V8 Moto Guzzi of its time), nor even the bizarre "upside-down" first NSR of 1985, with its curious underslung fuel tank and horrendous' horsepower, so evil that Freddie Spencer ditched it in favor of the previous year's highly effective triple halfway through the year. The devil is to be (pund in the detail engineering - as when Honda devised an "anti-wheelie" rear suspension, whereby a combination of chain and swingarm angles would lift the rear under acceleration. It also made the rear squat under braking, and the ungainly result threw poor Wayne Gardner into the gravel so often that he might as well have brought his shovel. The second culprit is simply the difficulty of the task, in the sense that any experimental engineer is by definition, at least to some extent, fumbling in the dark. After all, as we have often observed, the science of the dynamics of two wheels is vastly complex, and there are many opportunities for wrong turnings for anyone who wishes to strike a path of'forward progress. Does this suggest that they don't really know what they're doing? I:he inference is wrong. It means they are pushing the boundaries, and venturing into unknown territory. Here there be dragons. Examples are many, from all the manufacturers. Suzuki's fallow period came with a GP racer that was nearly right, but missed by far enough to turn it into an also-ran - their last GP win was in 1994. As one team engineer put it to me privately: "It's like trying to do a jigsaw in the dark, with half the pieces upside down." Their bike was seldom lower than fifth in the speed-trap times last year, and often much higher, but a weakness in the overall package kept Nobuatsu Aoki much lower in the lap times. It will be interesting to see if this year's team, reinforced by Roberts on the saddle and engineer Warren Willing as one of several new faces in the pit, can find the key. Yamaha provided an ,even better example with their super-stiff new chassis of 1992. It fulfilled all engineering requirements ... but was a pig to ride, and Wayne Rainey only got back to winning after switching back to an older and theoretically inferior chassis. But there is no clearer proof than that provided by the switch to unleaded fuel last year. It knocked power output of the 500s by 10 bhp or more and lessened throttle response. The result was faster lap times, since the bikes were now easier to ride, but how we would have laughed at a race engineer who had suggested that the way to better performance was to detune the motor. What wins in racing, I was once told by noted race engin,eer Kel Carruthers a former World Champion who wrenched for Kenny Roberts and Eddie Lawson, among others - is "what won last year, plus a few percent." Or in this case, minus a few percent and who would have guessed that? _ 20 YEARS AGO... APRIL 11,1979 10 YEARS AGO... APRIL 5, 1989 enny Roberts was wearing'· a rather goofy-looking cow- , boy ha t in an inset photo on our cover no doubt to protect himself from the mud being splashed in the main photo by the riders attacking the Great Bear GP. Inside was ari interview with "The King" and coverage of the Great Bear, where Larry Roeseler (Hu ) landed two class wins... Bob Hannah (Yam) and Broc Glover (Yam) won the 250cc and 125cc classes, respectively, at the Saddleback 125/25Occ AMA National MX, an event where the AMA'moved to suspend its claiming rule for motocross machines - at least temporarily... Marland Whaley (Mon) won the two-day V.O.T.E. trial in Texas Canyon, California... They were posing the question way back in '79, as our weekly installment of Championship Enduro debated whether or not it might be prudent to move to a reliabil· ity enduro format for all national enduros. That debate rages 01) today. eff Stanton jumped onto the cover of our '89 edition of issue #13, and we interviewed the fu ture supercross champ on page 12... Phil Tannery (Suz) won the Pro Stock Bike class at the NHRA/Motorcraft Quality Parts Gatornationals at Gainesville Raceway in Gainesville, Florida. Tannery was aboard a Vance & Hines Suzuki tuned by none ' o~heghr than(Kthe)lefinisgenhdedary Byro~ Hines···thTerry Cunnm am aw one pomt be tter an a tno 0 f top riders to claim the overall win at the Cherokee National Enduro in Maxeys, Georgia... Will Davis (HD) dominated the Expert class at the Nashville shorttrack round of the AMA Eastern Regional Championship Dirt Track Series. Chris Carr (H-D) came from the second row to finish second'in the main event. .. Paul Bray and Mike Smith shared the riding duties when Team Suzuki won its second straight WERA national endurance race of the season at the Roebling Road circuit in.Faulkville, Georgia. _ K J to I Ii! III :! • ~ Q . g: ... 83

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