Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

Carl Fogarty busy doing their own thing for the race, and I was just hanging around like a spare part - what used to be all mine, so to speak, I was now just a hanger-on at. So that was when I really started hoping the Petronas deal would come off, because I just couldn't not do anything anymore except smile at people and sign autographs. So I thought the first person I had to ring was David - if I don't ring him first, he's going to be mad at me anywayl It was such a hard call to make. I'd rehearsed everything in my mind what 1 was going to say, but I still couldn't bring it all out right - I reckon I was more upset than anyone about what I had to tell him. But he was absolutely fantastic. He said, "Yes - it's a good idea, I can see you don't like what you're doing, I understand you need to be involved in something serious - you must do this." I said, "Do you think there'll be a problem about it with the bosses at Ducati?" And he said, "No - I'm sure not. Leave it to me, and I'll sort everything else out for you." So he did - I never had to call anyone else. People at Ducati from the very top downwards have been really great about this. The main bosses were upset at first, but they understand. They don't want to stop me from doing something that's such a great opportunity, even if I had a three-year contract they'd offered me to try to soften the blow of having to stop racing before I was due to. They made it all really easy - so after clearing things with them, it was on with it all, really. I regret that things leaked out in dribs and drabs, rather than making a big formal announcement, because what's happened now is that there's been a lot of misinformation and rumors printed about Sauber, about Harris, about this and that, which were all just plain wrong so that's one reason J'm talking here to you now, to try to set it all down right what's really happening. So how's it all structured? Who owns what? Q A The bike is called the Foggy Petronas FPl, which is manufactured by Petronas themselves - I've no shares in that. It's them that's commissioned the development and manufacture of the street bikes from an outside company, MSX. My company is Team Foggy Racing, which is completely independent, without any Petronas shareholding, but with an exclusive five-year contract to race the FPl Supel1:5lk'e, which we're also responsible for establishing the technical basis of, and developing. Petronas will be our principal sponsors - they have 40 percent of the surface area of the bodywork assigned to them, though we are free to sign up other non-conflicting sponsors if we wish, and we've already cut deals with a variety of trade sponsors, though not as yet with anyone outside the industry. WhY did you decide you had to go from zero to the Laguna 5eca starting grid in six months? Why not give yourselves the whole of 2002 to develop the bike and get it ready for a full season in 2003? Believe it or not, the original idea was to race here at Valencial We thought this bike was ready to race, to be honest - stick lights and a starter on it for the street, and go racing with it in sleeved-down 900cc form. Two hundred and thirty horsepower on tap - and we're away! But then, when we got down to it properly, we started to realize the size of the task - the GPI thing Harris had built for them was completely undeveloped, and pretty unattractive looking, at that. It looked like a five-year-old GSX-R Suzuki with a big, ugly pipe down the side. At that point, we realized we had to begin again from scratch, so in December we started over again - about the only thing the FP-l will Q Q A n e _ Q You'1I see for yourself in May when we launch the racer and start testing with it - but it has a 12-valve, wet-sump, 900cc, three-cylinder, in-line motor, with double overhead cams and gear camshaft drive on the racer, but probably a mixture of chain and gear on the streetbike, for noise reasons. The cylinder head is reversed, so the inlet faces forward with an airbox behind the steering head, and we're using conventional valve springs, not pneumatic valves which Sauber themselves discarded on the Mark Two version of their own motor - you don't need them for the engine speeds we're going to be running in Superbike, about 14,000 rpm maximum instead of 16,000 rpm on Aprilia's Cosworth-designed 990 GPI triple. Gearbox is fully extractable for quick internal ratio changes, and we're using Marelli fuel injection, which we know works properly. The chassis will be an alloy Deltabox type, with Ohlins suspension and Brembo brakes - basically, all good stuff we know works well and has good backup at World Superbike rounds. But why throwaway the Sauber engine, after all the time and money spent on it? Wasn't there any way it could be adapted to Superbike? We had two or three meetings with SPE [Sauber Petronas Engineering], and got into the details of the design which really convinced us it wasn't suitable - it was designed as a Grand Prix engine, not a Superbike motor with street derivation, which means it must have a longer component life and generally be much easier to maintain. Even though Mackenzie rode the bike at Sepang and told everyone how fast it was, it was extremely shortfused, just like any Formula One racing car engine is. There was a pretty short engine life, plus it used very thick Fl-type oil which had to be preheated before you could start the engine - lots of things A 46 MAY 1, 2002' c u e I e have in common with that is it'll be a three-cylinder motor, and that's it. What are the technical details of the bike? A s: like that. That's why we brought in Eskil Suter in January, to re-engineer the motor. Okay - but having realized this, why not give yourselves more time and shoot for 2003? Why aim for Laguna Seca and deprive yourselves of another seven months development time? Because Petronas wanted to go racing as soon as possible. If they'd told us we could test all the way through 2002 and get ready for '03, we'd have heaved a big sigh of relief - but that's not what they want. As it is, we didn't think it was going to be possible to build and homologate the streetbikes in time, until they introduced the firm with the three magic letters, MSX. They're a major multinational contractor to the automotive industry, working for the likes of Ford and Jaguar, with around 14,000 employees all over the world, and their specialty is the development of special projects, including getting the design finalized, setting up production facilities, even building the car or bike and especially getting them homologated. Petronas commissionetl them to take care of developing and building the FPl streetbike, leaving us to concentrate on running the race team. But it's been up to us to determine the fundamentals of the design, and then steer MSX in the right direction so they can reverse-engineer the racer into a homologated streetbike - just the same as Ducati do, or Aprilia. But they'll be responsible not just for creating and homologating the FPl streetbike, but also building the first 75 examples for Superbike approval - they have huge facilities and excellent supplier contacts, so this will be no problem for them. Given that Petronas owns the Proton car company, and that this has a very sophisticated rapid prototyping facility which Nigel Bosworth is already familiar with from his time with Team Roberts, when they helped design the latest version of the Modenas/Proton KR3 twostroke triple, has that been a factor in creating the Foggy-Petronas four-stroke motor? Q A

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