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/128201
Kennv Roberts Jr. By ALAN CATHCART PHOTOS BY GOLD & GOOSE f:\ fter a lackluster final season of 500cc Grand W Prix racing in defense of the World title he so defiantly won in 2000 by defeating the massed ranks of Honda and Yamaha two-wheeled infantry with the sweet-handling but slower RGV500 Suzuki, Kenny Roberts must have been hoping for better things in 2002. For, with the advent of the new MotoGP four-stroke category, very much at the last moment Suzuki elected to equip both him and teammate Sete Gibernau with the Japanese factory's new 990cc GSV-R V4, backed up as an occasional wild-card entry by works tester Akira Ryo. When Ryo led most of the opening race of the season at Suzuka, albeit in a downpour, only to be edged out at the finish by Roberts' successor as World Champion, Valentino Rossi, aboard a V5 Honda that had enjoyed at least a full extra year of development compared to the Suzuki, Kenny must have been quietly optimistic that Suzuki's brave decision to spend a development season doing all its testing in the open by actually going racing with its new bike rather than spending the year in closed circuit R&D testing would indeed payoff. But Roberts and Gibernau found it less easy in succeeding races to bring the new bike into contention on a dry track, especially using the Dunlop tires Suzuki had switched to while all its Honda- and Yamaha-mounted four-stroke rivals remained on Michelins - as did the leading 500cc two-strokes. Reverting to the French rubber helped eliminate one more variable in developing the new bike, even if it 28 FEBRUARY 19, 2003' II: Y II: I e n e was only after midseason that Michelin was able to supply the same top-level tires as the other works teams. However, although constant development saw the GSV-R gradually pick up the pace, Team Suzuki visited the rostrum just once more in 2002, when Roberts finished third in Brazil. While at the end of the season the former World Champion rejected several other offers in favor of signing a two-year contract to stay with Suzuki, his Spanish teammate decamped to a Honda seat for 2003. This led Team Suzuki boss Garry Taylor to invest in the future by replacing him with the brightest young talent on the MotoGP scene, 19-year-old American John Hopkins. Many GP observers registered surprise at Kenny's decision to stay with the team that had helped him earn the world crown just three seasons ago - but in doing so they underestimated the focused determination of this famous son of a famous father. Talking to him during the off-season break underlined the extent of the challenges, and difficulties, Roberts faced last season - and his renewed optimism for the coming year. Kenny, was the GSV-R the first four-stroke you'd ever raced? And did riding it require a big change in technique compared to the RGV500? Yes, I guess it's the first - apart from riding a 750 Yamaha in the Suzuka 8 Hour back in 1983. The biggest obvious difference compared to the two-stroke was everything seemed to be quite a bit harder entering the corner with the clutch, and having to blip the throttle, which is what made me have to get surgery on my right arm in the middle of the season last year to cure the pump-up from that. vv s But out of the corner, the rideability and the aggressiveness is much easier on a four-stroke - you have all that extra power, which is really nice to use! Is it the way in which the power is delivered that's the real bonus, or the extra torque compared to the two-stroke? Well, torque is a dangerous thing, because last season we had too much torque compared to the other bikes, and not enough rpm. That meant we were harder on the tires, and we couldn't use all that torque with the bike laying on its side, which made it harder for us as riders. We're working hard to have less torque for next season, and for the motor to be much more linear. Suzuki could see we had to use so much cut on the engine to handle the torque, we weren't using the motor in the efficiency range whatsoever. There was so much torque below, say, 10,000 rpm, that when you got into a corner you couldn't use it - so we'd take out a lot of that torque via the ignition. That made the bike just kinda plain and bland down there, so you didn't really have any control over the slide. You just have that engine control in there for the linear part of the throttle, so as to be more easy on the rider· instead of fighting it the whole time, sliding and gripping. So when we started introducing that electronic control, the bike became easier to ride, but we still couldn't get the power on as soon as the other guys . and that's an indication we had too much torque, and in the wrong place. Was one solution to this to rev it out all the time, so that you fell off the end of the torque curve and got control that way, at higher rpm? Q