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No, the bike would push all the way up to the rev limiter, so that even if it would have revved that high, it probably wouldn't have fallen off at 15,000, it was so torquey. Suzuki had the rev limiter set at 14,300, which is what they felt comfortable with from a reliability standpoint - but that meant there were places last year where we'd be shifting twice between corners, and the Honda and Yamaha would be shifting once. That would really kill us, because we'd be using the torque in the corner, but having to shift twice out of it, then backshift twice again going into the next corner, when the others are just coming back once. Or at Sepang, for example, out of the hairpin to the next corner you'd have to shift once, then back again, when the others just revved them out without shifting. That's a big deal for the rider, because if you have 28 laps then it's 56 more gearshifts just at that point alone, up and down, and quite apart from the extra strain on the transmission and the rider, all the time you're shifting gear you're not going anywhere. If our torque range is that short, it's a lot harder for us. Often, you're held hostage by the nature of the circuit we could run as low as 8000 in a hairpin, but we had to run a tighter gearbox than anyone else, with more closed-up ratios, because we didn't have the rpm range. We have the down-low - but so does everyone else, so if everybody's got the down-low, whoever's got the extra 1500 rpm up high, that's going to make a huge difference on the racetrack, if you're all starting from the same place. Okay, so the bike was short of revs and over-torquey. But how about the slipper clutch that you had so much apparent trouble with downshifting through the gearbox using lots of engine braking? The biggest thing about the clutch was that it didn't allow you just to concentrate just on the riding part of it. When you start to use the clutch, it's difficult to feel, and it's hard to ride that way - so the easiest thing was just not to mess with it. They've got automatic kickers and suchlike on the bike to kick it into gear and blip the throttle for you, which again takes some of your riding away from what the bike's wanting to do, and that makes it hard. So we just had to balance stuff until we got the new engine, which would resolve all this. So the reason you don't use the clutch on the downshift is not because you're trying to ride the bike like a two-stroke, but because the clutch itself and the engine characteristics weren't userfriendly enough? Yes. I never wanted to have arm surgery to fix my arm pump-up, because on the 500 it was never a problem. But on the four-stroke you're coming down from sixth gear to first gear at the end of the pit straight at Sepang, and you're having to blip the throttle between each downshift, and doing that five times a lap for 28 laps is going to tax anyone's arm. That's something John (Hopkins) noticed right away, and he's used to racing fourstrokes very recently. It's difficult to comprehend having to do that, but it's something I had to do, because I'm racing the bike at its ultimate lap time, and that was the way to do it, to blip the throttle. We just never got what we needed to from the (slipper) clutch to get it to work the way we needed it to, even if it was quite a bit better when they went to the new ramp-type design after EstoriL With the problems you've had with engine braking, when the bike starts fishtailing into turns, does that actually help you steer into the turn? No, it actually affects your momentum, because once the bike is out of line, the only thing it wants to do is go straight, so what you want to do is try and get it back in line, and if you decrease the brake pressure a bit, you're losing that much braking force, so you needed to brake earlier. I haven't figured a way to use the back brake with any success on the four-stroke, because you're trying so hard to make it stay in line. I use it when I can, or to keep the rear end down, but there's not a lot of point in it until I can get the clutch working properly. Okay, so much for the GSV-R's engine last year. How about the chassis? Originally the idea was simply to transplant your RGV500 twostroke chassis, which made it one of the betterhandling bikes on the grid. Was that the way it ended up? And was it the right decision? II: U Well, I think they did achieve that, with the size and the weight and the dimensions and the stiffness and all that. One of the things I questioned about that was that the chassis on these four-strokes is not the same as it is on a two-stroke, where the engine just kinda sits in the frame. On these bikes the chassis is more sort of built around the engine, which is like the main event in making the motorcycle. It's actually part of the chassis much more than on the others, which means that when it's making power and running hotter and maybe flexing more because it's heavier and more powerful, there are more variables in there. I think Suzuki achieved what they set out to do with last year's bike, but that was just to start us up and get to first base. At Sepang in November we tested a new chassis, which seemed to give it some benefits and was based upon some other things, so I think they achieved what they wanted to in the beginning, with the bike being small and pretty quick to steer. But we need to improve on that and make it more of a racebike rather than a prototype. Was the decision to use the RGV500 chassis time-related, after Suzuki decided so late to actually go racing in MotoGP last season, rather than spend the year testing like Kawasaki did? We all realized the spotlight was going to shine on us in this way, doing our development in the public gaze while we tried to get down to a decent lap time and get some results. But it's something I enjoy, and I never wished for a moment I could have had the twostroke out there. I know if I'd jumped right on one of the other bikes, I could have been competitive, but both me and Sete realized we had to be patient and work on the future. We did a lot of stuff that first year by actually going racing, more than we would have done if we'd just gone testing. It meant we changed a lot more things than we would have liked to have changed at race weekends, but in the last three or four races, we really got a handle on what we needed to change and what really made the bike respond, which meant we saw a clearer path where we needed to go with the new bike for next season. We were still messing around with stuff like moving the swingarm pivot and suchlike, but the better we can make the base, the faster we can get away from that kind of stuff, and the more consistent the bike should be. Your confidence in Suzuki getting it right was such that you rejected reputed offers to switch to riding a Honda or a Yamaha in 2003, in favor of signing a new two-year contract with Suzuki. Was that a tough decision? I'm confident in the concept, and I'm confident that what they keep telling me they're doing will come right. Suzuki have invested a huge amount of work in this bike, and they've worked very fast to make the GSV-R work pretty well even though it's so new and more than one year behind Honda and Yamaha in development. The two-stroke was kind of II: I e n e _ os • FEBRUARY 19, 2003 29