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/128307
Sometimes even the best 'did plans By MICHAEL PHOTOS BY GOLD W dwry The Elf was revolution. ary, but don't tell Ron Haslam that. The Brit • found that leaning the f bl~e over meant that the .ro.nt sWlOgarm would dra IIftlOg the front wheel off t~' ground and causing him to ~rash. SCOTT & GOOSE AND THE CN ARCHIVES ' ve all had one or known one - a bike that was born bad. Maybe the design was wrong. Maybe there were other faults. But it made them hell to livewith. Imagine what it must be like to have to go racing on one , profess ionally . I rounded up a parade of winners and asked them all the same question. What was the worst bike you ever raced? Some of the choices were surprising. But there is a common thread. Many of the machines were pioneering in some way or ~o another. The mistakes came in the unavoidable trial and error in this process. Important lessons were learned . And the riders paid the price. As Wayne Gardner put it: "Honda had been following a design path of a low cen ter of gravity, which was wrong. Unfortunately for me , that time coincided with the peak of my career. If it wasn't for that , there'd have been a lot more race wins and championships." These were bikes that hurt their riders, in one way or another. Without them , however, progress would have been a lot slower. FREDDIE SPENCER 1984 HONDA NSR Freddie Spencer didn't care much for his 1984 Honda NSR500. The bike, with its exhaust pipes running under the engine, d roved to be a handful, an ~ encer lost the 1984 500 cc• ':orld Championship to EddIe Lawson's Yamaha. \. 34 JANUARY 21,2004 • CYCLE NEWS Fast Freddie Spencer won the 1983 500cc World Championship on Honda's light, simple and torque V-three. In 1984 it was replaced by an innovative V-four NSR. The chiefunorthodoxy was that the fueltank was underneath the engine, the exhausts passing over the top under a fake fuel tank. And it was such a handful that Spencer lost the title to Eddie Lawson's Yamaha, in spite of switching back to the triple later in the year. Over the ensuing years, the NSR V-four would be steadily developed to become the definitive SOOcc two-stroke racer. "It wasn't so much evil as unusual," Spencer recalls. "It didn't react as we thought it would. "The whole design with the lower center of gravity kept the bike pretty flat, but stability of the fuel was a problem. The tank was baffled, but it still used to move 40th versa around, and as it burned off it would behave differently. It made the bike very unpredictable. It wasn't on ly fuel moving forward and back, but also vertical as the level went down . "O ne problem seemed to be getting power at altitude . At Daytona it was okay, and seemed okay at Kyalami for the second race, though I crashed in practice. At the Salzburgringit wouldn't even pullsixth gear. It seemed to have a breathing problem at high speeds, as the heat built up with the venting and the way the carbs were positioned. We changed the bodywork some , but even then it wasn't consistent. "It was okay at Daytona [he put it on pole and finishedsecond to KennyRoberts], but after the second fuel stop one of the pipes split, underneath that dummy tank, and I was getting exhaust fumes. At Kyalami the wheel exploded and broke both my feet. So I didn't get off to a good start.