Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

didn't steer, wouldn't go round the corner. It just wanted to run stra ight ahead . "It didn't mailer if you were on or off the gas . Actually it understeered worse with the power on . That year [Eddie] Lawson's Yamaha handled well - he could take good lines and hold the lines. I was trying to get the NSR to do the same, but the more you forced it, the less it wanted to do it. It threw me off the highside plenty of times - just kept throwing me over the top . Honda tried everything to fix it changing crankshaft rotation, using a counterbalance shaft. But it was the engine position that was wrong. ''Apart from the weight being too low, the low engine and drive sprocket also forced the swingarm pivot low, so the swingarm was almost flat, which also meant it got a lot of wheelspin. It was like a dirt-track bike, and the Suzuki was more like a motocrosser on the road. All the bikes now have the swingarm droop at I I or 12 degrees. It wasn't until 1989 that Honda started to get it right. I was parked alongside Suzuki's workshop tent, and Honda took spy photographs of the Suzuki from my motorhome's mirrored windows and measured them up. Their engine was much higher, and the swingarm pivot . When Honda copied that, that's when the NSR started to get better, Then came the Big Bang, and so on . It was just my bad luck that Honda learned those lessons at the peak of my career." JAMES HAYDON FOGGY PETRONAS FPI With all the fanfare it must have seemed like a dream ride for the fast but luckless British racer James Haydon, but the debut season ride on the Foggy FP I triple turned sour and stayed sour. Unreliable and unpredictable, it maintained Haydon 's crash record without his needing to make mistakes of his own. Then he ended the year jobless. "Th e FP I was definitely my least favorite bike," Haydon said. "I never managed to get it set to anything I could ride and feel. I couldn't tell what the bike was doing. And it was forever spilling oil out and going wrong. You expect some of that with a new bike, but it kept on doing it, and it really knocked my confidence. In Germany, I had a problem with a bent gear selector, and it jumped out of gear going into a real fast section. That caused a big accident. The worst was at Monza where three times the engine leaked oil onto the back tire . You wouldn't know. The first time you'd find out was when you tipped it in. And you'd be out of the seat or on your arse . Garry McCay daesn't hesitate when asked what his least favarite racer is: the Kawasaki MataGP bike he raced in last year's series. 38 JANUARY 21 2004 • C YCLE N EWS "It reallywore me down. and Ilost a lot of confidence. Midway through I had problems even getting on it. Me and the bike would be staring at each other across the garage, wondering who was going to hurt who. Once you lose confidence, you need to know that something has been done to improve things, and I never knew that . 50 I never could get my rhythm and get going, and that's how you go fast. Only at the last race I got a new engine. Until then I didn't have the same engine as Troy [Corser), and Icouldn't understand why he was so much faster. I thought it was me . That engine was so much easier to ride. Straight away Iwent two seconds faster, as soon as I went out. And I was using one gear higher on the straight. It was frustrating, but at least that lifted my confodence. I realized why I'd been slower." PAUL SMART1972 KAWASAKI H2R. 1973 SUZUKI TR750 Paul Smart was one of the band of brave big two-stroke pioneers. Those first blindingly fast F750s were so nasty he gets to choose two bad bikes. "I got the jackpot," he said. Based around road bikes but developing IDO-odd horsepower, the Ja pane se machines were hugely more powerful than the Triumph/BSA Triples and Norton twins they faced , but they handled really badly. They also regularly used to seize or find other ways of breaking and always twisted their chassis into knots. And they used to explode back tires, too. Fun! " In 1972 I rode the Kawasaki and in 1973 the Suzuki, mainly in the American national se ries, wh ich was very important at that time," Smart said. "They were both really bad. Although the biggest Single problem was that they used to explode the rear tires - I had three go in one meeting once. There were also reliability problems. And the handling was atrocious. But because they were so fast , you could win races on them. "The H2R's biggest problem was that it was air-cooled, so it would go like hell for two laps then lose such a lot of power and often as not seize. It gave you plenty of warning, luckily. Sometimes it would lock up then free off and rattle to a stop. You'd open it up, and there'd be nothing left in the top end . The pistons would have turned to dust and gone down the exhaust ports. We had to run them really rich to stop them overheating, and then you'd lose all the power advantage. In 1972 I'd be sixth of seventh in the American races, but we actually finished every round, and I was the highest points scorer, so if there had been a championship, I'd have won it. The Kawasaki chassis looked all right, but the forks and suspension were in very early days, with only one-way damping and no adjustment. "The next year I rode the Suzuki, which had the big advantage of being water- 40th Anniversary cooled , so it didn't have the piston seizing problems. Although other things would break, because they were just modified road-bike parts. The water pump would fail, and we had gearbox trouble too. The chassis had major design faults. It was amazing how unbraced it was around the steering head . But with that engine it had the potential to win every race because it was so much more powerful. They were piston-port engines, with no reed valves or power valves, so the power was all or nothing. " It was an animal. Both of those bikes would just Wiggle and weave so badly, you 'd end up with blisters on your hands . Everything was flexing. We had treaded tires, too, as well as wire wheels. They 'd just shake their head all the time. The Suzuki was called the Flexi-Flyer. The biggest Single problem was tires exploding. Then Erv Kanemoto had the idea of making a wider rim out of three wheels cut up and welded together, and Dunlop made the first slick tire . I raced it at Ontario. To my knowledge, it was the first-ever race on a slick. I just cleared off and won. Of course at the next round everyone had them . "It was a new era, and we were finding new problems. And they weren't the worst bikes I ever raced. That would be the first prototype of the RG500 Suzuki GP bike . That was faster, and absolutely terrible - bad handling, bad brakes, and everything would break all the time. It slung me down the road so many times, it eventually ended my career." MICK DOOHAN 1989 HONDA NSR Five-time World Champion Mick Doohan had memories of a particular dog from his early years, but the bike that frightened him to the point that he almost quit GP racing after just one year was the 1989 NSR Honda. It had all the points mentioned by Wayne Gardner in his choice of the 1988 machine, plus a couple more. The difference was that Doohan had no GP bike experience. He thought that's just the way a 500cc GP bike was . It took all his nerve to keep gelling back on . "The worst bike I ever raced was before the GPs started, in 1985 or 1986," Doohan recalled . "It was a 500 made out of a TZ350 Yamaha with a third cylinder added . I think it had been made in Germany. The guy who entered it had good intentions but not enough money. The engine was in an old RG500 Suzuki chassis, and it was on second-hand Dunlop tires . We had to cut half the tire away to fit it in the swingarm. I raced it at Bathurst. where it seized, and at Lakeside. It had no ground clearance and just wouldn't do anything right. A modern production bike would be a hell of a lot better. FiliallY it threw me off in a big way. I was ~ wear-

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