t's hard to consider a bike that occupied five of the top six slots in the final
2004 World Championship points
table - and won a total of seven races
en route to clinching the Manufacturers' World title one race early - a failure.
Yet that's how Honda race management
will surely have assessed the 2004 version
of its V-five RC21 IV MotoGP contender,
now in its third season of racing and the
class benchmark, thanks to its dominant
track record of winning 29 out of the 32
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FEBRUARY 16, 2005 •
races it had started - up until the beginning
of this year. Even if that batting average
only dropped a little this season, to a stillmeritorious 36 victories out of 48 starts,
the '04 RC21 IV had the cards stacked
against it in seeking to make it three
MotoGP titles in a row for Honda - all
because of a racer called Valentino Rossi.
HaVing lost bike racing's winningest
rider to their bitter Yamaha rivals, HRC's
top management and bright engineers
knew they'd have a fight on their hands in
CYCLE NEWS
seeking to prevent Rossi from follOWing in
the tire tracks of Eddie Lawson. A decade
and a half ago, Lawson won two consecutive, premier-class World titles on rival
makes of machinery - though in Steady
Eddie's case he took his number-one plate
in the reverse direction in 1989, moving
from Yamaha to Honda.
And so HRC dug into its reserves to
unlock a good part of the 8- to 10-percent
extra performance that the R&D team's
then-project leader Shogo Kanaumi told me
at Catalunya a year ago was still locked up in
the RC21 IV That meant developing significant extra horsepower from the 75.5degree V-fove motor via internal mods leading to higher revs and less friction, which
allowed the Repsol RC21 I V of Alex Barros
to match the astounding 347 -kph (215mph) trap speed of the Ducati Desmosedici,
speed king of the MotoGP class, in preseason testing at Barcelona. That extra power
was delivered to the Catalan tarmac via a
new chassis incorporating a different
