Cycle News

VOL. 51 ISSUE 25 JUNE 24, 2014 P69 steel brakes of those days, those tires, those bikes – it was a hand- ful. Making sure your bike was the best it could be. At times try- ing to be more brave, go 'round the outside. It was real intense." Mackenzie said: "I can't say I was ever aware of the speed. At that speed in close company, everything seems to slow down. With high gearing the accelera- tion and everything is a lot slower. At tight tracks you're accelerating fast and stopping fast, so you're more aware of that. It's a different experience." When the speeds get high and the straights are long, slipstream- ing becomes the key element. Certainly just that for Parrish on the old Spa. "You were flat out for so long, then you had to go back one gear for the Masta Kink, lined by two or three houses, then there was another long straight. By the end of the race I'd worked out that if you led onto the straight, you got slipstreamed twice before you got to the kink, then once again afterwards. That was what Spa was about, particularly on an RG500. It wasn't slow, but it "I knew that by getting that real danger, I made a complete abstraction of it. And when you can do that and go faster it gives a you a rewarding feeling." -Christian Sarron took a long while to get there. So you were constantly using slip- stream. You didn't bother pass- ing on a corner, you just waited until you got the tow past." Hockenheim, along with Paul Ricard, was another great slip- streaming track. Rainey: "At these tracks the most important thing was to get the speed out of the bike. It was so important to get a drive. But these were two- strokes, and you needed to over- gear it. You'd gear the bike for a race in which you were expect- ing a draft. If you didn't gear the bike to deal with that you were going to get stuffed. But if you were by yourself then you were still going to get stuffed, because the bike wouldn't pull that gear. "With that gearing with the two-stroke you could backshift from sixth to fourth and you'd have no engine braking. So ev- erything was on the front brake. Into that far corner, you'd brake to avoid hitting them and the draft would just suck you by. I re- member seeing the trees and the road and the riders and you were buffeting in the draft, and you'd put the brakes on and you just wouldn't stop." Slipstreaming still happens, now and then, though not in the same me-first/you-first/me-first way of the long, long straights. Valentino Rossi believes it doesn't fit. "Usually a long straight is good for the battle, because with the slipstream you can over- take. But is mainly smaller bikes, because with MotoGP the bikes are so fast, so the slipstream is important, but has less effect." Mamola regrets slipstream- ing's passing as a major ele- ment of tactics and skill. "At the Salzburgring I lost the race to Eddie in '84. He was on the four- cylinder Yamaha and I was on the Honda three, and our speed wasn't strong enough, if I got out of the draft. I could attack, but I screwed up at the bottom corner and lost the draft going up the hill, and I couldn't deal with it. We've lost that scenario. "We had bikes that could over- rev. The two-strokes. These four- strokes can't do that. You see it more in Moto2: they pull out, but they can't go faster – because the gear ratios are all the same, the power's all the same, there's no advantage of putting on a dif- ferent gear ratio or using your own knowledge. "You see some of it at Mugello, but that's usually into the brak- ing zone. The two-strokes were much more variable. You could pass and repass on the straight." These speeds and dangerous fast corners were scary. How did riders prepare?

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