Cycle News

VOL. 51 ISSUE 33 AUGUST 19, 2014 P139 he said the next day, still shak- ing his head in wonderment. The pushrod engines are not the only thing about the whole spectacle that is somewhat disturbingly old- school. U.S. dirt track was once inte- grated with U.S. road racing in a single championship. That was why back in the day it was the cornerstone of a full generation of American talent. They were led by Kenny Rob- erts, himself an Indy legend for his victorious appearance in 1975 on an almost unrideable one-off flat-tracker powered by a four- cylinder two-stroke TZ750 road- racing engine. And they kept on coming, slip- ping off their steel-shoes and wiping the dirt off their visors to jump on the wayward generation of 500cc two-strokes, which they mastered in much the same way as their oval-track bikes - Randy Mamola, Eddie Lawson, Wayne Rainey and a host of others. With hindsight, the throttle control and slide management that had become second na- ture coincided with a time when horsepower was vaulting ahead of not only chassis and suspen- sion technology but more espe- cially tires. When they ran out of grip, the tail-steerers – those who could abstract the rooster- tail – came into their own. This technique is exciting to watch. It looks as though the rid- er is crashing, and indeed some- times he is. But the best ones are those who go further into the crash while still surviving. The most conspicuous practi- tioner, the one who crashed most without falling off, was Freddie Spencer in his prime. The guy whose "youngest-ever" records have now all been snatched away by Marquez. A contemporary rival told me recently how he would fol- low Spencer on the warm-up lap, amazed to watch him sliding the front: crashing, but not crashing. When the race began, his front tire was already fully warmed up. That's why he won so many races by grabbing an unassailable lead on the first lap. Funnily enough, that was ex- actly what Jorge Lorenzo said about Marquez, during a round robin of rivals' opinions at Indy: "You see him crash, but he doesn't fall off." Does this mean that the tech- nology has come full circle: that a couple of decades of European- style riders (some call it "Span- ish-style") are now out of date? Probably not. It's more the case that Marquez rides with the wheels out of line because mod- ern running gear allows him to do so. The old guys did it because they had to. But there are lessons to be learned at Indy, particularly at a time when MotoGP's lawmakers are striving to level out the techni- calities, to remove the advantage of factory riders. A lesson that can be learned also from speedway: that when the bikes are all more or less the same it allows talent to count more, and the racing becomes a lot closer. Because top riders tend to have similar levels of tal- ent. At the same time, of course, the same guys usually win. The biggest winner is show business. And the loser? Old-timers like myself believe that Grand Prix racing should be a center for technical excellence and innovation; that engineers who make a better bike than their rivals should be rewarded rather than punished. And that the oth- ers will strive to catch up, to the betterment of all. No pushrods, please. Take that away, and you're left with speedway. Or flat tracking. You can call it a Grand Prix, in the same way that you can call Moto2 a Grand Prix, but with ev- eryone using control production engines, it's really just a one- make series tailored for a cheap show. And none the better be- cause of it. MotoGP is headed the same way. No longer will it be a genu- ine motor sport. Just a sport, with the motors providing only back- ground noise. Pity they don't sound like thun- der. CN

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