Cycle News

INTERVIEW FIM SPEEDWAY WORLD CHAMPION GREG HANCOCK P70 they all jumped at the chance to work with it. They built a couple of different chassis combinations that suddenly opened my eyes and made the racing even more fun because I was able to correct some of the old bad habits and started riding the bike like I was a teenager again. The following year, I had an amazing season and I won my second world title after 14 years. From all the small changes each year, I come away from every race going, "That was good, but I can still be better. What can I do to be better?" I'm attacking it like a young kid with a massive career ahead of him. I haven't grown up. For the most part, speed- way bikes have remained unchanged throughout modern history. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the sport is so much about the rider, isn't it? You know what? It really is. The rider and the bike have to work together. The bikes haven't evolved that much. They still look kind of prehistoric. The Prodrive guys kind of opened my eyes to some different materials and a different way of engineering with the frame and the chassis in general. There are also a lot of the engine combinations that are going on now. These types of engines we're using, they're quite high performance. They all really look the same on the outside; it's what's going on in the inside, and it fools a lot of people. In one way it's really cool, because the engines are still manually carbureted and there is no traction control. You still have to ride the bike, and it come down to [the fact] that the rider is very, very important on the thing as well. As 46 years old, you're a much older rider than most of your competition. Is speedway a sport where being older and having all the knowledge and experience that you have actu- ally pay off? Without a doubt. I think with anything in life in general, you obviously mature and you learn a lot as you go. But it's cool. The sport, I've been around it since I was about five years old, and here I am at 46 and I'm still loving it, and I'm still learning so much all the time. I can't beat my competition on pure aggression, you know? These guys have got way more aggression and way more attitude and are willing to throw the thing wherever it has got to go, and the only way for me to beat them is to be a little bit smarter and put a little bit more into my equipment to be smoother and faster, rather than just turn the throttle and then hang off the thing. Maybe applying a bit more finesse to the whole thing, eh? You know what? I'm old school in that way too, man. I grew up with the style that you can't be aggressive on the bike; you've got to be smooth and make all of your moves calculated and you have to do everything to get the maximum contact patch of the tire on the ground. The way a lot of the youngsters ride the bike today, they're hanging off of it, and they've got the thing on the back wheel and then they're locked up. You take a kid like Darcy Ward, who you probably know well, he was probably the best of this whole crew because he could damn well have his head hanging on the ground, but he had the bike upright so he had maximum traction with the tire, getting the maximum contact patch to the ground. He mas- tered that and that's what made him so dangerous as a com- petitor, because he mastered something nobody else could do and was still going forward. Sort of how the MotoGP guys now try to get their bikes straightened up and going for- ward as quickly as possible? For sure, man. The thing with speedway, too, is it's all about wheel spin. The wheels have to be spinning to make the thing get sideways, but we're trying to calculate it all with the throttle and the contact patch of the tire. You don't want it to spin too much and you're trying to find "The sport, I've been around it since I was about five years old, and here I am at 46 and I'm still loving it and I'm still learning so much all the time."

• Cover