Roadracing in the Present Era

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Kevin Cameron has been writing about motorcycles for nearly 50 years, first for <em>Cycle magazine</em> and, since 1992, for <em>Cycle World</em>. (Robert Martin/)

Twenty years ago it became clear that the 750cc four-cylinders and 1,000cc twins then featured in World Superbike were not the machines that the Japanese makers wanted to see in the class. What they wanted was to race their literbikes. Permission was granted in 2003.

At the same time, as Dorna’s Carmelo Ezpeleta was pondering a displacement for a new four-stroke GP class, it was five-time world champion Mick Doohan who said, “Give ‘em a liter.” To avoid appearing to copy World Superbike, MotoGP chose 990cc.

Despite the skeptics, when the new series began in 2002 the four-strokes’ ability to smoothly feed power from zero throttle caused lap times to drop compared with the 500cc two-stroke era. Some old-timers and traditionalists had expected this new four-stroke class to also bring them the great sounds of the Gilera fours and Honda sixes. That didn’t happen. Sideways “cowboy riding” didn’t happen either. In its place came higher corner speeds, the bikes forming nose-to-tail “trains” whose riders were not “tradin’ paint” because there was now only one line through fast sections. Instead of singing a rising sweet song through pipe-organ arrays of megaphones, these new four-strokes let loose with dissonant grunts, their firing orders chosen to maximize tire grip.

Too Fast! Too Dangerous!

By 2006 came the ages-old whine: “Too fast! Too dangerous!” We had heard this before, back in 1989 when the FIM threatened the 500 two-strokes with intake restrictors if they didn’t stop their rash of high-side crashes. After much discussion, centering on the idea that less power could keep existing gravel traps adequate, MotoGP reduced bike size to 800cc. At Valencia, in the Monday test after the last GP of the season, some new 800cc prototypes were immediately quicker than the 990s had been. How was this possible? Part of the story was that the new smaller Ducatis were soon revving past 20,000 rpm; the rest was that new rubber technology was further increasing corner speeds. Casey Stoner took the 2007 title on Ducati, winning 10 of the 18 races.

Related: Ten Years of MotoGP

Casey Stoner took the championship in 2007 on a 800cc Ducati. (MotoGP/)

Now, whenever questions of safety arose, MotoGP was in a pinch. Making engines smaller made engineers push both revs and costs higher (making engines reliable at superhigh rpm levels eats money), and although a rev limit was proposed, Honda crushed it. Meanwhile, the rapid advance of silica-reinforced rubber technology continued to raise corner speeds higher still. This brought calls for wider runoff areas, pushing spectators farther away from the action. One way to reduce corner speed was to ask the tire suppliers to deliberately make bad tires. But those manufacturers always say that a major reason to race is to improve their commercial products; the “bad tire concept” would be tough to explain to stockholders.

After a few years of this nose-to-tail 800cc racing, the tall foreheads decided to bring drama back to the sport by returning to torque-rich 1,000cc engines. The belief was that with these engines riders would “back ‘em in” to corners and accelerate away sideways with tires smoking. When I asked a Bridgestone engineer about this, he said, “No cowboy riding. Riding same as last year.” And so it turned out in 2012, because rubber compounding was now on course for super grip rather than the abuse tolerance of two-stroke-era wheelspin.

When costs rise, grids shrink. And shrink they did. MotoGP needed more bikes! The class had begun with rules in place to prohibit underfunded private teams from stuffing timed-out Superbike kit engines into artisanal chassis, but now all that was forgiven. The “CRT” or Claiming Rule Teams came into being. A claiming rule would, it was thought, prevent excessive spending, and while it had been tried unsuccessfully in the US more than once, the CRT idea went forward.

Claiming Rule Teams opened the MotoGP grid to smaller teams, with the result many had expected—those teams becoming moving chicanes for the factory racers. (MotoGP/)

Proper Engineering Prevails

The outcome was embarrassing putt-putts as much as 10 seconds off the pace. They were much slower than Superbikes because they were built and operated by cut-and-try homebuilders. This was not the first time that rule makers had hoped barn jobs could compete with properly engineered racebikes. Maybe some of that idea grew from the belief that “good ol’ boys” clustered around liquor stills up some North Carolina hollow had made NASCAR what it has become. But—oops! Colorful myths aside, turns out that when a NASCAR team ran out of ideas for camshaft design, their Detroit associates would send them some applied-math geniuses from MIT or Stanford to undertake a few months of computer modeling. Hot damn! Three hundred extra revs! Maybe those country-singer hats and snap-front shirts were just promotional costumes. The heart of racing has always been solid professionalism, as when Junior Johnson had two otherwise identical NASCAR V-8s built and tested, one with conventional plain-journal main and rod bearings, and the other as a cooperative enterprise with Torrington Bearings, employing only balls and rollers. Big money, important results. Plain bearings won the day.

The Dawn of the Production Racer

As the Claiming Rule Teams popped and banged around the circuits, the next idea was the “production racer,” bikes that looked like factory racers but with downgraded internals. This had worked in the 1960s when Yamaha offered affordable two-stroke racebikes—the TD1s—based on its production 250s. A lot of top riders learned their skills on those machines.

Nicky Hayden’s Honda RSV1000R “production racer” was down on horsepower and not competitive. (MotoGP/)

It fell to the late Nicky Hayden to ride Honda’s production racer, which was down 30 hp from the bikes at the front of the grid. Swing and a miss! Collectors quickly scooped up the leftovers to ensconce in their temperature- and humidity-controlled private museums. The Honda production racer was superbly finished but not competitive, its valves closed by vintage metal springs.

Dorna’s next brainstorm was a winner: Stop the factory teams from sending last year’s bikes to the crusher and instead refurbish and lease those machines to satellite teams. Because those satellite teams at first had no clue how to go racing (like similar grid-packing embarrassments in F1) the year-old and two-year-old satellite bikes would be electronically managed by the factories that had made them.

Success! With riders graduating from the combination of early childhood minibike racing, the CEV Spanish racing series, and the new ladder formed by Moto3 and Moto2, superbly trained and experienced champions could be seated on genuine, engineered-for-purpose MotoGP bikes, resulting in the present troubling level of extremely close racing. To achieve a front-row starting position and have a chance at the top 10, every rider must run at his personal limit at all times. As noted recently by Valentino Rossi, losing a tenth of a second in qualifying can set you back an entire row. In the race, each rider you must pass to get to the front costs tire life that will work against you on lap 25.

Stuck in the Draft

When in the 1990s the AMA achieved similarly close competition in 600 Supersport, where riders were either factory men or the top “gypsies” of the now-departed contingency era, the outcome at Daytona was tight groups of six to 10 riders, all unable to break away from the draft of the others. This was the ultimate achievement of the “close racing” advocates.

However, because all those riders were stuck in the draft, there could be no real competition until the last two laps. Riders cruised, evaluated one another, and waited. At the end each man would spring his own plan to exit the chicane in the crucial second place, allowing him to accelerate in the draft of the unfortunate leader to pass and win at the line. Miguel DuHamel made it look like he was just lucky.

The Daytona speedway’s lawyers, seeing the tight groups as hair-trigger “liability bombs,” insisted that the course be changed to free riders from the draft.

Moto3 (and, before that, 125 GP) has a reputation for plentiful crashes, and the equality of machines and riders does indeed produce tight drafting groups. And so it is with MotoGP today, where the presence of so many evenly matched riders and bikes tends toward a similar result. From what the riders are saying, it seems everyone is holding his breath in fearful anticipation. Two bikes touch at the wrong moment and the whole group falls amid bright sparkles of shattering windscreens.

Today’s MotoGP racing is closer than ever. (MotoGP/)

What about technology? In racing-management circles, anything that improves performance is regarded as “destabilizing” to the parity that makes racing a salable product. Technology is therefore the deadly enemy of ticket sales. On the other hand, to most people a MotoGP bike looks the same as any 20-year-old clunker sportbike, while Formula 1 spectators are thrilled by the fantastical appearance of cars whose only similarity to production autos is having four wheels. Holding MotoGP technology where it is could turn it into a vintage class. Yet advancing as it now is, with downforce wings, variable ride height systems, and proliferating streamlining, the familiar cry is again heard: “The bikes are outgrowing the circuits.”

Meanwhile, it’s a grand show.

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