Making the Switch

Making the Switch

Motorcycle racers can win on four wheels, too. But there's more to success than skill and unfailing nerve.

“NASCAR is the type of sport where other drivers can make or break you. If they won't draft or run close to you, it can make

for long days. Some of the strategy I picked up racing motorcycles has really helped. I wasn’t intimidated by 170 mph, which made it a lot easier to concentrate on the car and what it's doing. Basically, it comes down to race smarts: knowing what you have to do and where you have to be.

Sometimes, it’s frustrating, but you just have to be patient, stay within sight of the leaders, run a comfortable pace and try to have a good race car at the end.’’-Kevin Schwantz, 1993 500cc World Champion, current Australian NASCAR racer

“Racing is racing. The way you go about it, the strategies, that’s all the same. The acceleration, the lines and what you see are real similar (to a 500 GP bike), but what you feel is completely different.

Testing’s critical in a car. You have to have a good engineer. The setup has to be right. You’re braking so much later that it’s

almost hard to get used to. If you stop at the 300 marker with a bike, then you wouldn’t apply the brakes until the 50 marker in a car. It’s that much different.’-Eddie Lawson, two-time AMA 250cc Grand Prix Champion, two-time AMA Superbike Champion, four-time 500cc World Champion, 1996 Indycar racer

“In a car, you have to go to school. There’s a lot to it. You have to learn about chassis. For some guys, it didn’t turn out. Kenny Roberts

couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. He wrecked two or three cars. You have an abundance of horsepower and not quite as much control. Your lines are almost identical,

but if a guy spins on a

motorcycle, he’s down on his rump.

With a car, well, look

at Danny Sullivan. He fumbled around, spun, caused his own yellow, changed tires and won Indy. Made him famous.”-Joe Leonard, three-time AMA Grand National Champion, two-time USAC Champion

ROAD & TRACK

“Cars were more complex, because

there were

more opposing

forces.

Only

(when driving a GP car in the rain) was there the same sensitivity, the softness of controls. On a bike, you don’t have the fantastic braking into slow corners...and a bike is only faster on a quick sneak through the esses, but even grand prix cars lack that delicate flow of messages a bike’s always relaying, and you feel removed from the machine by contrast”'-John Surtees, three-time 350cc World Champion, four-time 500cc World Champion, 1964 Formula One

World Champion,

1966

Can-Am

Champion

“It has a lot to do with confidence. If you feel confident, you want to get in the car. You want to go fast. I don’t have a ton of car races under my belt, but I feel like I’ve been doing it all of my life. The only thing I took to cars from motocross was concentration. In

motocross, you’ve got to concentrate for 40 minutes on exactly where you’re going to put the front wheel in every corner. You have to react to every bump. That really helped in the cars. I can visualize

where I need to be, and keep that concentration the entire race.”-Jeff Ward, two-time AMA Supercross Champion, five-time AMA National Motocross Champion, current Indy Lights racer