Making It Happen
Making it happen
TDC
Kevin Cameron
NOT EVERY NEW RACING SUPERBIKE IS successful. Right now, seeing the early successes of Honda's new RC51 1000cc V-Twin, some are saying, "Well of course it's successful—look at the resources and experience Honda has." Nicky Hayden was a very close second at this year's Daytona on the new Honda, and has won three other AMA nationals since then. In the World Superbike series, Colin Edwards is leading on the new Twin. Enough said?
Hardly. Seems to me a number of years ago that same resourceful and experienced company introduced another new Superbike-the RC45-and for a long, long time it was unsuccessful. It took John Kocinski and a rumored $17 million to finally squeeze out one World Superbike Championship. How do resources and experience also produce failure?
Money doesn’t equal success. HarleyDavidson has spent a fair amount of money on its VR-1000 Superbike since the project began back in 1987, but it has yet to become successful in AMA nationals. Flipping that coin, we see a smaller company, Aprilia, who first entered World Superbike races last year with its RSV Mille SR Rider Peter Goddard had some decent finishes, but suddenly this year, Troy Corser and the Aprilia are winning race after race, a real threat to series leader Edwards.
Evidence of this kind destroys the theory that money spent, times a constant, equals races won. No doubt Aprilia is spending money-it costs plenty to employ top riders, keep a team in the field and support them with rapid chassis and engine development.
Where does success come from? It begins with a decent design, developed to a reasonable level of power and reliability. Connecting rods don’t break, crankcases last at least one race, bad surprises have been mostly discovered and fixed. This much is straightforward engineering, but it’s only a beginning. Next, the machine has to be made to do what human riders want. This is the hard part, because every rider is different. One rider wants to hold the brakes deep into turns. Another seems hardly to brake at all, but concentrates on early acceleration. A third wants to steer with the front wheel, and demands endless experiments to make forks supple and sensitive. And so on. Is one of these riders right and the others wrong? Not at all. Even among race-winning riders, style and emphasis are quite different.
This means that engineering isn’t enough, because rows of dyno cells and ranks of saluting machine operators in company caps cannot make motorcycles respond as riders require. They don’t know how.
Why can’t riders just learn to ride what the engineers build? To understand why not, imagine that an important sport consisted of throwing your parachute out of an airplane above 10,000 feet, diving after it, catching it, putting it on and then floating safely to earth. Imagine that the jumpmaster now demands that you change your successful style, and instead go out the door of the aircraft whistling Dixie while holding your ankles. You have survived thusfar doing it your way, and you’re not at all sure how whistling Dixie and holding your ankles will affect your chances of catching up to that falling parachute. You feel safer doing it the way that has always kept you alive and well so far. This is what happens when riders are confronted with either (a) a brand-new machine for which no setup yet exists or (b) a machine set-up for another rider’s style. Riders cannot go fast unless they believe they can predict the machine’s responses exactly. Achieving that unique match between machine behavior and a rider’s expectation is what setup is all about.
Engineers learn in university that physics is true. It’s easy for them to expect others-riders, for example-to understand the world in the same way. The rider knows what is happening on the bike from his own perspective, but the engineer knows what ought to be happening from the perspective of physics. The frequent result is a clash of cultures and even a degree of mutual contempt.
Therefore on actual race teams the people who work with riders are not engineers. Instead, they are highly experienced in what motorcycles do on the racetrack, in how riders describe it and in what has worked to correct problems in the past. Trackside people know that confidence is basic to riding, and they therefore take riders’ complaints seriously even if they don’t really understand them. They can work with less than complete information, knowing that some kind of answer must be found in very little practice time. All these things make engineers uncomfortable, but race team personnel live with them every working day.
In 1999, the Aprilia Superbike was managed by the private De Ceceo team. When Aprilia engineers were satisfied that their RSV Mille was sufficiently developed to benefit from a top rider, Troy Corser happened to become available. Now the company has taken the program in-house, handing it to the already-established 250 Grand Prix team of veteran Fabrizio Guidotti. Corser and this group of professionals quickly found a workable setup for the bike, and their current string of wins and strong finishes is the result.
Engineers are very good at pursuing measurable and strictly definable things like lower polar moment of inertia, increased chassis stiffness or greater horsepower. From the perspective of riders, on the other hand, major changes to a machine alter the way it responds, and a revised setup must be found if any benefit is to come from the changes. This takes time.
Honda’s 500 GP team is struggling now, and the likely reason is the retirement of Mick Doohan. Without a rider of great prestige to balance engineering and setup, engineering tends to move ahead at the expense of lap times. It’s natural for a company to believe its machine is what wins races, but when the top rider becomes unavailable (as in the case of Ducati and Carl Fogarty), the lesson has to be relearned. Machine and rider join into a successful whole only via setup.
