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Not fade away: DouB C handler rides again
A funny thing happened to Doug Chan dler on the way to retirement. Just when he'd come to grips with the fact that he'd missed the Daytona 200, and was unlikely to land a ride for the remainder of the season, the phone rang. It was Mitch Hansen, owner of the HMC Ducati team, offering him a ride on the 998 Testastretta that Pascal Picotte had raced at Bike Week.
Picotte, as detailed last issue, had a troubled 200, qualifying fifth but retir ing from the race with gearbox prob lems. Apparently, however, his troubles were deeper than that: Friction between the French Canadian and the crew re portedly led to his termination.
There's little possibility of that hap pening with Chandler, because his crew chief is none other than longtime tuner Gary Medley, who defected from Kawasaki to join his rider at HMC. No stranger to desmodromics, Medley did a stint as Ben Bostrom's mechanic on the Vance & Hines Ducati team in 1999. After a career that saw him win three AMA Superbike Championships for Kawasaki, Chandler was unceremoni ously dropped at the end of the 2001 season after the decision was made to downsize the factory Superbike effort to just one rider, Eric Bostrom. Yes, that hurt.
"You'd like to think that you can sta~ loyal and something good will come of it, but that's just not the way it is any more," Chandler said. "There's con stant rotation, people come and go, and they don't want things to stay as they are; they want change. I looked at how people started bagging on Ricky Carmichael when he left Kawasaki, but then you turn it around and look what happened to me..."
Chandler, with the help of his manag er Gary Howard and friend Wayne Rainey, spent the off-season talking to various team owners, Hansen included. Rainey even approached Peter Clifford about Chandler riding the Red Bull Yamaha YZR500 after Garry McCoy got hurt testing, but the Australian suited up for Suzuka. The closest thing Chan dler got to an offer was from Terry Gre goricka of Austin Bleu Bayou Ducati Racing, ironically the team Picotte> signed with after HMC dumped him.
Despite not having ridden a Superbike in seven months-and only ever having tested a Ducati once, nine years ago-Chandler was quickly up to speed during a three-day, all-teams test at Laguna Seca Raceway. Donning the leathers he wore during his stint on the Cagiva 500cc Grand Prix bike in 1993-94 ("They still fit!"), Chandler ended up setting the quickest lap time at his "home" track; he lives just over the hill in Salinas.
"It's different, but it's a really good race motorcycle," Chandler said of the 998. "It's pretty forgiving, and the power is unbelievable-so smooth and flat, it's deceiving. You think it's not going anywhere, but it's getting busy."
Chandler's first race outing came just one week later at California Speedway. Despite not having tested at the new venue and rain cutting into practice time (like Daytona, the highbanked oval was deemed unsafe in the wet), Chandler qualified eighth and finished fourth on each day of the dou bleheader. But Sunday's result would likely have been better had it not been for a red flag that halted the race just four laps from the scheduled finish, shortly after Chandler had reeled in secondand third-place runners Mat Mladin and Eric Bostrom.
"Yeah, that was kind of a bummer," Chandler said. "I just had a moment on the first lap where I lost the front, and it took me a few laps to get back up to speed. I didn't really expect to catch them that early; I figured it would take until the last lap. It would have been fun.. ."
Despite having missed Daytona, Chandler is already eighth in points, and isn't ruling out the possibility of a fourth AMA Superbike Championship. "Really, the only ones who aren't even with us are (California Speedway win ners) Anthony Gobert and Nicky Hay den," he says. "Pretty much everyone else has had a DNF."
And, as always, he's looking forward to Laguna Seca-particularly the World Superbike round, in which he and most of the other top AMA riders are plan ning to compete. "It's good to see where you stand next to those guys," he said.
"Those guys" better watch out, be cause at age 36, Doug Chandler is showing no signs of slowing down. -Brian Catterson
The Troy Bayliss Show
RACE WATCH
The likes of it we've never seen. It may be the best bike in the World Superbike field, and it may also be guided around at supersonic velocities by a carbon unit who combines the determination
of Fogarty, the skills of Schwantz and the consistency of Lawson. But the fact remains that we've never seen anything like the early-season perfection shown by Troy Bayliss and his Ducati 998F02. Six wins in six starts is a Tiger Woods in-leathers level of domination, all from a guy with a disarmingly abnor mal dose of normality.
What's happened to what was once the world's most unpredictable cham pionship? It can't be over yet, can it? Well, it appears that thus far in 2002, WSB's ever-shrinking factory-bike show-even if it's traveling at record lap and race pace-ain't too fresh a product for the consumers.
It's not all bad news, though, because Noriyuki Haga has made a prodigal homecoming to WSB after an abortive MotoGP dalliance. Sad to relate so far his renowned race-winning ability was
during the early part of the season sup pressed by the "Twin" demons of a dom inant Bayliss and a Dunlop-shod, slowfused grenade of an Aprilia RSV Mille, on which either mechanical or vulcan ized components have been letting go at the most inopportune moments. Honda's Cohn Edwards has fared better, running at the front consistently and finishing first and second at Sugo, where Bayhiss finally faltered and showed he was hu man. Californian Ben Bostrom's been up there too, flinging his factory Ducati around the track, but as of round four he had yet to win a race.
What about the poor 750cc fourcylinder riders, the ones everybody wrote off prior to the start of the sea son? Well, the answer to that is simple: They still can't find their way to the winner's circle, even after a winter rules tweak that dropped their mini mum weight by 11 pounds.
An increasing problem is that the Twins continue to be vastly improved each winter-even the privateer Ducatiswhereas the 750cc development simply can't (or won't) keep up. This is exacer bated by the present political climate of
factory racing, where four-stroke R&D and race budgets are being lavished on an all-new generation of MotoGP exot ica. Also, in addition to pulling factory dollars out of WSB, the renewed inter est in MotoGP may have a deeper cost in terms of fan loss.
Politics during the off-season pre vented the FIM and World Superbike promoters SBK International from en acting a proposed 10 percent capacity hike for the 750cc Fours, thus killing what would have been an easy fix for the "competitiveness problem."
Will the four-cylinder field continue to thin? Yamaha left the series after 2000, Kawasaki is out at the end of 2002 and Suzuki may not even make it to the end of this year, if you believe the rumors. Yikes!
Add all this to Bayliss' brilliance, and the fact that Ducati has-remark ably-produced the best bike yet again, and it means grim times now and next year for WSB, even if commercial re ality may dictate that everyone rejoins the party in 2004. That's when the World Superbike rules change to more production-based, and manufacturers can show off the 1000cc "Superpro duction" Fours. These are essentially Supersport engines in Superbike chas sis, and bikes such as these are cur rently run in the U.K., Japanese and Australian domestic championships. This formula has also been used>
with success in the World Endurance Championship, where many major teams that had switched from 750cc Superbikes to 1000cc production ma chines for the 2001 season-when the class was added-found that lap times were quite similar.
Imagine the spectacle as closely matched road-based 1000cc machinesTwins, Fours and maybe even the Petronas three-cylinder-ridden by fac tory-level pilots in a full-on World Championship. Exactly the sort of tasty ingredients that made WSB racing such a success from 1988 until now.
All the indications are that it's gonna be great when the wheel turns full cir cle, but unless the factories are given an incentive to boost, not reduce, the number of machines on the grid in 2003, the immediate future of WSB racing shows signs of decline. Close racing made WSB's bones in the face of a hostile GP establishment, and maybe close racing is the only thing that's going to safeguard its future. -Gordon Ritchie
