Lease-A-Future

LEASE-A-FOTORE

WHO ISN’T IMPRESSED by KTM’s success in parlaying off-road sales and racing success into a fast-growing company with serious world-scale ambitions and unusual designs?

We’ve all heard that KTM plans to go roadracing, beginning in the 125cc Grand Prix class in 2003 and moving on to MotoGP in ’04. The idea of this Austrian company making its own key to the secrets of GP-level power is intriguing, but the facts may be otherwise. Harald Bartol, who has been involved as designer/ consultant in more two-stroke racing developments than anyone can remember, is to supply the secrets. Warren Willing, an experienced senior GP racing engineer, has been hired to design chassis.

Most recently, Bartol produced a Yamaha-derived 125cc race engine (with presumably improved cylinder, pipe, etc.) for Derbi’s GP team. This is an established way to build engines on a budget-the title-winning Morbidelli 125s of the 1970s contained a lot of over-thecounter Yamaha parts, too. Will Bartol’s work for KTM be an outgrowth of the Derbi project? Insiders say that

when Bartol left the Derbi effort, the latest drawings went with him.

While employing consultants may be a quick way to become competitive (just call Cosworth, Porsche Design, Ricardo or AVL), is there any lasting gain to the parent company? Racing is supposed to improve the breed, but if a company’s race engine comes from one of these “vending machines,” the parent company will learn little or nothing because its engineers have only limited involvement in the design process. All it gets is whatever public-relations noise the resulting racing engine generates in races won. Consultants-large or small-notoriously never tell all they know; that is their stock in trade. To tell all would be professional suicide. Consultants give specific answers but don’t reveal how they arrive at those answers.

Let us hope that KTM is indeed designing its own fourstroke MotoGP engine, or is at least deeply involved in the process. That way it will gain the value of making its own mistakes and discoveries-real experience that can then be applied to the wider line of street motorcycles it is beginning to make.

-Kevin Cameron