- 7/9/2025
Suzuki found early Grand Prix success with two-strokes in the early 1960s and it bloomed into 500cc championships in the '70s, '80s, and '90s and 2000s with riders like Scheene, Uncini, Lucchinelli, Schwantz and Roberts. Suzuki even scored one in MotoGP's four-stroke era. Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor Mark Hoyer talk about Suzuki's early days in GP racing and the Hamamatsu company's rise to the top.
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SportsTranscript
00:00:00Welcome to the Cycle World Podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer. I'm with Kevin Cameron.
00:00:04Our topic this week is Suzuki and Grand Prix road racing.
00:00:09And I like this topic because, well, mostly because I know Kevin Schwartz
00:00:14and I watched him race at Laguna Seca in the late 80s and early 90s,
00:00:19or right in 1990.
00:00:21And I watched the Pepsi Suzuki come off Turn 5 at Laguna
00:00:24and he was doing a cross-flip wheelie, spinning the back tire,
00:00:28with the bike wobbling around and then hurling toward 5 and shooting up the hill.
00:00:36You know, peak two-stroke era for me, obviously, because I was there.
00:00:42That'll do it.
00:00:43And Laguna was pretty cool because they'd come over what they call Turn 1, the hill,
00:00:48and at the end of the session for practice and qualifying in plug chop.
00:00:53And so they'd whiz over the hill and then the bike would shut off
00:00:57and you'd hear the fairings flutter.
00:00:59And then they would break at the end, just at the entry to Turn 2,
00:01:03and then the mechanics would walk over and I'd watch Kel Carruthers,
00:01:06who I had yet to meet, walking down to meet Eddie Lawson.
00:01:10And Kevin would be walking by and everybody, like, Kevin!
00:01:13Skinny little kid.
00:01:15It was neat times.
00:01:17But they have, you know, they have a pretty rich history.
00:01:20Of course, we know Barry Sheen, Kenny Jr., and then they're out.
00:01:29So you were more there than me.
00:01:33Why don't you kick us off?
00:01:35Well, okay.
00:01:36I think what's periodically valuable to do is to recall that the Japanese manufacturers
00:01:45had to start from zero.
00:01:50They might have an RT-125 DKW from either World War II era
00:01:59or they produced a bunch of them after the war.
00:02:05But that was the starting point for so much two-stroke activity.
00:02:10It was a simple one-cylinder, three-speed piston port,
00:02:16the bare minimum transportation, four and a half horsepower.
00:02:20And you weren't going to learn a lot about two-stroke engineering from that,
00:02:27except that here's one that works.
00:02:30And if you want to make these, fill your boots.
00:02:37So Suzuki, of course, was a loom manufacturer.
00:02:42And there are some gloomy, dark pictures,
00:02:45very much like modern television with these gloomy, dark machines in the background.
00:02:52That was their business.
00:02:54When the war ended, they thought,
00:02:57well, of course, we'll have to make clip-on engines for bicycles.
00:03:05Yamaha had made propellers during the war.
00:03:07All of their machine tools were seized
00:03:10and their use denied for a period of years.
00:03:14By whatever control commission.
00:03:18Honda made piston rings.
00:03:21Later, they would make clip-on bicycle engines.
00:03:25So this little engine made two foot-pounds of torque.
00:03:31Don't I make two foot-pounds of torque with pedals?
00:03:34I don't know, maybe.
00:03:35Maybe, probably not.
00:03:35So they were thinking to themselves about competition.
00:03:46And it seems that this idea was quite common in Japan in motorcycle circles in the early 1950s.
00:03:56Namely, we don't know what the Europeans know.
00:04:00And if we don't learn it fast, they will come here and take our motorcycle market,
00:04:06which we frankly would like to have for ourselves.
00:04:10So racing is the ruthless provider of truth in motorcycling.
00:04:20And that's a great thing.
00:04:22You can't talk your way out of a DNF.
00:04:25Well, we actually won, you see, except all this other stuff happened.
00:04:29So they decided they were going to enter the lowly class in a 1953 all-Japanese racing class.
00:04:41And they were very pleased with themselves to have finished this course,
00:04:47I don't know the length, in under an hour,
00:04:51and were close behind the slowest of the much bigger motorcycles.
00:04:59This encouraged them.
00:05:01Then they decided they were going to soup up their Koleda, single-cylinder 125, and race that.
00:05:11And the pistons rose like cakes.
00:05:18The big N bearings melted.
00:05:20And all these things happened that are the basis of the old saying,
00:05:29bring last year's bike to this year's Daytona, because you know that one works.
00:05:35And if it doesn't, Daytona will find it out.
00:05:37So they tried racing their Hotted Up production bike, and they soon, this is not working.
00:05:50We're not doing this.
00:05:51So they made a Koleda RB, which was made for racing, also a 125 single.
00:06:01And they started solving the problems that they ran into.
00:06:06Now, the first time that I looked at a Suzuki connecting rod sometime in the late 60s,
00:06:13I thought, oh, look, the big N is really small.
00:06:17I had the same reaction to bolt taco rods.
00:06:20Well, what they discovered is what Daimler-Benz discovered in 1940
00:06:26with their all-rower-bearing V12 aircraft engine.
00:06:33If you rev the thing up just even a little bit, may cause roller skidding.
00:06:41Why?
00:06:43Because as the crankpin revolves and the bearing on it is turning nominally at the crankshaft speed,
00:06:51there's also added and subtracted the back-and-forth swing of the connecting rod.
00:06:59And that causes the speed of the big N bearing to vary by plus and minus 25%,
00:07:06two times every revolution.
00:07:08That's a lot of speeding up and slowing down.
00:07:12Well, is there not also, say, centripetal, centrifugal force?
00:07:19Well,
00:07:19wouldn't it tend to, wouldn't it, the bearings would sort of work against the cage?
00:07:26I mean, there's a lot happening.
00:07:28Well, originally, for example, Vincent's had crowded rollers in their big N.
00:07:34And SKF said, no more than 5,800 RPM on this thing, except for short moments.
00:07:41But you're right.
00:07:42All those rollers are centrifuged to the outside.
00:07:45And the weight of several rollers is bearing on the roller at the apex, which is kind of getting all squashed.
00:07:53That's the reason to have a cage.
00:07:56Kevin squished his face, Spotify-ers.
00:07:58He smashed it together.
00:07:59It was awesome.
00:08:00So, the cage keeps the rollers from banging into each other.
00:08:10But this speeding up and slowing down, Suzuki found, oh, making the bearing larger and stronger makes it fail sooner.
00:08:20Why don't we go the other way?
00:08:23So, they made the crank pin smaller.
00:08:25They made the rod big N smaller.
00:08:28Results better.
00:08:29And so, that's been, that was the early secret to successful connecting rod big N bearings, was to make the crank pins as small as it could be and still have adequate strength.
00:08:43First time I went into an RD350, I was very surprised at the, air quote, big end of the crank pins.
00:08:54You know, like the connecting rod is like, huh.
00:08:58Yeah.
00:08:58Well, there's the reason for it.
00:09:01Intuition says we should make it huge.
00:09:04Yes.
00:09:04And in fact, if you look in the bearing books, it tells you that the larger you make the rollers, the lower the stress that's produced under the surface, which ultimately causes cracking.
00:09:15And the cracks come wiggling and the cracks come wiggling and they reach the surface and usually at an angle and a little piece of the edge of the crack breaks off into a flake.
00:09:26Is the flake large enough to stop a rower?
00:09:29If so, in the twinkling of an eye, all the rollers have become interleaved black pieces of sharp edged steel.
00:09:43Now, I've seen this many times.
00:09:46We're changing the crankshaft this afternoon, so rally around.
00:09:51My RD was making choo-choo sounds and it was all, it was flaking.
00:09:56It was making that kind of ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.
00:09:58Oh, yeah.
00:09:59Because the bearings were going away and all that flaking, you could see that flaking.
00:10:04It was not pretty.
00:10:05Nope.
00:10:06So, they soon found out how to make a racing bearing that would last a race.
00:10:16And they went and raced at the next, maybe it was 55.
00:10:24I think they missed in 57.
00:10:26And they raced against Yamaha's YA1, which was also a 125 single.
00:10:33Yamaha, by that time, had some race smarts.
00:10:39They'd been doing it a while.
00:10:42And they knew how to get the best out of their bike.
00:10:44And they cruised to an easy win.
00:10:46And the Suzuki guys went home all chagrined.
00:10:49Oh, our poor motorcycle is so inferior.
00:10:53But somehow, oh, it went 77 miles an hour.
00:10:58It had the same top speed as the YA1, but it just, it encountered vicissitudes.
00:11:06I'd like to see one sometime.
00:11:08Anyway.
00:11:09A vicissitude?
00:11:11Yes.
00:11:12And put it in a strong box so that it can't get out.
00:11:16Anyway.
00:11:16By some accident, some professional meeting or what have you, Shunzo Suzuki and Mr. Soichiro Honda encountered one another.
00:11:31And Mr. Honda, with his wonderful toothy grin, seems to have clapped old Suzuki on the back and said, hey, your bike is pretty fast.
00:11:45You guys ought to race in Europe.
00:11:47And he might have been saying, good luck, inwardly.
00:11:51But this was encouraging.
00:11:57Yeah, maybe we should do that.
00:12:00And so they decided to send a team to the Isle of Man and with tape measures and cameras and inclinometers.
00:12:13And they measured every turn.
00:12:16They measured pavement texture.
00:12:18They were thorough.
00:12:21And they came back with voluminous reports.
00:12:24I don't know how they would help anyone, but at least they knew how far around it was, the 37 and 230 miles.
00:12:32What a place to start, though.
00:12:34I mean, how about a 10 laps on a two-mile track?
00:12:37Let's start there.
00:12:39Right.
00:12:40Not the TT.
00:12:41So they had a lot of trouble.
00:12:49At one point, they stopped for a while, but they were going racing in Europe, and they were having indifferent results.
00:13:00Now, it's important to know that there are many secrets in a Grand Prix paddock, but they're not well kept, because these people are lonely.
00:13:14They're away from home for months at a time, going, sleeping two up in hotels with other persons who may snore loudly or emit other noises.
00:13:29And they talk to each other.
00:13:34They have friends.
00:13:35They talk.
00:13:36And I learned about this from that man of few words, Ginger Molloy, a New Zealand racer who finished second in 500 Grand Prix racing to Giacomo Agostini in 1970,
00:13:52himself riding an over-the-counter 500 Kawasaki H1R, and he could lay hands on the most exotic things.
00:14:09Because these cylinders, which are most secret, would travel across Europe to northern Spain, where they would vacation in the sun for perhaps a week.
00:14:23And then they would reappear in inventory in whoever's truck it was, big factory transporter, big in those days, and no one the wiser.
00:14:35And there was also the question of who actually knows how to go racing.
00:14:42Because when you send engineers to a racetrack, most of them have no idea what are we supposed to do here.
00:14:52So that's why early Grand Prix race teams all had a European technical guy in charge of the team.
00:15:08Because he knew how to get to the next race, for one thing.
00:15:11He knew how to get a carnet.
00:15:14He knew how to get through customs.
00:15:16Europe wasn't a common market in the 1950s.
00:15:20And these people also knew the ropes.
00:15:26We've heard, we've told you the story before about Kelk or others at Barry Sheen's shop sawing the whole steering head off of their Yamaha.
00:15:35And then standing back, how does this look, holding up the steering head?
00:15:41A little less.
00:15:42Okay, how about that?
00:15:44Yeah, that's a better tacket there.
00:15:46Okay, I'll hold it.
00:15:47You tack it.
00:15:48And this kind of rough and ready stuff mystified the Japanese because in their corporations, there were procedures for everything.
00:15:59Perhaps those of you who work for organizations have encountered them.
00:16:03And they needed these practical people.
00:16:09Well, Suzuki had their eye on Ernst Degner, who was working for MZ, lately IFA, an East German firm that had inherited and then built upon the work of the now revered Daniel Zimmerman,
00:16:28who won a bunch of championships in East Germany, he was one of those people, when the war ended, he just got busy and became reasonably prosperous.
00:16:41And then one day along comes the Stasi and they say, you will hand over all notebooks, all parts, all complete machines, test results, and you will not work on motorcycles ever again sign here.
00:16:55Uh, the Stasi could be persuasive.
00:17:01So he went off to race outboards and his, in his concept of a disc valve, 125 single, uh, quickly in the hands of MZ, who had more resources than an individual craftsman.
00:17:18And they soon had the thing making 20 horsepower, which was as good as any of the four strokes at that point.
00:17:27So, uh, Degner would be quite a good catch.
00:17:32He would, he would know a number of secrets.
00:17:35He would know where to get things.
00:17:37And so the very famous escape of Degner and his family from, from East Germany has, uh, I don't think there's a song, but there are certainly film and print versions, uh, very exciting cold war stuff.
00:17:53But not everything that he brought to Suzuki was necessarily a gain.
00:18:00Suzuki had already discovered that the big problem of the two stroke engine is that it fires twice as often.
00:18:10And it has where a four stroke has 540 degrees for the piston to cool before it fires again.
00:18:18And then the two stroke has 250 degrees.
00:18:24So pistons get hot.
00:18:26They swell like cakes.
00:18:28They stick or they break into crumblies so that you take the exhaust pipe off and shake the piston out of there.
00:18:38Oh, those used to be wrist pin bosses.
00:18:40Oh, there's the fragments of the piston ring.
00:18:43So these people had to go through this business over and over and over again in order to come up with stuff that worked.
00:18:55And Degner was a considerable help, I'm sure, because he'd been doing it for a few years already.
00:19:03He, he knew the ropes and, uh, Suzuki's original, uh, race team guys.
00:19:13Were, first of all, uh, Masanao Shimizu, who was a chassis guy.
00:19:20And, uh, Takeharu Okano, the engine guy.
00:19:27And at a point in 1962, they hired Makoto Hase, who would later design the RG500.
00:19:38On which Barry Sheen would win two world championships.
00:19:44And after Kenny Roberts got through winning his three, later versions of the RG500 would win.
00:19:53First in 81 with Marco Lucanelli, the tire conservator.
00:19:59And then Franco and Cheney, who was later, uh, MotoGP safety officer.
00:20:05So two more championships, four championships.
00:20:10Why did Suzuki decide that they should build a, uh, 500 class two-stroke racer?
00:20:20Well, they looked at the results and they could see, I mentioned that, um, in 1970, uh, Ginger Molloy was second to Agostini.
00:20:30Now, who used to be second?
00:20:32Somebody on a Norton or a G50.
00:20:36Big singles that were last produced in 1962.
00:20:40A few were built the following year from parts.
00:20:43So, no wonder that the FIM at one point said, do we really need the 500 class?
00:20:50We only have one constructor.
00:20:53But that situation changed.
00:20:57Suzuki also knew that they had been supplying parts and equipment to people who were running versions of the 500 twin Suzuki called Titan.
00:21:11T-I-G-H-T, spelled T-I-G-H-T, apostrophe U-N.
00:21:17And, um, because, of course, the frightening thing is, the bigger the piston, the more area it has to gather heat.
00:21:27And the longer it takes to get it out.
00:21:30Yes, sir.
00:21:30The heat path is to the center of the piston where you usually find the hole.
00:21:34It is no surprise that the first two-stroke to win an FIM World Championship in road racing was a 50cc Suzuki RM62, I guess, which was ridden by Ernst Degner in 1962.
00:21:55And the thing had, what, eight or ten horsepower.
00:22:01And, uh, Honda wasted no time with the CR110 concept and they soon made a twin.
00:22:10And, uh, Suzuki came back and won two more 50cc championships.
00:22:16And the Honda guy said, well, we've got to get serious here.
00:22:22We can't have this.
00:22:23This is, this is shameful.
00:22:26And so, uh, the very young, uh, Shouichiro Irimadri was put on the job and he came up, he sort of made a breakthrough, uh, finding that it was better to reduce friction than to try to increase power because they'd done all the souping up they could.
00:22:47And what they really needed to do was to get the enclosing walls of the crankcase away from the crankshaft and to shorten the pistons and, you know, do all the friction reducing things.
00:23:01There was real power there.
00:23:03So they won the 50cc championship in, uh, in 1965.
00:23:10Ah, all's well.
00:23:13Well, but then they made a terrible discovery.
00:23:17It's cheaper for these two stroke idiots to come up with another horsepower way cheaper than it is for us with the four stroke because the four stroke makes increased power by increased RPM.
00:23:33Because the breathing, the cylinder filling is something that's been worked on for half a century.
00:23:39And so revving it up is the, is the best solution with the two stroke at this point.
00:23:47People weren't really on the beam with exhaust pipes.
00:23:51They were making hundreds of them and testing them.
00:23:53And they would ultimately be able to fill the two stroke cylinder so that the energy expended in the stroke was equal to or greater than that of a four stroke by using the exhaust pipe as an acoustic supercharger.
00:24:13So, the Suzuki guys said, well, um, we made a lot of pipes.
00:24:24We made, well, we made a thousand pipes during those few years of the 1960s and tested them one after another.
00:24:34And this is why I'm a bit skeptical when I see, uh, these advertisements for packages, software packages to design your perfect two stroke.
00:24:47I'm sure it gives a decent starting point, but there's nothing like the dyno to uncover all the little glitches that reality puts in our way, such as banana peels.
00:24:58Um, so developing the two stroke engine was a, an intense step-by-step process.
00:25:11So back to what Suzuki was looking at, they saw these two strokes that were finishing right behind Agostini.
00:25:18And they said, this is the opportunity of the century, because all we have to do, I mean, one guy won the championship, Kim Newcomb, with an outboard powerhead.
00:25:30The thing was fast.
00:25:33And so all we have to do is design a competent engine, make the hundred horsepower, and we'll blow these guys down.
00:25:42And so Makoto Hase makes a single cylinder test engine.
00:25:50This is a good way, not have to grind four different cylinders and weld four different pipes.
00:25:56We'll work on our single cylinder four times quickly, more quickly.
00:26:02So they got 95 horsepower.
00:26:04They had been using the same basic transfer port arrangement that MZ, uh, was using, which everyone else therefore used.
00:26:18Oh, this, this is the secret.
00:26:19This is the key to the whole thing was actually lousy.
00:26:23It was just the best thing that they had.
00:26:25So Hase is looking at this thing.
00:26:28Not only does it not make a hundred horsepower, which we need, but it's power is so narrow.
00:26:34We can't make it work with a six speed gearbox that is now required by the class.
00:26:40See, when, when the classic era of Grand Prix racing ended in 67, the FIM said, now what?
00:26:50All these wonderful factory racing has entertained the daylights out of people for all these years.
00:26:57What are they going to ride?
00:26:59So he said, we've got to, we've got to restrict this thing.
00:27:02First of all, no more 12 speed gearboxes with extra support bearings in the middle so that the shaft isn't going ga-ding, ga-doing.
00:27:10And some of those photos of, of the oyster on the half shell, the crank shafts, rows of them, little gears.
00:27:19It's marvelous Swiss watch precision.
00:27:25But imagine having to lug all that stuff around with your little motor.
00:27:33It needed to be simplified.
00:27:35So they made the six speed rule and they also made a rule that said four cylinders maximum and two cylinders in 250.
00:27:48And one cylinder of it later on, they made a one cylinder rule for the 125s.
00:27:55So Hassi looks at this scavenge scheme and I think that he got himself a copy of Paul Schweitzer's 1949 classic on scavenging of high speed diesel engines.
00:28:12And I can't cite the page number, but the book is over there on the shelf and it shows what's called Curtis scavenging.
00:28:22In Curtis scavenging, the transfer ports that are closest to the exhaust have a zero roof angle.
00:28:29They come in at 90 degrees to the central axis.
00:28:32The second pair of transfer ports angles up at 30 degrees and the third pair angles up at 45 degrees.
00:28:42And then there's a finger port or two in the back wall that's really pointed up at 60 degrees.
00:28:48So the roof angle increases as you move away from the exhaust port.
00:28:53And I think about Curtis scavenging every time I heat water in the electric kettle because it has a ring of heat that causes rising bubbles that is very much like Curtis scavenging.
00:29:09It causes the material in the coffee, in the water kettle to circulate so that it heats very quickly.
00:29:17Anyway, they put this thing on the dyno and it made 114 horsepower.
00:29:27Wow.
00:29:29And it got better gas mileage and it had broader power.
00:29:36So it was like those five cent nostrums that people were always talking about for your motorcycle.
00:29:45It says more power, better gas mileage and, you know, a whole bunch of claims that just forget it.
00:29:54Well, that sounds like the raising of the pirate flag right there when the two-stroke pirates would take over.
00:30:02Yeah, well, of course, MV in Italy, MV Agusta,
00:30:08were fading out because the count had collapsed in a business meeting in 1971.
00:30:16And the remaining management, well, somebody want this or what are we doing?
00:30:23We don't, we're not in the racing business.
00:30:24We're helicopter manufacturers.
00:30:26And so I think the last time a factory MV ran was 76 or 77.
00:30:36So Suzuki fields the RG500.
00:30:40It still has, it's a fairly narrow power band, but they compensated for it to a degree by timing the disc valve,
00:30:49very much like those single cylinder YA-6s that people used to ride.
00:30:55Kawasaki also made little campus cadet singles.
00:31:01The disc opens at 120 and closes at 55 after top.
00:31:07And so it was a really a strange combination of this racing engine with all these transfer ports,
00:31:18beautiful shaped, lovely things, and with a campus cadet disc valve timing.
00:31:26So the thing ran, but it didn't shift.
00:31:33And there were different problems.
00:31:34They kept getting better results.
00:31:38And then by 76,
00:31:42Beresheen won the world championship.
00:31:46And then he won it again in 77.
00:31:49But Steve Baker was second on a Yamaha.
00:31:56Yamaha had been running an inline with these little dinky read valves on it.
00:32:00The same part number as for the child's 80cc motocrosser.
00:32:05Little four pedal thing.
00:32:09And Irv Kanemoto used to refer to that read as the restriction.
00:32:15Because they put the same read on the TZ-750.
00:32:22It was made for an 80cc cylinder.
00:32:24Then they put it on a 125 cylinder.
00:32:28And finally, they put it on the big cylinder.
00:32:32So it was a restriction.
00:32:37So in 77, what Yamaha did was they put separate cylinders on the inline engine and they ran piston controlled intake.
00:32:46And they were really big intakes.
00:32:50So the thing was more powerful, but not as powerful as the RG500.
00:32:56So then Kenny arrives.
00:33:01And at first, they said, well, you're American, aren't you?
00:33:07Are you American?
00:33:08Yeah, I think so.
00:33:10We have our riders all scheduled here, but we'll give you some parts maybe.
00:33:16Particularly if you get good results.
00:33:18He got good results.
00:33:20This was 1978.
00:33:23So then they gave him the full deal.
00:33:24An engine with variable exhaust port timing.
00:33:29It had these eyelids in the port, which rotated.
00:33:35And the edge of the cutaway portion of this rotor functioned as an eyelid.
00:33:40And it broadened the power enough to more than make up for the lack of power in comparison with the RG.
00:33:47And Kenny was able, in an exciting season in 1978, to take the title from Barry Sheen.
00:33:56And so that appeared to be it for a while.
00:34:01Kenny had it covered.
00:34:0378, 79, 80.
00:34:07In 81, they gave Kenny, Yamaha gave Kenny a disc valve.
00:34:11Can't beat him?
00:34:12Join him.
00:34:12We'll make our own RG500.
00:34:17It was difficult.
00:34:20Kel had to change all the port timings.
00:34:22Kel for others.
00:34:24And Kenny didn't get real good results on it.
00:34:30And the tires didn't like it either.
00:34:32So guess what happens?
00:34:34In 1981, Marco Lucanelli notices, as who could not at the time, these bias tires are junk.
00:34:48They're only good for about 10 laps.
00:34:50So he formulates a strategy.
00:34:55I'm going to let the fast guys wear out their tires.
00:35:01And I'm going to hang back just a little bit.
00:35:04I'm not going to push.
00:35:05I'm not going to play.
00:35:07And then they'll come back to me.
00:35:11Because I've seen it.
00:35:13And that's what happened.
00:35:16The fast guys' tires went off.
00:35:20And this was an irreversible change.
00:35:23This was the thing.
00:35:24There were people who would collect, who would beg or buy.
00:35:28Use takeoff tires from the teams.
00:35:31Oh, what a treasure.
00:35:32They would take it away.
00:35:34It was garbage.
00:35:35Because it had internally, chemically failed.
00:35:42So Lucanelli was world champion on an RG500.
00:35:52Making nearly 130 horsepower at this point.
00:35:57Because it was really easy to boost the power.
00:35:59And that's what Makoto Hase said.
00:36:02And he said, we can improve the power very easily.
00:36:05But we choose instead to improve the handling.
00:36:09So they began to play games with long travel rear suspension.
00:36:14Then that took them to single shock.
00:36:16And that took them to linkages.
00:36:17So that you could have any curve you wanted of suspension movement versus spring rate.
00:36:27And that was a revolution.
00:36:29That was a very powerful thing in Grand Prix racing.
00:36:35Because prior to that, it was, well, we have rear suspension.
00:36:40It's a swing arm.
00:36:41We've got two shocks on there that have three inches of travel.
00:36:45That was standard.
00:36:47Don't question it.
00:36:48Just get on and race it.
00:36:49And as people have commented, the Honda factory racers, the conclusion was, that suspension works best, which moves least.
00:37:02Constant geometry.
00:37:03Yeah, that was the Alan Girdler quote about, it's what he said about suspension in the 1970s.
00:37:10It was the best way to make it work was to not let it.
00:37:13Yeah.
00:37:13Well, so at this point, at this point, Cook Nelson, who was the next to last editor of the beloved, but gone forever, Cycle magazine.
00:37:29Somebody from Suzuki got in touch with him and said, we want to bring you to Japan.
00:37:37We want you to ride the RG500.
00:37:40We're very proud of it.
00:37:42It's been quite successful.
00:37:44We think that you'll find it interesting.
00:37:47Well, at the time, Nelson had been riding Ducati's 60-inch wheelbase, 30, 31-degree steering head angle, and 12 feet of trail.
00:38:02And he was used to motorcycles that cornered as if on rails, as locomotives are.
00:38:12You can't steer a locomotive once you're in the turn.
00:38:15You can't say, oh, I'm going to take the inside line.
00:38:19You're committed.
00:38:21He came back from Japan sort of shaking his head.
00:38:25And he said, on that RG, he said, I only had to look, and the motorcycle would go there.
00:38:32He said, I suspected it of reading my mind.
00:38:36Well, what had happened was that suspension had left the beautiful Ducati that Nelson and the late Phil Schilling were building behind.
00:38:48And they would, of course, do their best to make up the distance.
00:38:53But after Uncini won the 1982 championship, guess what happened next?
00:39:03Everyone with the disc valve motor was furiously trying to make more power.
00:39:10Here came Honda in 82 with Freddie Spencer.
00:39:14How much power was he worth?
00:39:16And a little three-cylinder 500, basically three motocross singles on a common crankcase, making 108 horsepower.
00:39:32Well, this was a big shakeup because at Spa, the place you expect to win because you've got a powerful engine,
00:39:40and you could just sing the high, sweet song of horsepower past all the others.
00:39:46This little putt-putt managed to win.
00:39:52And, of course, it did it in Lucanelli style.
00:39:55Let the others come back to you.
00:39:57And so this meant an entirely new style of Grand Prix motorcycle had to come into being.
00:40:07And it would take Suzuki quite a while because they tried lightening their bike.
00:40:13They tried making the engine more compact.
00:40:15Meanwhile, in 84, Yamaha decided, we're done with disc valve.
00:40:24We're going to put those large area reed valves like Hondas and build a V4 with two crankshafts.
00:40:33And Eddie Lawson used that thing to win the world championship in 84 after Freddie had won it in 83 on the little putt-putt three-cylinder,
00:40:46which was not harmful to tires.
00:40:50In fact, so little harm could it do to tires that when Freddie complained about some big sweeper, that's Silverstone,
00:41:01he said, I can't use the throttle to steer.
00:41:06Irv said, just do the turning at the point where the engine's making peak torque.
00:41:13So he went round, as people used to say, round the thrupny bit, which was a piece of English coinage
00:41:24that had flat surfaces all the way around, connected by little corners.
00:41:29That's the way he went round the corners because he didn't have the power to steer with the throttle.
00:41:35And this was a completely new kind of motorcycle.
00:41:38Suzuki built a V4 in 87 that had large area reeds, and they got with the program.
00:41:47But I think it was hard for them.
00:41:52When you visit Suzuki, you see that they haven't spent a lot of money making their buildings look like the United Nations.
00:42:02They look functional.
00:42:03They don't have 800 engineers to put on a project.
00:42:10Well, I'll tell you, I visited Suzuki's museum.
00:42:13It was for the GSX-R 750 launch.
00:42:17We went to Ryuyo, which is their test track, their famous test track.
00:42:21It has two very long straightaways, and it has a fifth-year, I guess, chicane.
00:42:26I don't know.
00:42:26It was really something.
00:42:30Yeah, you would hit the rev limiter going through that.
00:42:34Because you were leaning it enough that the ratio of the tire would change.
00:42:38You'd hit the rev limiter, pick it up.
00:42:40I think it was actually, it might have been sixth.
00:42:42Then you would backshift to fifth and throw it into this right-hand sweeper.
00:42:46It was something, it was very top-end-y, very.
00:42:49Anyway, we raced around the track.
00:42:51Schwantz was there.
00:42:53And he regaled us with stories of test riders who had died.
00:42:56And then this one guy who crashed, and they couldn't find him.
00:43:00And he had flipped over this barrier, and he drowned.
00:43:03And he was really bolstering our confidence for testing at this track.
00:43:09It was not the safest place I'd ever ridden fast.
00:43:12And we also got a visit to the museum.
00:43:15And what was remarkable about that is, like, there's Kevin Schwantz's championship Suzuki from 93.
00:43:23And I'm like, man, this is great.
00:43:25Well, check it out, though.
00:43:26We're walking through this museum, and there's all these old bikes.
00:43:29And it's as if they're not being touched.
00:43:31And I go up to Schwantz's GP-winning bike, and there's, like, white corrosion coming out of the master cylinder on the brakes.
00:43:39Like, it just seemed like, yeah, here's the museum, and we're going to forget about it.
00:43:44We're not ready.
00:43:45Yeah.
00:43:47Not a lot of polishing going on.
00:43:49Anyway, in 88, Suzuki decided, this hot kid in the States, let's get him.
00:43:55He had just won Daytona on the 88 bike, which had narrow power, Suzuki style.
00:44:07And it took him years to work up.
00:44:10Every year, he would finish a bit higher in the championship.
00:44:13Finally, in 93, he was world champion.
00:44:17And you have to give him credit for being not only hardworking, but patient.
00:44:23The story of Suzuki is not a story of a lot of systematic breaks, scheduled breakthroughs.
00:44:34But rather, the way they have advanced is like I described with Makoto Hase.
00:44:40He said, not enough power, not enough power bandwidth.
00:44:45Let's try something else.
00:44:46Jumping from 95 horsepower to 114 or deciding, let's build a light, simple motorcycle to counter these main battle tanks from the competition.
00:45:04The GSX-R750 was 100 pounds lighter than comparable bikes on the market.
00:45:09It was cooled by oil.
00:45:12It already had an oil system and an oil pump.
00:45:14So they decided to cool it with oil.
00:45:17And the bike was a huge success with people who wanted a good handling motorcycle that had strong performance.
00:45:25But Suzuki weren't going to break the bank in World Superbike.
00:45:31They took a Superbike championship in the U.S. with Schwanz, I think.
00:45:37And they weren't headliners.
00:45:42But the GSX-R series was a money printing operation.
00:45:49It was a very successful seller.
00:45:51So that brings us to MotoGP.
00:45:57And MotoGP started out basically, I think somebody big in Japan said, everyone will operate a team in this new series.
00:46:11So, OK.
00:46:12And Suzuki elected to run the displacement limit was 990 cc's.
00:46:19They were going to run a 60 degree V4.
00:46:22And then the next year it was 65 degrees.
00:46:24And then a couple of years after that, it was 75 degrees.
00:46:29Learn as you go, which is the way they had done it all along.
00:46:32Oh, at 60 degrees, there isn't enough room for the intake system.
00:46:38At 65 degrees, there's more room, but not enough.
00:46:43And they found all kinds of things that were of special interest.
00:46:50But it wasn't an easy process.
00:46:56And so after 2011, they decided to take a break.
00:47:04When I was finishing up my junior year at college, a lot of my friends were taking a year off.
00:47:12Because they just wanted a break.
00:47:19So, at one point, I think it was 2004, I visited the Suzuki garage late one evening.
00:47:32And they were in there changing valve springs.
00:47:34If you want the top performance out of metal springs, you have to operate the wire at a tremendous surface stress.
00:47:44And the higher the surface stress, the shorter the life.
00:47:49So, they basically, one day's running, necessary new springs.
00:47:54And I think they were the first to switch to pneumatic springs in MotoGP.
00:48:00But then they came back in 2015 with an inline four.
00:48:07Now, one of the big problems in MotoGP all along has been round riders versus pointed riders.
00:48:16The pointed rider, the point and shoot rider, brakes late, brakes very hard, early apex, get the bike turned at low speed.
00:48:25And Kenny Roberts says, low risk.
00:48:28And then, do what motorcycles do best, accelerate.
00:48:34The round people, taking the great circle route, which Barry Sheen did, are right at the edge of traction all the way around the corner.
00:48:45And this is Kenny's criticism of it.
00:48:47But it persists as a style.
00:48:49And the problem is that if you specialize, if you make your bike laterally flexible enough for corner speed so that it has reasonable grip at high lean angle on pavement that isn't perfectly smooth, then you have braking instability.
00:49:07The front end is tucking.
00:49:10It's wobbling around.
00:49:11Do you ever see brake hop?
00:49:14What fun.
00:49:15And it's very easy.
00:49:18In the early days of MotoGP, Max Biagi said, you feel it start to do this.
00:49:27And he said, before you know it, you're in the gravel.
00:49:29He said, it builds up quickly.
00:49:31So, what Suzuki did was, he said, okay, we want the side beams to be laterally flexible.
00:49:41So, they're going to be thin.
00:49:42And that means that at the front, if brake torque, brake bending force is applied to the steering head, the side beams are going to try to bow out.
00:49:55So, what they did was to make two blades of carbon fiber, 70 millimeters wide, 5 millimeters thick, according to our friend, Neil Spaulding, author of the book, MotoGP Technology.
00:50:12I'll try to find a copy.
00:50:17These blades caused the steering head to be strongly braced against tucking under by being attached to the engine down low.
00:50:29And they had virtually zero lateral resistance so that the designed in sort of high lean false suspension could work.
00:50:42And they developed this thing to the point that in 2020, this hastily run up in line four and its rider, Mir, were world champions.
00:50:59And I think that's a grand story because it's just like Suzuki.
00:51:04They come up with something that nobody else has thought of, and they maybe barely have the finance to back it.
00:51:16I mean, if you're going to the big table to play, presumably you have to buy chips.
00:51:22And they couldn't buy many.
00:51:25But they've been able to raise their hand and say, we're here.
00:51:30Remember that Honda hired an ad agency that said, you meet the nicest people on a Honda.
00:51:38Suzuki's agency told them to run this one.
00:51:44Suzuki are here.
00:51:48Are you excited?
00:51:50Let's go to the dealer and look at those.
00:51:53Suzuki are here.
00:51:56We thought it was funny then, and it's still funny.
00:51:59So, okay, their products had to sell on Merit, and the GSX-R certainly did.
00:52:10Will Suzuki be back in Grand Prix?
00:52:12I don't know.
00:52:14What?
00:52:15No, I was thinking of the GSX-R series and how they did all that club racing and they shoveled contingency out.
00:52:24Oh, yeah.
00:52:25Oh, man, look at that contingency.
00:52:26I got to race one of these Suzuki's.
00:52:29And then everybody bought parts to race that bike, and it paid for the contingency.
00:52:35It's like, good job.
00:52:36And there was a whole core of riders who were contingency gypsies.
00:52:44Yeah.
00:52:44It was a great life.
00:52:46Oh, Doug Polin, right?
00:52:47Wasn't Polin one of those guys?
00:52:48Yeah.
00:52:48And Revin Kevin Renzel, I came around the corner at Daytona Garage Area, and there he was sitting in the open back of his van with a rack of carburetors off of his Suzuki, changing jets.
00:53:03And he had coffee, and he had coffee, and I thought, what more does a person need?
00:53:08So, I think this Suzuki story is an inspiring one because they have had the product that the market wanted after not really having a sterling start with the rotary and the, what do they call it?
00:53:32Not the, not the tea kettle, the water buffalo, yes.
00:53:38Motorcycles that made you say to yourself, what's it for?
00:53:43Well, that was a very interesting period of time, as several manufacturers were kind of searching for what they meant themselves to be.
00:53:56Yamaha in the market, yeah, with those strange things that they made.
00:54:02Yeah, the four-strokes were, you know, they had the XS650, which was a great big hit because it, you know, it looked good, it sounded good, it was familiar,
00:54:10but it did all the Yamaha things that Triumphs were not, especially, you know, as 1974 was rolling around.
00:54:20Great little motorcycle, and, you know, fun and reliable and terrible stock coils, but other than that, they were pretty darn good.
00:54:29And then they had RDs, which were a smash hit, but we also knew that that was going to end.
00:54:34It was going to end.
00:54:35And so, yeah, Suzuki tried the rotary, and they had the water buffalo, the 750, two-stroke, water-cooled, pretty neat, but not, you know, not where, not where motorcycles were going.
00:54:50I mean, Honda tried the CB750 automatic in the late 70s, I think 78, 77, put a torque converter on the 750.
00:54:59Yeah.
00:55:00Way to slow her down.
00:55:01You know, so.
00:55:03Slush puffs.
00:55:04A lot of slush, yeah.
00:55:06Yeah.
00:55:06So, interesting time.
00:55:09So, Suzuki withdrew at the end of 2022, right?
00:55:13Yeah.
00:55:14And that was the end of it.
00:55:17There have apparently been a few rumors of Suzuki expressing interest in the next.
00:55:23The 2020, 2027, the formula change.
00:55:27Yeah.
00:55:27Yeah.
00:55:28What is that, 850s?
00:55:29850s, yeah.
00:55:30And there are all sorts of rules about this and that and the other thing, but it'll be a new game, which is always an opportunity for an outsider to play.
00:55:43Because right now, would you want to go up against Ducati?
00:55:49Seems that I would not.
00:55:52Yeah.
00:55:52As scrappy as we might think of ourselves, it's a real monolith.
00:55:58Oh, we're scrappy.
00:56:00Yeah.
00:56:00It's a Ducati suit.
00:56:02Poor old Mark Marquez bumping along through the stones, taking hits to his lower unit.
00:56:10That's what they call the right angle drive on an outboard motor, the lower unit.
00:56:15It's always words have a way of leading us.
00:56:20But the poor man, here he's, he's hammered.
00:56:24He can't get up.
00:56:25Finally, he gets up.
00:56:27He puts a good face on it.
00:56:28He says all those words that you'll find in my race report.
00:56:33Basically, I'm fine.
00:56:36Otherwise, I wouldn't be here talking to you.
00:56:38And later, he's saying, after Sunday's race, after the warmup, I was destroyed.
00:56:45I can't do this.
00:56:47Forget it.
00:56:47But then he said, adrenaline to the rescue, my favorite drug, secreted by your own body.
00:56:59And he goes out and wins.
00:57:02So that's a tough one to match.
00:57:07But 2027 offers a fresh start.
00:57:12Same for everyone.
00:57:13And who knows?
00:57:14There may be Suzuki in preparation.
00:57:19Let's listen for a moment and see if we can hear the Dino test article.
00:57:26We'd love to.
00:57:27We'd love to see it.
00:57:28Yeah.
00:57:30So Grand Prix racing is a grand thing.
00:57:38Because, for example, while the four-stroke people were talking about the lost era and wringing their hands over the uncompetitiveness of the Triumph Trident.
00:57:49And after 1972, 100-horsepower two-strokes tore their tires to shreds and little 350s won the race.
00:57:57What was actually happening was those two-strokes were a development team, developing tires, chassis, and suspensions, which, when traditional four-strokes came to an end in 1982, those first-generation 1,000cc super bikes, the sit-ups that had to be completely re-engineered.
00:58:24When the Japanese built the second-generation super bike, it had all that two-stroke knowledge, chassis, suspension, and tires off the shelf.
00:58:39What will you have?
00:58:42And so the combination of those discoveries with improved four-stroke engines that no longer weighed 225 pounds.
00:58:52Give me a hand with this, will you?
00:58:53We'll put it in the frame.
00:58:56Yeah.
00:58:56Those fellows that were changing engines so rapidly in 88 and 89, RC-30s, they had a lovely little tripod that fitted over the bike, and you could hoist the engine up with this little arrangement.
00:59:13And as soon as it lined up, your colleague would slip the bolts through.
00:59:21No need to lift that great lump.
00:59:25Well, it sounds like their frames were a little bit better than the Triumphs and other stuff I've worked on, that you have to use a three-foot lineup punch and then...
00:59:34Really heave on it.
00:59:35You got to get...
00:59:36That's the only way to get the bolt holes to line up.
00:59:38I was so naive when I pulled apart my Triumph that I thought I couldn't get the bolts out.
00:59:46I'm like, what is...
00:59:46You know, you pull it out and you squeak it out and then you unscrew it, kind of buggering the threads as you're getting it out.
00:59:54And then you're like, okay, it's out.
00:59:56And then putting it back together, I just had no idea that that's how it was.
01:00:01Yeah.
01:00:02Well, when we were with the dealership, they said, of course, you'll want some of our fine Triumph 250 singles, which was a C-15 BSA or some kind of dreadful thing.
01:00:15And each bike appeared and it had a warranty problem.
01:00:22And we had to replace head gaskets, which meant a lot of work.
01:00:29And some of the engines had to come out of the frame.
01:00:32And it was as though...
01:00:35Well, it's just like Mark described.
01:00:38You had to beat the bejesus out of the bolts to get them out because the holes were so offset between the crankcase and the chassis.
01:00:51And you just wondered, what manufacturing process is this?
01:00:56Well, it was the manufacturing process of a corporation at sundown.
01:01:05It was sad.
01:01:07It happened.
01:01:09And Triumph now is made in Thailand, where there is a full suite of all the parts that are needed.
01:01:19Wheels, brakes, suspension, all these wonderful things.
01:01:24And they used to be present in England.
01:01:26England had the supply network.
01:01:29Naturally, it disappeared after 1970.
01:01:34Moved east.
01:01:36So we've had to...
01:01:38What do they call it?
01:01:40Pivot.
01:01:41Pivot to East Asia.
01:01:43Well, we'll pivot to the end of the show here.
01:01:49We appreciate you all listening.
01:01:53Suzuki's Grand Prix history is rich, and it's informed the rest of their product, informed the GSX-R750.
01:02:02For sure.
01:02:03And, of course, the Gamma, the road-going Gamma, was a close cousin to the racing Gamma, and that's one of the things that made it so attractive to all of us back when the...
01:02:14Yeah, try to buy one now.
01:02:16Back when we couldn't get one, except through Canada, perhaps.
01:02:22Pretty wonderful stuff.
01:02:23So thanks for listening, folks.
01:02:25We appreciate it.
01:02:26We'll see you down in comments.
01:02:28We'll see you down in comments.
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