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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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00:00Welcome to the Cycle World Podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer. I'm with Kevin Cameron.
00:04Our topic this week is Suzuki and Grand Prix road racing.
00:09And I like this topic because, well, mostly because I know Kevin Schwartz
00:14and I watched him race at Laguna Seca in the late 80s and early 90s,
00:19or right in 1990.
00:21And I watched the Pepsi Suzuki come off Turn 5 at Laguna
00:24and he was doing a cross-up wheelie, spinning the back tire,
00:28with the bike wobbling around and then hurling toward 5 and shooting up the hill.
00:36You know, peak two-stroke era for me, obviously, because I was there.
00:42That'll do it.
00:43And Laguna was pretty cool because they'd come over what they call Turn 1, the hill,
00:48and at the end of the session for practice and qualifying in plug chop.
00:53And so they'd whiz over the hill and then the bike would shut off
00:57and you'd hear the fairings flutter.
00:59And then they would break at the end, just at the entry to Turn 2,
01:03and then the mechanics would walk over and I'd watch Kel Carruthers,
01:06who I had yet to meet, walking down to meet Eddie Lawson.
01:10And Kevin would be walking by and everybody, like, Kevin!
01:13Skinny little kid.
01:15It was neat times.
01:17But they have, you know, they have a pretty rich history.
01:20Of course, we know Barry Sheen, Kenny Jr., and then they're out.
01:29So you were more there than me.
01:33Why don't you kick us off?
01:35Well, okay.
01:36I think what's periodically valuable to do is to recall that the Japanese manufacturers
01:45had to start from zero.
01:50They might have an RT-125 DKW from either World War II era
01:59or they produced a bunch of them after the war.
02:05But that was the starting point for so much two-stroke activity.
02:10It was a simple one-cylinder, three-speed piston port,
02:16the bare minimum transportation, four and a half horsepower.
02:20And you weren't going to learn a lot about two-stroke engineering from that,
02:27except that here's one that works.
02:30And if you want to make these, fill your boots.
02:37So Suzuki, of course, was a loom manufacturer.
02:42And there are some gloomy, dark pictures,
02:45very much like modern television with these gloomy, dark machines in the background.
02:52That was their business.
02:54When the war ended, they thought,
02:57well, of course, we'll have to make clip-on engines for bicycles.
03:05Yamaha had made propellers during the war.
03:07All of their machine tools were seized
03:10and their use denied for a period of years.
03:14By whatever control commission.
03:18Honda made piston rings.
03:21Later, they would make clip-on bicycle engines.
03:25So this little engine made two foot-pounds of torque.
03:31Don't I make two foot-pounds of torque with pedals?
03:34I don't know, maybe.
03:35Maybe, probably not.
03:35So they were thinking to themselves about competition.
03:46And it seems that this idea was quite common in Japan in motorcycle circles in the early 1950s.
03:56Namely, we don't know what the Europeans know.
04:00And if we don't learn it fast, they will come here and take our motorcycle market,
04:06which we frankly would like to have for ourselves.
04:10So racing is the ruthless provider of truth in motorcycling.
04:20And that's a great thing.
04:22You can't talk your way out of a DNF.
04:25Well, we actually won, you see, except all this other stuff happened.
04:29So they decided they were going to enter the lowly class in a 1953 all-Japanese racing class.
04:41And they were very pleased with themselves to have finished this course,
04:47I don't know the length, in under an hour,
04:51and were close behind the slowest of the much bigger motorcycles.
04:59This encouraged them.
05:01Then they decided they were going to soup up their Koleda, single-cylinder 125, and race that.
05:11And the pistons rose like cakes.
05:18The big N bearings melted.
05:20And all these things happened that are the basis of the old saying,
05:29bring last year's bike to this year's Daytona, because you know that one works.
05:35And if it doesn't, Daytona will find it out.
05:37So they tried racing their Hotted Up production bike, and they soon, this is not working.
05:50We're not doing this.
05:51So they made a Koleda RB, which was made for racing, also a 125 single.
06:01And they started solving the problems that they ran into.
06:06Now, the first time that I looked at a Suzuki connecting rod sometime in the late 60s,
06:13I thought, oh, look, the big N is really small.
06:17I had the same reaction to boltaco rods.
06:20Well, what they discovered is what Daimler-Benz discovered in 1940
06:26with their all-rower-bearing V12 aircraft engine.
06:33If you rev the thing up just even a little bit, may cause roller skidding.
06:41Why?
06:43Because as the crankpin revolves and the bearing on it is turning nominally at the crankshaft speed,
06:51there's also added and subtracted the back-and-forth swing of the connecting rod.
06:59And that causes the speed of the big N bearing to vary by plus and minus 25%,
07:06two times every revolution.
07:08That's a lot of speeding up and slowing down.
07:12Well, is there not also, say, centripetal, centrifugal force?
07:19Well,
07:19wouldn't it tend to, wouldn't it, the bearings would sort of work against the cage?
07:26I mean, there's a lot happening.
07:28Well, originally, for example, Vincent's had crowded rollers in their big N.
07:34And SKF said, no more than 5,800 RPM on this thing, except for short moments.
07:41But you're right.
07:42All those rollers are centrifuged to the outside.
07:45And the weight of several rollers is bearing on the roller at the apex, which is kind of getting all squashed.
07:53That's the reason to have a cage.
07:56Kevin squished his face, Spotify-ers.
07:58He smashed it together.
07:59It was awesome.
08:00So, the cage keeps the rollers from banging into each other.
08:10But this speeding up and slowing down, Suzuki found, oh, making the bearing larger and stronger makes it fail sooner.
08:20Why don't we go the other way?
08:23So, they made the crank pin smaller.
08:25They made the rod big N smaller.
08:28Results better.
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.
08:43First time I went into an RD350, I was very surprised at the, air quote, big end of the crank pins.
08:54Yeah.
08:54You know, like the connecting rod, I was like, huh.
08:58Yeah.
08:58Well, there's the reason for it.
09:01Intuition says we should make it huge.
09:04Yes.
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.
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.
09:26Is the flake large enough to stop a rower?
09:29If so, in the twinkling of an eye, all the rollers have become interleaved black pieces of sharp edged steel.
09:43Now, I've seen this many times.
09:46We're changing the crankshaft this afternoon, so rally around.
09:51Well, my RD was making choo-choo sounds and it was all, it was flaking.
09:56It was making that kind of ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.
09:58Oh, yeah.
09:59Because the bearings were going away and all that flaking, you could see that flaking.
10:04It was not pretty.
10:05No.
10:05So, they soon found out how to make a racing bearing that would last a race.
10:16And they went and raced at the next, maybe it was 55.
10:24I think they missed in 57.
10:26And they raced against Yamaha's YA1, which was also a 125 single.
10:33Yamaha, by that time, had some race smarts.
10:39They'd been doing it a while.
10:42And they knew how to get the best out of their bike.
10:44And they cruised to an easy win.
10:46And the Suzuki guys went home all chagrined.
10:49Oh, our poor motorcycle is so inferior.
10:53But somehow, oh, it went 77 miles an hour.
10:58It had the same top speed as the YA1, but it just, it encountered vicissitudes.
11:06I'd like to see one sometime.
11:08Anyway.
11:09A vicissitude?
11:11Yes.
11:12And put it in a strong box so that it can't get out.
11:16Anyway.
11:16By some accident, some professional meeting or what have you, Shunzo Suzuki and Mr. Soichiro Honda encountered one another.
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.
11:45You guys ought to race in Europe.
11:47And he might have been saying, good luck, inwardly.
11:52But this was encouraging.
11:56Yeah, maybe we should do that.
11:59And so they, they decided to send a team to the Isle of Man and with tape measures and cameras and inclinometers.
12:13And they measured every turn.
12:15They measured pavement texture.
12:19They were thorough.
12:21And they came back with voluminous reports.
12:24I don't know how they would help anyone, but at least they, they knew how far around it was, the 37 and two-thirds miles.
12:32What a place to start, though.
12:34I mean, how about a 10 laps on a two-mile track?
12:37Let's start there.
12:39Right.
12:40Not the TT.
12:41So they, they had a lot of trouble.
12:49And at one point, they, they stopped for a while, but they were going racing in Europe and they were having indifferent results.
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.
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.
13:31And they talk to each other.
13:34They have friends.
13:35They talk.
13:35And 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, himself riding an over-the-counter 500 Kawasaki H1R.
13:58And he could lay hands on the most exotic things.
14:10These cylinders, which are most secret, would travel across Europe to northern Spain where they would vacation in the sun for perhaps a week.
14:23And then they would reappear in inventory in whoever's truck it was.
14:28Big factory transporter, big in those days.
14:33And no one the wiser.
14:35And there was also the question of who actually knows how to go racing.
14:43Because when you send engineers to a racetrack, most of them have no idea what are we supposed to do here.
14:51So that's why early Grand Prix race teams all had a European technical guy in charge of the team.
15:07Because he knew how to get to the next race, for one thing.
15:12He knew how to get a carnet.
15:14He knew how to get through customs.
15:17Europe wasn't a common market in the 1950s.
15:19And these people also knew the ropes.
15:26So 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.
15:35And then standing back, how does this look, holding up the steering head?
15:41A little less.
15:42Okay, how about that?
15:44Yeah, that's a better tacket there.
15:46Okay, I'll hold it.
15:47You tack it.
15:48And this kind of rough and ready stuff mystified the Japanese because in their corporations there were procedures for everything.
15:58Perhaps those of you who work for organizations have encountered them.
16:04And they needed these practical people.
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,
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.
16:40And 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.
16:58The Stasi could be persuasive.
17:01So he went off to race outboards.
17:02And his concept of a disc valve, 125 single, quickly in the hands of MZ, who had more resources than an individual craftsman.
17:19They soon had the thing making 20 horsepower, which was as good as any of the four strokes at that point.
17:27So Degner would be quite a good catch.
17:32He would, he would know a number of secrets.
17:35He would know where to get things.
17:38And so the very famous escape of Degner and his family from, from East Germany has, I don't think there's a song, but there are certainly film and print versions.
17:51Very exciting Cold War stuff.
17:55But not everything that he brought to Suzuki was necessarily a gain.
18:00Suzuki had already discovered that the big problem of the two-stroke engine is that it fires twice as often.
18:10And it has, where a four-stroke has 540 degrees for the piston to cool before it fires again, the two-stroke has 250 degrees.
18:23So pistons get hot, they swell like cakes, they stick, or they break into crumblies so that you take the exhaust pipe off and shake the piston out of there.
18:37Oh, those used to be wrist pin bosses.
18:40Oh, there's the fragments of the piston ring.
18:44So these people had to go through this business over and over and over again in order to come up with stuff that worked.
18:55And Degner was a considerable help, I'm sure, because he'd been doing it for a few years already.
19:03He knew the ropes.
19:05And Suzuki's original race team guys were, first of all, Masanao Shimizu, who was the chassis guy, and Takeharu Okano, the engine guy.
19:26And at a point, in 1962, they hired Makoto Hase, who would later design the RG500, on which Barry Sheen would win two world championships.
19:43And after Kenny Roberts got through winning his three, later versions of the RG500 would win, first in 81 with Marco Lucanelli, the tire conservator, and then Franco Inchini, who was later MotoGP safety officer.
20:06So two more championships, four championships.
20:09Why did Suzuki decide that they should build a 500-class two-stroke racer?
20:20Well, they looked at the results and they could see, I mentioned that in 1970, Ginger Molloy was second to Agostini.
20:30Now, who used to be second?
20:32Somebody on a Norton or a G50.
20:35Suzuki, big singles that were last produced in 1962.
20:40A few were built the following year from parts.
20:44So, no wonder that the FIM, at one point, said, do we really need the 500-class?
20:50We only have one constructor.
20:54But that situation changed.
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, spelled T-I-G-H-T.
21:14I mean, that's good, mate.
21:14You
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