Now and then, I wonder about the high-tech future that is said to be upon us. Any minute, I’ll be able to have a routine outpatient injection of nanobots that will enthusiastically nibble away any arteriosclerotic plaque I may have, leaving me with an athlete’s blood pressure. They won’t make any mistakes at all, such as accidentally eating away my adrenal glands or my recollections of Intermediate Algebra. Super capacitors or hyper batteries will shortly be invented by brilliant marketing guys working in one of those modest double-overhead-door units in an industrial park, so gasoline will become as quaint as buggy whips. Autonomous vehicles will seamlessly take over from the accident-prone, traffic-jamming, human-guided kind. To commute to work, we’ll just go sit in the car (which has no steering wheel or other controls), sipping coffee and reading the paper, as a vast computer network integrates our transportation requests into routes, speeds and lanes. We won’t need driving licenses, and speeding will be impossible. I can even doze and my car will let me know that I have arrived by “dinging” like the clothes washer or microwave do. Because I may in the interim have forgotten where I was going, the destination will appear on a screen along with a happy face, urging me to “have a great day.” As I take the elevator to my tasteful corner office on the 40th floor, my car will route itself to a high-density underground auto-storage facility.

It might not be quite like that because the scheduled breakthroughs that the futurists predict actually come at their own speed or not at all. And some of the fabulous new technologies might be very expensive—not for everyone; maybe only for presidents, big-time CEOs and the Sultan of Brunei. So, I sometimes imagine a world in which some but not all of the science-fiction occurs.

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Photo by Mark Wernham

The 2012 MotoGP season began on Tuesday with the first post-Valencia test sessions. Honda, Yamaha and Ducati were there with 1000cc prototypes, and Randy de Puniet and Stefan Bradl rode Suzuki and Honda 800s. Several of the new “CRT” bikes—prototype chassis powered by production-based 1000cc engines—also took part (CRT stands for “Claiming Rule Team,” a clumsy name we hope will soon be changed).

Next year won’t really be racing as we know it, because these 25-percent-bigger, 1000cc prototypes will be limited to the same 21 liters of fuel that compelled 800s to run lean in order to finish races. As has been the case the past two years, six prototype engines will be all that a rider gets for the 18-race series (this requires roughly a 1200-mile engine-life guarantee). CRTs are, by contrast, allowed 24 liters of fuel and 12 engines per rider.

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Periodically, I stumble across a statistic that bowls me over, changes the way I think and feel. Earlier this week, I sat over lunch, looking at a recent issue of Diesel Facts, a publication of the German MAN company, which makes diesel engines.

The statistic was in an article about 40,000-horsepower MAN two-stroke marine engines being specified for giant new 400,000-ton bulk carrier ships. The sentence that got me said that 19 such ships “will transport iron ore from South American mines to the Chinese steelworks that currently take 60 percent of all iron ore mined globally.”

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Suspension engineer Jim Lindemann has died after many years of successfully fighting brain cancer. Jim was for 25 years a familiar face on the AMA roadracing circuit and could sometimes be seen with a wire loop around his neck, onto which he had threaded the washer stack of a suspension unit he was servicing at the moment. It kept everything in sequence!

Like the roll of duct tape often kept handy on the wrists of mechanics on the starting grid, that wire loop also proclaimed his profession. Jim helped a great many riders over the years and not only by his knowledge of suspension. He always seemed pleasantly taken by surprise by life, and that optimistic outlook was contagious. Racers need the company of optimists.

We will miss Jim’s presence.

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Photo by Andrew Wheeler

Sometimes, I actually think of something and am cheered up by the novelty of it. Back when Valentino Rossi was first on Bridgestones, there was a big hoopla about how, because of their big, heavy, stiff casings, these tires were extra-stable and needed to be heavily loaded by weight transfer to get the best out of them. And there was Colin Edwards, saying how amazed he was at how the tires just kept gripping the more load he’d put on them.

None of this makes sense because, in the past, the way things have worked is that a company makes its tire carcass softer so it then spreads out a bigger footprint, which engineers can then exploit by using softer tread rubber and so on. For example, each time Dunlop made its car-racing tire carcass softer—the first time was when it reduced the number of plies in the tire by switching from cotton to nylon—it got a bigger contact patch because the softer carcass could more easily spread out to make a big footprint.

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In March, three nuclear power stations melted down at Fukushima after their cooling systems were knocked out by a tsunami. Radioactive material was released from the plants into the air, groundwater and nearby ocean. Twin Ring Motegi, owned by Honda and site of this year’s delayed but now-upcoming Grand Prix of Japan, is less than 100 air miles from Fukushima.

Some MotoGP riders, notably series points-leader Casey Stoner and reigning world champion Jorge Lorenzo, have said they will not compete at Motegi because they distrust official statements that radiation levels have returned to normal at the circuit.

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Fred Nix was one of the best mile racers ever. In 1968, he won every mile. Photo by Walt Mahony

Former racer Dave Ijams phoned me the other day and told me a story of what he says is the best motorcycle racing quote ever.

“Novices quaked at the thought that one day, if they became good enough, they’d have to race the mile,” he began. “The mile was big stuff, almost of religious significance. Everybody knew it took four years before you got good enough—if you were ever going to—to win on the mile.

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Photo by Mark Wernham

This Mark Wernham photograph of Nicky Hayden braking at Silverstone is dramatic but also counterproductive. What’s important is what BMW factory rider Leon Haslam told me at Miller Motorsports Park this past May during the World Superbike race weekend: “If rear braking is lost, the rear will rise and overall braking will suffer.”

We can find out the brake torque required to lift the rear wheel by measuring the wheelbase and multiplying it times the weight on the rear tire. The rear tire lifts when braking force, multiplied times the overall center-of-gravity height, equals rear-wheel load multiplied times wheelbase.

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Years ago, the former head of Harley-Davidson racing, Dick O’Brien, described to me what happens when a Harley engine “wet-sumps.” If for any reason oil at the bottom of the crankcase is not picked up rapidly enough by the scavenge pump, it can be swept around by the whirling crank into the narrow gap between the inside of the close-fitting crankcase and the outside diameter of the crank. The oil does not, as some describe, stick to the crank, but is batted back and forth between it and the case. This very rapid shearing of the oil consumes a lot of power—O’B said he could see it when a bike would wet-sump on the Daytona banking.

This is a very old problem, dating back to the early days of total-loss oiling. If the alert rider of 1914 looked behind and saw no visible smoke, he took that as an indication of too little oil in the engine. A few strokes of the hand pump fixed that. Sluggish performance signaled too much oil—time to ease up.

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Imagine a little piece titled “Affording Your New Four-Stroke Motocross Bike.” It would cover such topics as being born a Saudi prince or maybe a yachtsman, techniques for quickly acquiring large amounts of other people’s money, such as fraud, bank robbery, etc., and non-violent financing techniques of the kind used for years by Team Obsolete’s Robert Iannucci, who has said he never spent a dime of his own money on racing.

 It would also include a cheerful explanation of how we got into this mess: “Back in the beginning, the idea of four-stroke MX machines sounded hot to everyone, because at that time, our ideas about four-stroke MXers had been conditioned by Honda’s many super-durable XLs—the bikes we bought for our kids and kept up at the lake, which now, 25 years later, are still starting and running like trains every summer without so much as an oil change.

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Victory Circle: Daytona International Speedway

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Blake Young, Rockstar Makita Suzuki, American SuperBike. Photos by Tim White

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Photo by Gold & Goose

In the years immediately after World War II, aviation’s new international range made rapid overseas travel possible. But the need to operate in existing conditions led to a series of terrible crashes during landings in bad weather. The airlines had to operate in poor weather to maintain schedules, but the crashes were giving the enterprise a bad name.

In a parallel manner, in 1987, ’88 and ’89, 500cc Grand Prix racing was confronted by serious highside crashes occurring on corner exit. In the 1950s and ’60s, crashes and even fatalities were dismissed as “part of the cost of doing business,” but by the 1980s, public sentiment had changed. The FIM feared that government regulation might be imposed on them if they did not take action to make crashes and injuries less severe and less frequent. There was also the danger that news media might focus on such crashes, denouncing racing as “a commerce in human sacrifice” as had happened after Pierre Levegh’s famous 1955 auto-racing crash at Le Mans.

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Wes Cooley, Daytona International Speedway, 1981

It’s interesting to consider just what it is that makes motorcycles fast in a given era. In our own time, we can see that tires have reached a high level of both grip and durability. In racing, it is no longer unusual for a rider to set the fastest lap of the race two laps from the end. Thirty years ago, wide bias-ply tires used in 500cc Grand Prix racing were so short-lived that they were being brought to the starting line without even being scuffed. Even at the end of that era, five-time 500cc World Champion Mick Doohan would say that a rider with a 10-second lead on lap 15 would “spend the last 10 laps sliding around” because of tire deterioration.

Tire and rim sizes have grown at the same time. A 1978 1025cc Superbike rolled on 2.5-inch front and 3.5-inch rear rims—sizes that were being used by 125cc GP bikes in 2009.

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Photo by Brian J. Nelson

When I looked at the new Kawasaki ZX-10R, I realized how much accumulated change in rider position there has been in recent years. Both rider and engine have had to be positioned ever-farther forward so that engine power—rising with every new model—drives the machine forward rather than just causing a big wheelie.

In the specific case of the 2011 ZX-10R, Team Cycle World Attack Performance crew chief Richard Stanboli reckons that the engine’s crankshaft is approximately 20mm forward of where it was in the Suzuki GSX-R1000 that Team CW operated last season.

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