Tracing the origins of "The Pass" to the source: Alex Zanardi

So, I note that you can watch the replay of Marquez using the, uh, "extreme inside line" at The Corkscrew, in order to pass Rossi. five years ago, Rossi pulled the same move on Casey Stoner. Marquez obviously knew about Rossi's pass, but probably doesn't know that Rossi had been inspired by a guy who won a gold medal in the London Paralympics.

Ex-F1 and IndyCar driver Alex Zanardi lost his legs in one of the most horrific motorsports incidents ever, but he continues to inspire with his personal strength and courage. As an ex- (and admittedly crap) TT racer, I've dissed plenty of car racers in my time, but not this guy. Legs gone, 'nads apparently fully intact.

Most Backmarker readers remember Rossi's epic pass on Stoner, through the gravel in the Corkscrew in 2008. Photographer Andrew Wheeler certainly does. The expat Englishman lives just up the coast from Monterey and calls Laguna Seca his home track. So, he was perfectly positioned to shoot Rossi's move, and the resulting photos cemented his reputation as one of the top photographers in MotoGP.

 
Rossi-Stoner Laguna Seca 2008 Battle - Images by Andrew Wheeler

Stoner thought Rossi should've been penalized for cutting the course, but Rossi was well aware that Alex Zanardi had gotten away with the same stunt on the last lap of a CART race about 10 years before that.

Check it out here...

 

UPDATE... Monday morning crew chief, Tuesday edition: But wasn't it against the rules? 

All three moves beg the question that Stoner asked in 2008: Wasn't the move illegal? Every racing organization has a rule to the effect that a racer should not gain an advantage by leaving the course. All three of them were all already ahead of their victims when they entered the second part of the Corkscrew (it's usually listed as turn 8A on track maps.) So in one sense, no one “gained an advantage” by leaving the track, they already had the advantage and just maintained it.

That said, look closely at the Corkscrew. It’s a left-right flick over the crest. I haven't raced there since 2001, and haven't tested there since about 2008, but I think I remember it pretty clearly; and if my memory serves, the slowest point through the complex is the left, not the right. You can carry a ton more speed through the first part of the Corkscrew and make your pass there, if you’re prepared to straight-line it across the gravel, inside the apex of the second half of the complex. 

Marquez took Rossi on the outside of the left, and was ahead but not fully past him when Rossi used all the track on the exit line of the first part of the Corkscrew. Unlike Rossi vs. Stoner, Marquez could have argued (if needed) that he’d been pushed wide but that wasn’t really the case, his momentum was simply too great at that point.

Rossi (and Zanardi before him) took the inside line in the left turn. They were fully past their rivals and weren’t forced wide, they were just going too fast to complete the direction change and keep it on the asphalt. Inside or outside, it makes no matter; in all three cases, blowing the right turn was a consequence of intentionally carrying too much speed a second or two earlier. All three racers gained an advantage by leaving the track. If there’d been a wall there, or even deep gravel, they would either not have tried the move, or not have succeeded.

Still, none of them were penalized. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, eh?

Parsing Jerez: SBK/CRT/MotoGP

I used to think that MotoGP and World SBK went out of their way to avoid giving punters like me a chance to directly compare lap times. But the recent Jerez test, in which the world's two premier classes briefly overlapped, allowed for a nearly apples-to-apples comparison.

Let's call it apples to quinces.

Sure, the fastest SBK lap -- Laverty (Aprilia) 1:40.1 -- was a banzai effort on Pirelli qualifying tires, while Hayden's fastest lap of the test, coming a day later, was a 1:40.090 done in serious testing-for-data mode on Bridgestones. And Superbike Planet may have been correct to point out that "Jerez has never been a sweet spot for the Ducati." (Although when MotoGP raced at Jerez last April, in similar conditions, Hayden recorded essentially the same best lap, and started from third -- wouldn't that have made it his, and Ducati's, best dry qualifying session of the year?)

More to the point, while the fastest SBK bikes and riders were present in Jerez, the fastest MotoGP bikes and riders were not. I'm guessing that Lorenzo and Pedrosa, had they been present, would have put in laps in the 1:39s, just as they did when they qualified 1 & 2 there in April.

What was more interesting to me than any single best-lap stats, however, was that Melandri and Sykes were both under 1:41 on Superbikes as well. I.E., the best laps recorded by three different Superbikes at this test would have qualified ahead of Ben Spies, who was just over 1:41 on the factory Yamaha MotoGP bike last April.

Unanswered question: how much faster are the fastest MotoGP riders than the fastest SBK riders?

My point in all this is, at least in a qualifying-at-Jerez simulation, the fastest Superbikes are at least as fast as MotoGP prototypes (if the prototypes are ridden by humans, not aliens). 

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose, eh?

Ten years ago, we were kind of shocked when, during qualifying for the British Superbike Championship round at Donington Park, Steve Hislop set the outright motorcycle lap record on his Ducati Superbike, eclipsing Valentino Rossi's record set on the fire-breathing Honda 500GP two-stroke. Hizzy was a special case, but it's clear that the technological convergence of Superbikes and MotoGP bikes have resulted in a lap-time convergence, too.


Where were/are the CRT-class MotoGP bikes in all this? Last April, the fastest CRT rider was Espargo, who was four seconds off the pole. Over the course of the year, the CRT bikes in general and Espargo in particular closed the gap. At the season finale last month, Espargo was two seconds off the pole. Which is good, for what it is, although I guess the CRT experiment won't be very long-lived if Honda comes through with a promised customer MotoGP bike.


I don't want to say, "I told you so" (OK, I love saying that) but it was obvious that the CRT bikes weren't going to be faster than the Superbikes from which their engines were sourced. It's still interesting that they aren't faster. 

I mean, you're basically taking a Superbike motor and handing it to a bunch of really smart guys and saying, "Throw out the rest of the rule book; give it carbon brakes, go nuts." But at the end of the day, what they make isn't faster than a production-based bike that's fairly tightly constrained by SBK rules.

Unanswered question: How much faster are the fastest SBK riders than the fastest CRT riders, if at all?

Why haven't CRT class bikes improved on production-based SBK lap times?

• As important as the bike is to the rider, it's not as important as the rider is to the bike.
• Current production bikes are fucking incredible, and yes, they really are almost as fast as MotoGP bikes. This is crazy, really. Anyone with a reasonable job can afford a street bike that is almost as fast as the fastest prototype. It's as if a showroom Dodge Charger was only a few seconds a lap slower than Sebastian Vettel's F-1 car.
• Motorcycle chassis are complex, dynamic systems. If you took all the restrictions off the chassis, you could use a Dodge Charger motor to power a car that could lap within 10% of an F-1 car. It's not so easy with bikes.
• More than anything else, electronics -- it's your choice whether you call them 'traction control' or 'rider aids' -- have become the rate-limiting factor in motorcycle racing.

Now that Dorna controls both MotoGP and World SBK racing, it will be interesting to see how they go about packaging the two racing 'brands'. One thing is sure: the prototype class loses its raison d'être if it is not faster than the production-based class. With cost-control and safety concerns arguing against any changes that will make MotoGP bikes faster, the only solution in sight is making Superbikes slower.

Until they do that, they'd better avoid putting Superbikes and MotoGP bikes on track together.

Monday morning Crew Chief, Thursday Edition. The six-motor rule blows. Or does it?

For a while, it seemed is if MotoGP's "six motor" rule could have a real impact on Jorge Lorenzo's World Championship bid. As the season wore down, Pedrosa's team had lots of (expected) life left in their six motors. But Lorenzo, through no fault of his own, wrecked one motor half-way through the season. That left the very real prospect that #99 could have to use a seventh motor, which would mean that he'd have to start from pit lane.

"I see your white smoke," said Pedrosa, "and I'll raise you 250 rpm."

The consensus seemed to be that, should that happen, it would suck. I.E., that we were (again!) experiencing the law of unintended consequences as it applies to MotoGP rules. Limiting the number of engines sort of made intuitive sense as a cost-limiting measure (good). But few liked the idea that the rule might actually be the 'outside assistance' Honda and Pedrosa needed to pull championship victory from the jaws of defeat second place.

With only two races to go, it now seems less likely that this will be a deciding factor in the championship. It could still be so, but only if Lorenzo blows a motor and is DNF somewhere, which doesn't seem to happen that much any more. Most feel that if Yamaha had to fit a seventh motor and thus forced him to start from pit lane, that he'd still have no trouble putting enough points on the board to win the title, thanks to his very strong early season form.

I frankly like the added strategic battle that the six-engine rule brings to MotoGP. If there can't be action on track, there's at least intrigue in the pits, and the battle's well-joined by the Crew Chiefs.

It's cool that (by measuring the pitch of Pedrosa's exhaust note at peak revs) geekfans have determined that Honda's been raising the rev limit on his bike. I think that right now, if Lorenzo finishes right behind Pedrosa at Philip Island (which is not a given, since Stoner's resurgent, but still) then Lorenzo would only have to finish 8th or better in Valencia to clinch. That would make for a boring last couple of races except that we may be looking at a situation in which Pedrosa's team can tune a bike for guaranteed wins while Lorenzo's team have to tune for the finish.

I think it would have been even more interesting if Lorenzo had run into engine life issues a few races ago. That would open up the situation in which his team's best strategy was to take a seventh motor with, say, four races to go even though they may have made their six 'legal' motors last.

Yes, that would mean an unnecessary pit lane start -- which seems like a ridiculous choice -- but it might be better to do that and run all the motors at full power rather than start at your earned grid position in that one race, but run all remaining races detuned for reliability.

I wonder if the teams have a computer simulation that allows them to calculate and optimize this strategy?

Monday morning crew chief -- The rap(p) on CRTs, etc.

Attack got some good PR in the weeks leading up to their first-of-two wild card/CRT entries. But it ended in disappointment as Rapp missed the 107% cutoff (of pole time) and failed to qualify for the race.

Rapp would'a needed to find another half-second or so to make the grid. Failing to qualify, under the circumstances, shouldn't have surprised anyone. Attack didn't have their bike together nearly soon enough. Remember the first few winter tests of the full-time CRT machines, in Spain? They sucked. That's the development stage that Attack's at right now. To put it in perspective, Martin Cardenas on his 600 was as close to Steve Rapp as Steve Rapp was to the slowest rider who made the MotoGP grid.

I want to believe that the Attack bike is capable of running with, if not the big dogs of MotoGP, at least the lap(ped) dogs. But getting the bike up to speed doesn't just take track time. To really evaluate your bike and improve it, you need to be on the track with other bikes and riders as fast as you are.

There's an official AMA Superbike test day the week before the Indy MotoGP event. I don't have a MotoGP rule book, so I'm not sure what the MotoGP rules have to say about wild card riders practicing on the circuit in the weeks leading up to the race. If Attack's allowed to practice on the circuit along with the AMA Superbikes, it would be nice if the AMA invited them to the test.

It was interesting to see just where the CRT bikes are vis-a-vis the American-rules Superbikes. When the current U.S. rules package was defined, there was a lot of complaining that the bikes were 'dumbed down'. And yet, the fastest three Superbike qualifiers were in the 1:24s, as were the slowest three MotoGP qualifiers. Hayes' Superbike race-winning average speed (151 kph) was about the same as the slowest CRT finisher's.

I realize it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. The fastest U.S. riders all have a lot more seat time at Laguna Seca than those CRT riders (who, for all I know were seeing it for the first time.) It's not a particularly easy track to learn. It's slow and technical; on a faster track like Philip Island, I imagine the CRT bikes would have stretched their legs a bit more. And of course they're on different tires.

But still. It's clear that in qualifying trim, the CRT bikes are not much faster than AMA Pro Racing's Superbikes. They're not any faster than World Superbike machines, even though CRT rules are quite a bit more flexible than SBK rules, and a lot more flexible than U.S. rules.

The lesson in this is not that CRT bikes are crap (no matter what Colin Edwards says.) The lesson is that production (and production-based) bikes are so good that performance is barely rules-limited.

Monday Morning Crew Chief: How does Rossi feel about lapped traffic now?

Over the winter break, most factory riders in MotoGP were openly critical of the prospect of encountering lapped traffic (again) in the premier class in 2012. The tone of discussion ranged from assuming that fans would be aghast at the sight of backmarkers (no relation) being lapped, to implications that speed differentials would create major safety hazards.

Valentino Rossi and Nicky Hayden were almost the only two factory riders who didn't decry the CRT rules. The two Ducati riders were far from enthusiastic  about the prospect of sharing the track with riders and motorcycles turning significantly slower lap times, but at least they were open to trying the new rules on for size.

I guess Rossi may now be one of the few factory riders actively supporting the CRT rules, after one of the CRT bikes, getting lapped at the end of the race, slowed Casey Stoner just enough to allow Rossi to close the gap to second place. Rossi would never have caught and passed Stoner otherwise.

I doubt Stoner was philosophical about the presence of the lapper -- and I suppose I have to admit that I jumped the gun a little in assuming the FIM would force him to race by himself as early as yesterday. Now that he's shown a bit of vulnerability, I guess they may put the SuperLeague on hold.

But seriously, folks...

Where did the idea even come from, that no one should ever encounter lapped traffic in the premier class? Dealing with lapped traffic has long been a part of racecraft; there were lappers in almost every 500GP race ever held. Hailwood and Agostini used to just about lap everyone but each other.

The AMA's tightened Q standards in recent years with an eye to reducing lapped traffic here in the U.S., and the races have been great -- but the credit for that goes towards ever-more-restricted technical rules and spec tires -- not cleaning up the back of the grid*. Miguel Duhamel, for one, would have a much smaller win total if it hadn't been for his skillful use of backmarkers -- I often saw him deftly catch and pass riders on better machinery, when they caught up to rolling chicanes in the second half of AMA nationals.

I think most people would say that the rapid evolution of the four-stroke bikes in the MotoGP era, particularly in the area of electronics, has reduced the amount of passing and dicing at a time when the problem of processional races is compounded by shrinking grids. Predictability is a great thing if you're the best rider on the best bike, but it sucks for the fans and the mid-grid. Lapped traffic is, if nothing else, a randomizing factor that re-emphasizes the rider's racecraft, and de-emphasizes the black boxes.

Lappers aren't necessarily bad for the show. Just ask Rossi.

*And, to the absence of Spies and Mladin. I'm just sayin'...

The rap on EVmoto 'racing'

A little while back, I noted that in spite of a ridiculously small field at the first 2012 e-Power race at Magny-Cours, it seemed the FIM had upgraded the series from an 'International Championship' to an official FIM World Championship. I just noticed that the series is now listed as a World Championship, like MotoGP and SBK.

I guess the FIM's staking its claim to the future, because at present, most EV motorcycle races are laughable. Not that racing a motorcycle with 100+ hp is ever a joke in itself, as Brammo's Steve Atlas now knows. He was bucked off the Empulse RR and broke several vertebrae(!!) Then, Brammo tapped Steve Rapp (an Infineon expert and a notable 'hired gun' in the AMA paddock) to take the ride, and it threw him down the road, too. Rapp broke his wrist, knocking him out of an actual motorcycle race he was entered in later that weekend. I hear they've already contacted Guilherme Marchi, a Brazilian, to take over riding duties at Laguna Seca.

Brammo ran this ad to celebrate it's 2011 TTXGP 'championship'. There's only one real race for EV motorcycles right now, though, and only one win will matter.

That left  precisely two entries in the TTXGP 'premier' class at Infineon. Both Lightnings. One finished. Yes, one entrant crossed the finish line.

Note to the EV racing apologists: One bike doesn't make a race.

And that was at Infineon; a race in the back yard of America's EV moto industry, such as it is. (Yes, I know Zero was represented in the 'super stock' class.) I presume a few more bikes will show up at Laguna Seca, when TTXGP and the FIM hold one of their interlocking races, but as an outsider looking in, I'm expecting another laughingstock.

By contrast there were, last I saw, close to 20 entries for the TT Zero event, pitting all the highest-profile U.S. endeavors against, among others, the most intriguing electric bike yet -- the Mugen. This is as it should be. Right now, EVs are still struggling to establish relevance, and prove they're meaningfully functional in real-world applications. The Isle of Man 'Mountain Course,' with its long lap, elevation change, long fast stretches and full set of real-roads challenges (bumps, terrible weather, crazy cambers; you name it...) has always been the place to prove that your bike's the best one out where real motorcycling happens, on real roads.

Until the TTXGP and e-Power get their shit together -- until they can field a reasonable number of competitive entrants -- there's only one EV motorcycle race worth paying attention to.

Wake me next month.

And a note to the FIM: 'World Championship'? Get real.

Bubba Stewart, idiot savant of physics

Red Bull just released a promotional video of Bubba Stewart. It's the sort of hi-def, ultra-slo-mo stuff you'd expect. Bubba narrates it, providing a pretty bland and dull commentary. What interests me about it is his discussion of his greatest contribution to motocross, the 'Bubba Scrub'.



The scrub move gave Bubba a huge advantage coming up as a motocross racer. In the long travel suspension/SX era, speed over jumps is an important factor in race success, especially in SX races. Course designers make the challenge harder, by contouring landing areas or locating corners in places that make it more complicated than just hitting the takeoff ramp at a higher speed, flying further and higher, and landing with a higher retained speed.

I remember watching Bubba as a young 125 racer, and he was so much faster through the air than other riders that it seemed as if a different set of laws of physics applied to him. Time after time, he'd pass people in mid-air, on a visibly lower and faster trajectory.

While no one really seemed to know just how Bubba's trick on the takeoff ramps worked, all his rivals quickly realized that it did work, and before long it was part of every motocrosser or supercrosser's arsenal. On a big outdoor track, the scrub allows riders to hit takeoff ramps at higher speed without launching themselves into space; they get back to the ground faster, where their rear wheel can again begin transmitting power. On a supercross track, where landing areas are typically tighter, they can hit the jump harder without over-jumping.

The Red Bull video doesn't really have great shots of the key moment in the scrub -- which is when the rider essentially does a whip on the takeoff ramp, virtually crashing his bike into the ramp at the moment when it goes ballistic. But there are any number of great videos illustrating the technique, such as this one...



Bubba's own narration makes it clear that he has no idea how it works. He claims that it works by reducing aerodynamic drag in mid-air. That's why he's a motorcycle racer and I'm a frustrated genius. (Trust me, Bubba, you'd rather be you. Geniuses don't have groupies who'll boink them in their motorhomes. In fact, we don't even rate motorhomes. Put that way, I'd rather be you, too.)

But, the Scrub's got nothing to do with aerodynamic drag, for several reasons not the least of which is that with average SX lap speeds of about 30 mph, drag's minimal and that there's no reason why drag would be lower with the bike horizontal compared to vertical. If you watch the video clip above, you'll see that in fact during the mid-air recovery phase, his bike's turned broadside to the direction of travel, for maximum aero drag.

So why does the scrub actually work? It's all about getting a lower trajectory off any given launch ramp.

As noted, all else being equal, lower trajectory is faster for two reasons: It will get you back on the ground, with your rear wheel driving forward, ASAP. And/or, it will allow you to hit a jump faster without over jumping the landing area.

Pre-Bubba, motocross racers pretty much always ran up the launch ramp with their bikes straight up and down (or as straight as they could get 'em.) That meant that their bikes' center of mass left the jump on a trajectory parallel (and a couple of feet above) the angle of the launch ramp. (I'm simplifying ever so slightly here, and describing a sharp-edged ramp. It's more complex but the same principles apply over a jump with a rounded profile. Also, amateur physicists please note that I'm using the term 'bike's center of mass' but really mean, 'combined bike and rider center of mass.') (God, can I get one more parenthetical comment into this paragraph?)

Bubba himself accidentally gets part of the scrub explanation right in the Red Bull video when he says that you have to crash the bike as you leave the jump, and have faith that you can gather it back up and land on the wheels. That's pretty much what happens.

When a rider does the scrub, he's basically pushing his bike's center of mass down towards the track at the moment that he breaks contact with the ground and takes to the air. The path that the center of mass is taking through space at that moment defines the bike's ballistic trajectory in the air.

It's critical to understand that if the rider grossly mis-timed his scrub, and scrubbed well before the takeoff lip, he'd simply crash his bike into the ground. I've seen videos in which riders actually drag their cases off the jump. IE, at the moment they go ballistic, their bike's center of mass is at least a foot lower than it would be in the normal riding position. Considering that that one-foot drop happens on the launch ramp -- and as long as it's in progress at the moment the bike goes ballistic -- it effectively reduces the ramp angle by several degrees.

Anyone who remembers the days when Bubba first rode the 125 class (often posting times as fast or faster than the best 250 riders!) will recall seeing him pass many riders in mid-air; going a gear faster while magically traveling on a much lower trajectory.

Given Bubba's tendency to over-ride his bike, I imagine that this technique was simply discovered when he realized that he was on a takeoff ramp and committed to the jump, while traveling at a speed much too high for the situation. Either he'd carried too much speed out of the last corner and was still turning the bike on takeoff ramp, or he realized he was about to over jump a landing area followed by a corner and attempted to start turning the following corner before even leaving the jump. Regardless, he basically low-sided at high speed over the lip of the jump. Once in mid-air, his instincts took over; he'd already landed hundreds of show-offy whips, and this was no different. The Bubba Scrub was born.

Now, I presume that Bubba knows that, sometimes, you can break the law and just get away with it. I guess that's what he was hoping would happen last year, when he was arrested after impersonating a police officer and attempting to pull over... a real cop.

But the laws of physics are not like the law. You not only never get away with breaking them, you just can't break them, period. The flight trajectories of things like motorcycles -- with no appreciable lift or motive power in the air, it's a projectile -- are clearly defined by simple equations that can be found in any high-school physics text. The rider can do things that will adjust the bike's pitch, roll, and yaw in mid-air, but there is nothing he can do to prevent the motorcycle's center of mass from following a ballistic trajectory that is defined by simple physics.

Bubba can't break those laws any more than I can, but he did (probably accidentally) find a way to redefine his launch trajectory. Until he came along, motocross racers had always launched off a jump on a trajectory defined by the jump itself.

Realizing that he'd found a way to change that trajectory was Bubba's genius. I guess it doesn't matter whether he knows why it works or not.

Monday morning crew chief: Hayes' shot? Not. But, he gets the job done

In a tumultuous couple of weeks in MotoGP racing, one of the bright spots was Josh Hayes' job subbing for Colin Edwards.

The final race of the 2011 season could have been a non-event for Yamaha. Lorenzo was scrubbed -- still nursing a flayed finger, and there had to have been a question mark about Spies' health, after he was withdrawn in Sepang. Colin Edwards would not be racing for Tech 3, either; he proved to have been more injured than he'd looked at first, after the Simoncelli incident. And the whole weekend was, of course, colored by the fact that it was the first one after #58's death. All in all, the cold and rainy weather was apropos.

Cue Josh Hayes, who had been scheduled to 'test' a Yamaha M1 after the race at Valencia. This started out as a lark, really -- just a way for Yamaha USA to eke out a little more publicity from their AMA Superbike Championship. Suddenly, though, with not one but two riders out of commission, Hayes was invited to actually race.

There are those who described Hayes' opportunity as 'his shot' which, sadly, it was not. At 36, no one is seriously going to consider hiring Hayes as a MotoGP regular. People hoped that maybe Hayes would set the cat amongst the pigeons, the way Troy Bayliss did at the end of the '06 season. That was not going to happen because Bayliss had three big advantages over Hayes: he'd already ridden the track, he'd already tested the bike, and he was, after all, Troy Bayliss.

The powers-that-be in MotoGP don't want to give fans the impression that there are a bunch of guys pushing 40, languishing in national series around the world, who are just as fast as 'real' MotoGP riders. When a national rider like Josh Hayes is parachuted into the World Championship, they want to see him right at the bottom of the time sheets. Will they bring him back for a few more (U.S.) races in 2012? They'll be balancing the risk of embarrassment if he does too well, against Hayes' popularity in the U.S. 

People set, as a goal for Hayes, at a minimum finishing above Cal Crutchlow; that would have been totally unrealistic under the circumstances -- unless, maybe, it had snowed. In fact, over the course of the race, Crutchlow eked out an advantage of about one second per lap.

That's no insult to Hayes, who handled his first MotoGP race weekend perfectly. In shitty practice conditions, he kept the bike rubber-side-down and put in plenty of laps. Just not wrecking the equipment is a huge first step in building a rapport with any new team, and not taking anybody else out helps to build acceptance in the wider paddock. He seized an opportunity to top the time-sheets in the morning warm-up (a fluke, but still pretty cool) and then kept his head in the race, avoiding trouble with Katsuyuki Nakasuga, and passing series regulars when he got the chance. He finished ahead of Loris Capirossi and Tony Elias, who aren't exactly chumps. By any realistic standard, the goal for a first MotoGP weekend -- especially at the end of a season when you're the only newbie out there -- isn't to do something great, it's to avoid doing something stupid.

At the end of the day, seventh place in a MotoGP debut is eyebrow-raising, no matter who didn't start or who was taken out in the first lap. There will be those who'll say that Hayes got a gift last weekend, but that's not true. There's no such thing as being gifted positions in motorcycle racing. If Hayes had ridden over his head in the U.S. series, he'd be the one home recuperating from some injury. When someone crashes out in front of you, you beat them just as surely as if you'd stuffed them in Turn 1 and pulled off a nasty block pass.

Motorcycle racing is all about concentration, confidence, and focus; new stimuli (to say nothing of an unfamiliar bike, tires, and track!) are all concentration and confidence sappers. Hayes is now far more familiar with the M1 in particular, and MotoGP in general; getting that first race under his belt without a mishap sets him up to do even better next time, when he'll know what to expect.

What I'd like to see happen now is, I'd like to see Yamaha decide to enter an extra bike for him in the  U.S. MotoGP rounds next season. And give Hayes at least a couple more testing opportunities. I think that if they did that, by the time he was in his third or fourth MotoGP race, he'd be mixing it up in top half of the field, even at races with a full grid and all the 'names' healthy and up on two wheels. Note that that is what I'd like to see, not necessarily what MotoGP wants to see (read photo caption for more on this.)

Would even that earn him 'a shot'? No. No chance. He's old enough to the father of the riders who'll get their shots at MotoGP stardom in the next couple of years. Is that unfair? Yes, totally. But motorcycle racing's become another youth cult. Get used to it. Josh Hayes will retire from motorcycle racing before he's ever seriously considered for a contract in the world's premiere series.

But.

What Hayes would earn from that kind of showing -- and he's really almost earned it already -- is the right to say, "If I'd been given the right breaks, I could have raced with those guys."

I once read a mainstream media sportswriter describe Hayes as, "the nicest professional athlete I've ever met," but every racer has to have a massive ego. The racer's ego in Josh Hayes already knows he could'a been a contendah, but the chance to prove that to a wider public would almost be as valuable, to him, as a legitimate shot.

A writer's notebook, Simoncelli, and a meditation on risk

The last week or so, there's been several moments when I've found myself thinking, 'That would make a great topic for a blog post,' but I just haven't had the time to jot down more than a reminder to myself.

The hip Hell for Leather site's been paying a little attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement; first covering the NYC cops' apparent use of their scooters as juggernauts, bowling over protesters. Then, they ran this story about Greek rioters using motorcycle gear for protection from police batons, etc. Are they taking a side? It's not yet clear.

Another disgruntled ex-motorcycle journalist, Mark Williams -- the long-time editor of the great UK magazine BIKE -- has taken to blogging about wider topics, and his blog's definitely worth reading.

I've been meaning to weigh in on the (hopefully final, for a while) sale of Cycle World magazine. Then I decided that, instead, I'd conduct a lengthy interview with America's greatest bike mag editor, Cook Neilson.

Cook, who studied Lit at Princeton, was the editor of Cycle from the late '60s through the late '70s. Picture this: When Cycle moved from New York to L.A., they moved into a space that was 25% office and 75% shop. Cook and Phil Schilling developed and built a motorcycle, in their own shop, that Cook used to win the 1977 Superbike race at Daytona.

That interview's epic, and I'll probably finish writing it up and post it in a month or two on the Motorcycle-USA web site. I wish Cycle World well I guess, but it's no Cycle.

I was going to write about two 'Love Ride' motorcyclists being killed in L.A., and point out for the nth time that rides for breast cancer, autism, toys for tots or whatever the hell else you want to benefit are misguided. The only thing we, as motorcyclists, should ride to benefit is spinal cord research. Breast cancer, autism, and toyless tots are all worthy causes, but we should be collecting money for the thing that most affects us, as riders. The only reason we don't is that we're all too scared to even raise the subject.

Oh, and my friend John Stein's amazing history of motorcycle drag racing is about to come out, and that's newsworthy too. All that was stuff I was hoping to write up when I finally got a couple of days off early this week.


Then Marco Simoncelli was killed in Malaysia. That changed everything.

I haven't seen the crash. Since I don't have a television, I wasn't watching it and I won't see it on the internet because my personal policy is not to purposely watch a crash that ends a career. It's just a thing with me; a place I draw the line.

Simoncelli's death, though, underlines the inherent risk in motorsport. The best gear, the safest tracks, the best corner workers and the Clinica Mobile will never take all those risks out of racing. In fact, if racing ever was made completely safe, it would also become boring to me.

Risk, as a philosopher might say, informs motorcycle racing. We don't race in order to take risks, but risk gives the decision to go racing meaning. About 15 years ago, when I was working my way up through the amateur ranks as a club racer, I realized that I wanted to explain that to a public that took a very simplistic view of risk sports. I knew that in order to come to terms with the topic, I would have to go and race in the place where that risk was most obvious. To fully understand that topic, I had to race on the Isle of Man, in the TT.

Although what Marco Simoncelli did for a living was very dangerous compared to, say, soccer, MotoGP is very safe compared to racing in the TT. Simoncelli was the first MotoGP rider to die in a race since Daijiro Kato in 2003. TT riders are killed every single year.

My book about the TT, Riding Man, is largely a meditation on risk and today and Thursday, I'll post a couple of the most relevant excerpts. Here's the first one, a chapter of the book called...

Memorials 

The TT course is lined with memorials to riders. Some of them are big, permanent features of the TT course. The Guthrie Memorial on the climb up the mountain, which is really just a cairn; the Graham Memorial which is anA-framed chapel that looks west down the Laxey Valley; and now the Dunlop Memorial, a bronze statue up at the Bungalow. They’re the exceptions to the general rule, since Guthrie and Dunlop died on other circuits (Guthrie at the German Grand Prix in ’39, and Dunlop in Estonia in 2000.) Even Graham’s chapel was built far from the bottom of Bray Hill where he crashed and died. Officially, little is done to remember the fallen.

The vast majority of TT memorials are much smaller and unofficial; they’re placed by friends and families at the very spot their loved one died. At first, you don’t see them. Then you notice one because it’s relatively prominent, or because it’s new or freshly cleaned. As you get sensitized, you start to see more and more of them, notice ever subtler and older ones, see the ones that are set further back in the weeds. Eventually, you realize that no matter where you choose to stop along the course if you know what to look for, you can see something that commemorates a fallen rider.

They are permanent plaques in stone or metal, screwed to fences or set in the ground. They are personal mementos, stuffed animals or flags or photos, tacked to trees or jammed between rocks. They are flowers, long dried, brown, wilted and molding, or gone altogether leaving a faded bit of ribbon gradually fraying in the constant wind.

• 
  

Alpine Cottage is a fast but normally innocuous right -hander between Kirk Michael and Ballaugh. The turn-in marker for this bend is the nearby bus shelter. When I stop to study the corner’s line I notice that the bus stop has a ceramic plaque set into its wall, low down in one corner almost at ground level.

On the plaque, there is a glazed bas-relief illustration of a racing sidecar, with Manx and Swedish flags. It reads: ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF TOMAS & MATS ERICSSON WHO DIED NEAR THIS POINT IN PRACTICE FOR THE 1985 T.T. RACES. THEY WERE BRILLIANT EXPONENTS OF SIDECAR RACING AND FINE EXAMPLES OF THE YOUTH OF SWEDEN WHO THEY REPRESENTED INTERNATIONALLY – COMPETITORS IN SPORT AND LIFE.

• 
  

A mile or so down the road, just over the bridge at the entrance to the town of Ballaugh, there’s a fine bronze bas-relief set in a white stucco gate. It is a portrait of a man and since he’s wearing a pudding bowl crash helmet, I’m pretty sure it’s a memorial. I make a note of the name Karl Gall and the date1939, with an eye to checking on them next time I’m in the library.

Later on, I do go to the library and pull the 1939 volume of the local paper. Gall had been one of the leading German riders of the 1930s. In the ’38 TT, Gall had crashed hard at Waterworks and been badly hurt. He’d announced his retirement after that. But as war clouds gathered, the Nazis were determined to wring as much propaganda value as possible from international motorsport. The BMW, DKW and NSU teams all got Nazi support, but it came with heavy pressure to deliver results, especially at prestigious events like the TT. Gall was persuaded to take one more shot at the Senior, on BMW’s all-powerful, supercharged ‘kompressor’ twin. In practice, he lost control going over Ballaugh Bridge, and was flung headfirst into that gatepost. His team-mate, Georg Meier, ended up winning the last prewar Senior on an identical machine.

• 
  

One time, Steve accompanies me on a bicycle lap. It’s nearly the death of him. I collect him at Ballacraine, which is already a pretty long ride from his house, considering that he doesn’t cycle or get much of any other kind of exercise. We set off up Ballaspur and haven’t gone too far – we’re near Laurel Bank – when he calls out for me to stop. At first I think he just needs a rest, but he leans his bike against a low stone wall and starts to climb over it. “Come here,” he says “I want to show you something.”

It drops away so the wall is only a couple of feet high from the road, but it’s a five-foot jump to the damp and musky forest floor. The Neb, a little stream, gurgles a few yards away. Hidden here behind the wall amongst fiddleheads are three little plaques devoted to Mark Farmer, a popular rider who died in 1994 while riding a Britten.

“I came here once and noticed that one of these plaques had been removed,” said Steve. “I thought ‘Bloody hell, someone’s stolen one of them,’ but the next time I looked it was back and all polished. They’d just removed it for cleaning.”

We clambered back over the wall. As we got on our bikes, Steve said, “I’ll tell you what my friend… I don’t want to be polishing your memorial around here.”

• 
  

After a while, I start to get a little paranoid about the memorials, about the danger. Then one day I stop to study Kate’s Cottage. There never was a “Kate”, ironically. The cottage belonged to the Tates, but at one TT years back, an excited commentator got tongue-tied and blurted out something about “Kate’s Cottage” and the name stuck. It’s a hairy-looking spot; a narrow, fast, blind, downhill kink with – on top of everything else – a constant trickle of water that flows from a crack in the pavement right on the natural racing line, leaving it damp on all but the hottest days.

Dodging cars, I walk down through the corner to look for (more) hazards on the exit. There, I notice a commercial florist’s bouquet that’s been tied to a concrete fencepost with ribbon. It’s been there a long time, I can tell. There’s a tiny white envelope attached to it; the kind that comes with any basic commercial bouquet, which would normally contain a card with a message from the sender. I slip a finger into the envelope, which has been softened by the elements. It’s empty. No card. No clue who it might have been for, or from. I realize that there is some faded writing on the envelope itself. It says “34th milestone (Kate’s)”.

Something about this one, in particular, sticks in my mind. Sometime later, I walk down the Strand in Douglas and look in on a florist, when it hits me: It wasn’t that someone put the bouquet there, they phoned it in. That was why there was no message in the envelope: there was no recipient, at least no one who needed to read anything. The florist had just written the delivery address down on the envelope, and gone out and tied it to the fence.

The people, friends and family who gather in small groups to place the more permanent memorials are – at least in part – doing something for themselves. Getting ‘closure’, to put a pop pscyh label on it. But whoever phoned in that florist’s order was doing something very different. He or she was never going to see the flowers; they were going to be placed by someone with no connection to anything. And really, except for me, they were destined to go almost unnoticed. It was less a public thing than a private message to an anonymous rider, as if he was still out there somewhere, lapping the course.

Something about that flips a neuron in me, and I suddenly realize that, read as a collective, the hundreds of memorials are not sad. Although they often express loss, “You’ll be missed,” not one of them condemns the TT. If anything, they celebrate it as the high point, which it was, of every life thus recalled.

I don’t want Steve polishing my memorial here either. But I can not think of any place I’d rather have one.

Thanks for reading. Check back next Thursday for a second excerpt from Riding Man -- one that will explain why Marco Simoncelli almost certainly didn't think it could happen to him.

Is there a lesson for motorcycle rules committees in the Dan Wheldon crash?

I heard about Dan Wheldon's fatal IndyCar crash on Sunday, when I dropped by a friend's place for dinner. He told me that crash footage was already on the web, but I haven't seen it; my personal rule is not to (purposely) watch crashes that end anyone's career.

I was at the gym yesterday, which is the only place I'm exposed to actual television. There's a wall of TVs in front of the cardio equipment, and when I looked up I saw snippets of "analysis" on ESPN, CNN, etc. I also saw photos on the New York Times website.

The 'Vegas track was modified a few years ago, when they increased the steepest banking angle to 20 degrees from 12. That meant that top speeds increased to, like, 225 miles an hour. I remember, maybe 15-20 years ago, when Scott Goodyear lapped the Michigan track at 230-something, and people in IndyCar muttered that it was maybe time to do something about those speeds because if anything went wrong, there would be carnage. Last weekend, despite the fact that the rules governing IndyCar are far stricter than they were in Goodyear's day, lap speeds were nearly that high on the 'Vegas track -- and it's a mile shorter than the Michigan superspeedway.

The Newtonian response to Wheldon's crash is note that Energy=Mass times Velocity squared. All else being equal, a crash at 225mph 'IndyCar' speeds dissipates about 60% more energy than one at 180mph 'NASCAR' speeds. Danica Patrick, in the aftermath of the recent IndyCar incident, noted that she wouldn't mind putting those speeds behind her when she completes her transition to NASCAR for the 2012 season.

The Machiavellian response to the Wheldon crash is that it will finally give IndyCar the marketing hook it has needed for about 10 years. "NASCAR is great, too. For girls. Real men race open-wheel cars."

You can pussyfoot around it all you want, but there's no point in denying the fact that a large part of the audience appeal in mass-market car racing is "wantin' ta see wrecks." One of the reasons that I'm of two minds about promoting motorcycle racing to a wider, mass-market, audience is that in our dumbed-down culture, a big crowd will inevitably be watching for wrecks and incapable of understanding the nuances of actual racing.

Don't get me wrong; there's (sometimes) a distinction between wrecks and fatalities. Over the last 30 years or so, NASCAR's been very good at building up the brand value of drivers, and it doesn't want them killed; it's bad for business. So they use restrictor plates and a bunch of other rules that, taken together reduce lap speeds to threshold below which driver survival is (nearly) guaranteed. As a, ahem, side-effect of those rules, however, the cars run very close together in drafting packs and there are plenty of crowd-pleasing wrecks.

Notwithstanding the Newtonian and Machiavellian responses, though, it was obvious that the Wheldon crash was the result of a series of events that unfolded very quickly as a large pack of cars traveled at very high speed in close formation. Clearly one part of that equation is that a rolling start on a speedway yields a closely spaced pack for a long time under almost any conditions. In current IndyCar racing -- it's nearly a spec series -- all cars' performance is very close. The difference between the pole time at 'Vegas, and Wheldon's time -- he qualified way back in 28th place -- was less than 2%.

We've seen a similar compression in qualifying times in MotoGP, with the advent of the spec tire and/or traction control era. The evolution of MotoGP rules continues, and the stated goal of rules changes in recent years has usually been to help (or force) teams to control costs. Much closer qualifying times are a side effect. The only reason we don't see huge packs of bikes racing close together for the first few laps until they string out, is that the grid is so sparse to begin with.

Curiously, the racing's not nearly so good as the tight qualifying results would imply. That's a subject for another post. Of course, the rules of Moto2 make that even more of a spec class, and with its larger grids it has been a crash-fest since its inception. With lots of bikes riding in tight formation for long periods, the occasional crash in which a rider is left on the track in the path of following riders is inevitable. Tomizawa's crash at Imola last year is just one recent example of how much more dangerous such crashes are in the world of motorcycle racing (although it occurred after the field had strung out.)

Restrictor-plate racing has bunched up the fields in AMA Pro Racing flat track competition, too. Races have been pretty thrilling as a result, and we've done OK, safety-wise. We're keeping speeds under control and there's more air fence than there used to be. In the Pro class, the singles races on big tracks are pure drafting battles that are exciting to watch but I think they're a recipe for disaster.

My point in writing this post is that historically, motorcycle racing has been great to watch when there were battles up and down the field, but it doesn't necessarily need huge packs of riders who can't get away from each other.

Maybe it's time to free up the rules and let that happen, before we have our own Dan Wheldon horror crash. You guys all seem to want more TV coverage of motorcycle racing, but I don't want to get my sport on TV that bad.

'H' could stand for 'has-been'. Or hero...

As I rode in to work on Sunday, I mulled over John Hopkins' bad luck in finishing second, by .006 seconds, in the British Superbike Championship. Hopkins had an amazing season in the UK, riding unfamiliar tracks in a new team. He was in the hunt all year and but for -- take your pick -- his MotoGP hand injury or a machine problem in the second leg of the final BSB triple-header, he would have won the championship in his 'rookie' season over there.

Hopkins, though only 28, has already seemed washed up as a result of injuries at least once. Now, he's a battered vet, but he nearly won the British Superbike Championship on his first go.

Hopkins is not old; he's still in his twenties. But a year or two ago, he seemed done in by Schwantz-like repeated injuries. When he dropped from MotoGP to an American Superbike Championship series satellite team, many in the motorcycle racing world classified him as a has-been. His career trajectory was definitely down. His old mentor, John Ulrich, found a place for him at M4 Suzuki but even Ulrich felt that Hopkins had misrepresented his race fitness.

As I trundled along my commute, my thoughts ranged to two other 'old' riders who've also had good seasons. Josh Hayes, who's pushing 40, won his second AMA Pro Superbike title in a thrilling final too. He finally came to the fore after toiling in a series where if you weren't on a Yoshimura Suzuki, you had no real chance of winning. (And, even if you were, you had to beat Ben Spies and/or Mat Mladin.) He's another guy that, just three or four years ago, you would have said was destined to 'best of the rest' status -- which is not too attractive to sponsors and team owners in a sport that places a pedophile's priorities on youth.

All things come to those who wait. In Hayes' case, he had to wait for  AMA Pro to level the Superbike playing field in the U.S. His 2011 title defense was as hard-fought as his 2010 series, despite the absence of nemesis Mat Mladin. Now, he's slated for "a few laps" on a Yamaha MotoGP bike at the end-of-season test. I suppose that if he goes well, he might be in line for a wild-card ride (or three) in the U.S. next year, but there's no chance he'll actually move to MotoGP -- he's far to old. Not in reality, just in the minds of the motorcycle racing powers-that-be.

Then there's Nicky Hayden, 30. Although he may 'only' be languishing in seventh place in the MotoGP standings, 2011's been a season of redemption for him, too. Sure he won the AMA Superbike title in 2002 in dominant fashion, and won the 2006 MotoGP Championship, but he's also struggled for long periods. In those years when he was the 'B' team-mate at both Honda and Ducati, he continued to shoulder the 'A' testing load.

It could just be me, but Nicky Hayden seems a little less haunted this year. Is it that now the world's seen that even Valentino Rossi can't ride the Ducati MotoGP bike? And that Nicky's occasionally out-qualifying Rossi?

It must have been frustrating when Stoner could make the Ducati GP10 work (at least some of the time) and Nicky couldn't. Then, Ducati teamed him with Valentino Rossi for 2011. I guess we all knew who the teacher's pet would be in that class.

But it turns out that even the greatest living motorcycle racer couldn't make the GP11 work. Despite the fact that Ducati is (obviously) putting most of its efforts into Rossi's side of the garage -- despite the fact that Rossi gets all the best new stuff first -- Hayden's outridden Rossi several times. So no matter how long it's been since his last win, Nicky's had a few moral victories this year.

Where I'm going with this is that after a decade of increasing pressure to start kids road racing at younger and younger ages, there's still rewards to be reaped from experience and perseverance. I know that plenty of young riders would have looked at all three of these guys at the beginning of the 2011 season and thought, "I should have that ride."(OK, kids would look at two of the three and think that; most would admit that Yamaha would have been crazy to let Hayes walk away with his #1 plate.)

That's especially true of Hopkins in BSB. Most young racers (whose attention spans are scarcely longer than a fruit fly's) had forgotten his stalwart years in MotoGP (where he put in a yeoman's effort racing for teams in which winning was really not even possible.) Many European riders resent Hayden's Ducati deal, which they see as a reflection of the importance of the U.S. market to Ducati's sales.

So, many 'young guns' probably think they deserve those guys'  rides. But the truth is, no kid could have done anywhere near as well as these 'old guns' in their respective teams/situations. So what's with the obsession with pushing kids as young as 12 into road racing?

Hopper, Hayes, and Hayden didn't put in creditable seasons this year because they started racing as little kids. They racked up good results this year because of the years of toil they put in after they stopped being young guns.

I don't really know what Hayes' early childhood riding experience was; I do admit that both Hopper and Hayden were racing at a pretty high level from a pretty young age and that both of them were backed to the hilt as kids by supportive families. Nicky started out as a dirt tracker. (If he'd stayed racing flat track, he would have won multiple Grand National Championships by now, but he'd probably still need an off-season job, so I don't begrudge his switch to asphalt.)

But when I talked to him by phone earlier this season, he told me that he never rides flat track -- even mini-bikes -- in the off-season any more, because it screws him up for his MotoGP bike. So Nicky's early riding experience is definitely not the experience he put to use to out-ride Valentino Rossi several times this year.

My point in all this is, your kid doesn't have to be a young gun to succeed. You don't have to rush your kid into road racing. This year, even the guys who once were young guns succeeded because of the experience they amassed over years of ups and downs on the way to becoming old guns.

To teams and sponsors I say: Sure, keep an eye on those young guns. But bear in mind that Suzuki, Yamaha, and Ducati would be way behind where they are now if they'd hung up their old guns a season or two ago.

Indy fallout: Is this a note from the Dept. of Kicking Rossi While He's Down?

Two weeks ago, a wind gust toppled a concert stage at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. That resulted in the cancelation of the Indy Mile flat track race, and ratified my decision not to go to the MotoGP race. For me, that weekend is a great racing event, with some bonus racing at a nearby track during the day before and after the Main event.

But, I kept an eye on Indy from afar. If Valentino Rossi's ever had a more dismal qualifying, I can't bring it to mind. Rossi and Ducati's struggles this season have almost made Corse's MotoGP effort an exercise in anti-marketing. Surely people must be thinking, "If Jeremy Burgess can't make that thing rideable, and if even Valentino Rossi can't be competitive on it, it must be a real turd."

So far, it doesn't seem to have had a negative impact on Ducati sales, but you have to wonder where they'd be without the as-far-from-MotoGP-as-you-can-get Multistrada model.

In some ways, it's been interesting to watch the process of Rossi's devolution to 'human' status. That was underlined when he qualified six positions behind Nicky Hayden. (For the first time in a few races, they were on what appeared to be functionally identical bikes.)

On Saturday afternoon, Rossi's near-last grid position prompted Matthew Birt to post this brief story on the heavily trafficked UK website associated with the weekly MCN newspaper. [Full disclosure: I'm also a contributor to MCN from time to time. -- MG]

If you don't live in Europe, you may not realize that MCN is probably the most influential (not necessarily accurate, just influential) English-language motorcycle industry news source. It's closely read by everyone in the business.

Within a few minutes of Matthew Birt's story going up -- and it should be noted that Birt merely reported Rossi's rough qualifying session, quoting Rossi extensively; he didn't criticize Rossi's performance at all -- this comment was appended to MCN's post...

I quickly scanned it, thinking it was evidence of Rossi's falling from fan favor, then I did a double-take on the user name. Elbowz11?? Was that really Ben Spies?

I clicked on the Elbowz11 hyperlink only to find this...

Holy crap, eh?.. I have no real way of knowing whether MCN user Elbowz11 is really Spies or just some spotty fanboy. [Actually, I probably could just email friends on the MCN staff and confirm it, but rumors are so much more fun that facts. -- MG]

But, I assume that this really did come from Spies. The nature of the post suggests it; a terse message shortly after qualifying, still in the heat of battle, delivered via smartphone without much punctuation or second thought.

That a class rookie -- even one as talented as Spies, who was forged in the crucible of the Yosh team with Mat Mladin as 'mentor' -- would openly, publicly diss Valentino Rossi...

It shows how human the once-alien Rossi has become.

Monday Morning Crew Chief: Mission Accomplished, etc...

Mission Accomplished

I guess I've been a bit of a Mission Motors 'slammer' over the last few months. I basically called the company out, in MCN (the UK motorcycle weekly) when I wrote that the company had pretty much abandoned the idea of actually manufacturing motorcycles. 

Few people now remember that Bridgestone - the MotoGP tire supplier - once made whole motorcycles. In the 1960s, the company made tires and some really high-performance bikes. When it became obvious that other manufacturers like Honda would not specify Bridgestone tires as OEM fitment as long as Bridgestone was itself a competitor, the company had to choose whether it would pursue the tire business, or the motorcycle business. I think Mission is in the same sort of position; it can make motorcycles, or try to become a supplier of technology to Honda, et al. I think that they're positioning themselves as high-end suppliers to the car and motorcycle industry.

If I'm right about that, they made a pretty good impression at Laguna Seca last weekend. Steve Rapp obliterated the field in the TTXGP race. Rapp was several seconds a lap faster than Michael Czysz (though Czysz finished second, his MotoCzysz company was probably the one hurt most by being utterly outclassed.)

Based on his 8-lap race time, if Rapp and the Mission R had been entered in the AMA SuperSport race, he would probably have been solidly mid-pack until mid-distance. IE, Mission's taken the e-moto performance envelope and stretched it a good ways towards modern ICE sportbike performance.

For the record, with a full tank of gas, the ICE bikes in the field could have maintained their race pace for 80+ miles. If Rapp had to shepherd the energy in the Mission R's battery for 80 miles, his lap times would have been in the 2-minute range, not the 1:35s.

Still, my hat's off to Mission Motors, who have set a new benchmark for zero-emission motorcycle performance. If anyone, anywhere (Honda?) has a better handle on the challenges of managing the limited energy available in current batteries, they've not shown their hand.

It remains to be seen whether Rapp's impressive TTXGP win on the Mission R reinvigorates interest in Mission Motors as a limited-run motorcycle manufacturer -- or, will it bring in new consulting business from major OEMs who might decide to essentially outsource their R&D effort to Mission and jumpstart an e-moto program with Mission's package, which is clearly the best one that has broken cover.

Bostrom. Wrong choice?

There was a lot of skepticism when it was revealed that Ben Bostrom would get a wild card MotoGP ride at Laguna. At 37, he's probably still close to the fittest man in the AMA Superbike championship -- but he's obviously past his sell-by date as a top-level racer.

He qualified last, almost a second behind his LCR team-mate Tony Elias, and pulled in after an off-track excursion for a completely forgettable race. So the question is, did he suck, or not?

In his defense, Bostrom lapped in the 1:25.6 range in Superbike qualifying, while Tommy Hayden was the fast Suzuki rider in the AMA field, at 1:24.8 (Hayes, on a Yamaha, took pole with a 1:24.5) So if my math's right, BBoz gave up somewhere between 8/10ths of a second and a second to the fastest of the American riders in the U.S. series. Based on this, I'd say that no matter who else Lucio Cecchinello had picked among active AMA Superbike riders, his second bike would still have been the backmarker.

Stoner. Wrong choice.
The big race wiener (er, make that 'winner') was Stoner. After I ranted about MotoGP riders boycotting the rescheduled Motegi round, the FIM released a statement that could have been inspired by my post. And a number of riders, sensing fans' lack of sympathy for their cause, opted to restate their opposition to the race in terms that gave them some wiggle room.

Not Stoner, who told one reporter that his decision was not anti-Japanese at all. He said that if the tsunami and nuclear reactor damage had happened in his home country of Australia, he would not go to the Australian GP, either.

Way to endear himself to his homies, eh?

Parsing the weekend's TTXGP lap times

A regular Backmarker reader/intel source emailed me this morning, to ruminate on the times that the Brammo Empulse RR put in around Infineon this weekend. "I was interested to read about the TTXGP at Infineon this weekend," my friend wrote. " I wonder how fast Tommy Hayden or Steve Rapp would have gone on the top bike?"

For the record, Steve Atlas lapped in the 1:55 range in the under-subscribed TTXGP races. That was fast enough to win by a wide margin, and to knock a little less than two seconds off the course record for EV motorcycles. To put that in perspective, Steve would probably not have finished last in the slowest ICE race of the weekend, for Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200s. He would have finished second-last.

But all else being equal, I doubt that anyone else would have gone faster. Steve's finished well inside the top 10 in the Daytona 200. He's got genuine AMA Pro-level speed and it's safe to say that he's quite a bit faster than that bike.

His 1:55 time might have come down a tad if there had been another bike on the track to push him, although having been on track with him a lot over the years, I think he's pretty much got one speed, which is as-fast-as-possible. It's more likely that limiting factors were 1.) lack of quality seat time on the bike - I think they tested at a couple of track days, and that's it; and, 2.) fears that the motor problems that showed up in testing would resurface in the race, if they pushed any more power through the Parker unit.

Where does that leave me feeling about the Empulse RR's performance? I admit to being a little surprised that the very tidy-looking machine was 'only' a couple of seconds faster than the Lightning and ZeroAgni ridden by Michael Barnes and Scott Higbee last year. Two seconds a lap is a big improvement in relative terms, but in absolute terms the gap between the fastest current (no pun intended) EV motorcycles and fast ICE bikes is still about 20%. An eternity, in racing terms. My friend Chris Van Andel dug into recent AFM records and wrote to tell me that Steve, on the Brammo, would only have been able to finish 32nd (out of 36 finishers) in the AFM's most recent 600 Superbike club race.

And those are over short race distances that avoid the EV's current (argh) weakness. The winners of the 2009 Bol d'Or rode a Suzuki GSX-R1000 2,233 miles in 24 hours. I doubt that any EV motorcycle could get half as far.

So on the battery's-half-drained side, it seems that dreams the TTXGP/FIM e-Power/TT Zero field would soon close the gap to ICE lap times have been dashed. Even extrapolating current rates of improvement in a straight line, it will be over a decade before EV bikes are competitive with ICE bikes -- and anyone who has ever developed a race bike knows that the first seconds come easy, but that the last tenths come very, very hard. The sparse Infineon TTXGP grid, too, speaks to the fact that some investor enthusiasm's been drained.

From the battery's-half-charged point of view, the Empulse RR would not have been completely embarrassed in the Sportster 1200 race. I rode that Sportster at Road America when it was launched, and I had a blast on it. If an EV motorcycle is already capable of providing that much entertainment, it's a good first step.

Let's see if Brammo stays focused on developing the Empulse RR for the rest of the season, and if they reach a point where they're confident they can drain the battery over the race distance, without blowing up the motor. Let's see whether Mission, Lightning, and some of the other next-gen, lighter EV race bikes like the Amarok can walk the walk as well as they talk the talk.

I guess the lesson here is, EV race teams release these sexy photos and sketches, and it's hard not to get excited. But the pace of EVolution demands patience.

Monday Morning Crew Chief: Disalvo? Check. Daytona? Check. Ducati? Dual engines? Check and mate.

Ducati finally won the Daytona 200, breaking a winless streak that was beginning to take on the proportions of a curse.

But.

An engine change on a bizarre red flag initiated by Dunlop? That's not an '*'. It's an '*'.

I'm not taking anything away from Jason Disalvo, who's quick (especially so when he's just putting his head down for a few laps) and a genuinely good guy. He's a racer, and all you can expect him to do is go on green. Or from the Latus Ducati effort; their never-say-die engine swap was inspired. To say the least, the beers must've tasted great yesterday on the beach.

And it was, just, within the rules.

The relevant rule is this one:
2.23.c.iii. During the red flag hiatus period, repairs, adjustments and refueling may be performed on all competing motorcycles...

It's clear that in the absence of a definition for 'repair' that excludes swapping engines, Latus' engine-swap was legal. It's possible that no one on the Rules Committee ever really imagined a red flag incident long enough to do it, although you can be sure that top teams will now keep a spare motor, ready to swap in, in their hot pit arsenals. Latus was forced to swap motors because that deep in the race, just going to a backup bike was forbidden (it's permitted only if the red flag incident takes place in the first two laps.)

Ironically, while the team could change motors within the rules, they couldn't change the rear tire without the express permission of the Race Director, and even then would have had to start from the back of the grid, according to this rule:
2.23.iv. Tires may not be changed during such red flag hiatus period without the prior approval of the Race Director (who may confer with the official tire representatives as to the condition of specific tires).
1. After receiving specific approval, all riders who have changed any tires during such red flag hiatus period must restart at the back of the grid.
2. Riders who have changed any tire without the specific prior approval referred to above, may be subject to one or more of the following penalties: disqualification from restart, black flag and  disqualification, loss of championship points, suspension. Further official action will be at the  discretion of AMA Pro Racing.

Crazy, eh? Changing tires could be cheating, changing motors is fair game. There are many racing sanctioning bodies that require the Race Director's approval for any red flag repairs.

If I was one of the other riders in the lead draft at the (grossly premature) end of the race, I'd also have chafed at this rule:
2.23.f. When a race is stopped after the completion of two (2) or more laps by the race leader, riders’ re-grid positions will be determined by their race positions in the last official lap preceding the red-flagged lap. At the time the red flag is displayed, riders who are not actively competing in the race will not be classified for the restart.
Disalvo had blown one cylinder on his Ducati and was just circulating in to certain retirement when the red flag was thrown. When would he have been deemed 'not actively competing'? If he'd pulled into the pit? Gotten off the bike? In a two-hour red flag delay, could his team have swapped motors and sent a cab to pick him up at the airport ticket counter and rush him back to the track in time for the restart?

Like I said, this isn't a shot at Disalvo or his team, who tried anything to win; that's admirable. It's what makes racing, racing. But I do think that an engine swap changes the character of the Daytona 200. Part of the challenge to winning this race has always been the need to optimize durability and power. That and pit stops are what make it unique in the AMA Superbike calendar.

And I have to say, what's with the long, long mandatory tire swap? Surely we can find or make tires that won't come apart on the banking in less (sometimes a lot less) than 200 miles? And if we can't, should a tire stop in what is still (at least arguably) the blue-riband race in the U.S. series, take more than a few minutes? I could have swapped my own front tire in less time. Why open the door to tactics like engine swaps, which debase the original point of the 200-mile distance? Next year, at the very least, AMA Pro should just give all teams a window (say between 75 and 125 miles) and tell them, change both tires in this window.

Look, in some endurance races, teams run thousands of miles, and they make their own decisions about tire compounds, balancing grip with durability. Incidentally, those guys do change motors from time to time, and I've even seen them do it under green flags. But if they blew a motor in less than 200 miles, there'd be hell to pay for the engine builder.

It's hard for me to believe that decades ago, teams ran the 200 on TZ750s, calling their own stops according to their own strategies, but that now, we can't race 200 miles on production based 600s. If  there's some reason that teams competing in the Daytona 200 can't handle those big-boy tire decisions (or because the banking or the new surface are impossibly hard to compound for) then maybe it's time to forget about the 200. The race is a shadow of its former self anyway, why make it a travesty?