Early Days ...

The first race of the season offers something that will not happen again for the rest of the calendar - the completely unexpected. New teams join experienced crews in the paddock. New riders throw their legs over bikes they've never ridden in anger. And experienced racers find themselves challenged by a new discipline, new tires, new tracks, new everything. And any venture into unknown territory is fraught with the potential for mistakes.

The 80th running of the Bol d'Or endurance classic, the 24-hour contest held at Circuit Paul Ricard that opened the 2016/17 EWC season, featured all of the above. The challenge of a 24-hour exposes every weakness, but equally puts every strength on full display. So exhausted that all they want to do is collapse, somehow the victors seem to put that aside for a few shining moments on the podium, where they celebrate not just their accomplishments, but the pitfalls they have escaped.

Two racers added FIM Endurance World Championship competition to their racing resumes in France. In each case, they were faced with a challenge that offered a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong. And in each case, more or less, the endurance series offered them the chance to remain professional motorcycle racers - perhaps the only opportunity they had.

MotoGP and World Superbike racer Randy de Puniet turned his first laps in FIM Endurance World Championship competition on the SRC Kawasaki ZX-10R. A podium finisher in MotoGP and a winner in 250cc GP competition, de Puniet took a year off from competition in 2014, taking a paid job developing the Suzuki MotoGP machine. He was rewarded with a Superbike World Championship ride with Suzuki in 2015. 

It was scant reward. The Crescent Suzuki team had one foot out the door of the series and put little effort, relatively speaking, into making the GSX-R1000 competitive. And de Puniet was blunt in his criticism of the team - his interviews on the series' website pulled no punches:

http://www.worldsbk.com/en/news/2015/De+Puniet+Not+an+easy+situation+to+go+through

After a year with only two top-10 finishes, de Puniet found that he was not exactly hot property on the rider market. The French rider found a seat with the French SRC team, which had been struggling since winning the Bol the year before. For de Puniet and his team, the race offered a promise of a fresh start, one with the potential of great success and significant failure.

Moto Ain put Moto3 winner Alexis Masbou on its Superstock Yamaha YZF-R1. Masbou didn't just leave Moto3, he was being pushed. After scoring a Moto3 win in 2014 and another in 2015, Masbou was only able to find a ride on a team fielding a Peugeot Moto3 machine for 2016. That worked out about as well as it sounds like it would, and Masbou was dropped from the team halfway through the season. And it was his last year in Moto3, as the class age limit will prevent him from racing in the smallest GP class in 2017. Masbou was in free fall, and the Moto Ain team offered him a branch to grasp.

Both made the absolute best of their opportunities.

The SRC team suffered a broken front axle in the middle of the night, but de Puniet, Gregory Leblanc and Fabien Foret kept pushing and as things went wrong for the others, kept moving up the order. In the end, SRC had moved almost as far up the order as was possible, ending the round-the-clock contest second overall. The last time de Puniet stood on a podium in international competition was in 2009. Seven years is an eternity in a racer's career, and those on the outside can only guess at the emotions de Puniet felt on the podium. Gilles Stafler, SRC team manager, said, “I’m delighted with Randy’s work. He’s a genuine rider. He just got better and better ..."

Moto Ain went one better. On its Superstock-spec R1, the team took sixth overall and first in class. And Masbou, who hadn't even cracked the top 15 in Moto3 this season and hadn't scored a point, who was out of a job and was barred from looking for work in the class where he was most successful, was suddenly and spectacularly once again an international motorcycle road racing winner.

While endurance racing offers the unexpected, sometimes the entirely predictable can still be a surprise of sorts. Suzuki Endurance Racing Team debuted no new machinery, no new riders, no GP stars. Its GSX-R1000 was one of the oldest machines in the field, overshadowed by the more modern Yamahas and Kawasakis on the grid. 

Yet SERT, which last season won its 15th endurance championship, fields a machine, a team and riders that have been tempered in the furnace of endurance racing success. And as others fell and fell into difficulties, SERT pounded its advantage home. SERT led at the eight-hour mark and picked up the bonus points for leading. SERT led at the 16-hour mark and doubled up on bonus points. And SERT was nine laps ahead when the flag dropped after 23:51.03.405 of racing, making it a nearly perfect weekend for the veteran squad. SERT led 683 of the 687 laps. That is not a misprint. That is nearly a flag-to-flag win in a 24-hour race. In celebration, Suzuki France ran an ad proclaiming, "The Cougar Spanked The Youngsters!" Never bet against old age and treachery ...

Something Goes Wrong Again ...

Racing at the front looks hard enough from the outside. That's because it is hard. But sometimes the real struggle takes place at the back of the pack, away from the cameras and reporters, and is so utterly insane that it sounds impossible. Sometimes the rider is the victim. Sometimes the rider is the cause. Sometimes the stars line up in such a way that well-intentioned people make hideous mistakes. And sometimes hideous decisions are made by people who - for perfectly reasonable-sounding reasons - aren't particularly concerned about the well-being of the rider on the firing line.
 

Three recent stories:


 

- Josh Brookes' talents are undeniable. He's the 2015 British Superbike Champion and a podium-finisher at Suzuka in the 8 Hours. The SMR team, which took Brookes to the BSB title, also is a proven winner. And yet this season, when the team stepped up to the Superbike World Championship, is a disaster. Brookes has only three top-nine finishes aboard the team's BMW S1000RR and is languishing 15th in the standings; teammate Karel Abraham, a MotoGP veteran, has done worse.

Brookes told me at Suzuka that, to put it simply, the team can't get all of the bike to work at the same time. The team loads software that doesn't work with the other software on the bike. Imagine having to get on a machine that the team doesn't understand. And Brookes really opened up in an interview with an Australian website, revealing that he really doesn't have a "team" in the traditional sense of the word. SMR runs the chassis; BMW the engine and electronics, and each camp says what it is doing is fine and the other side needs to change, long arguments ensue, and the bike never improves. It's amazing the bike actually starts. 

It's hard to imagine something worse. But if you read the interview, Brookes talks about his crew chief being prohibited from calling him in for a tire change in the drying conditions at Assen. Brookes had a shot at the win, but was forced to stay out longer than the other riders because he was temporarily in the lead after other riders had pitted. "The management says they ‘need the television time and leave him out there,'" Brookes says his crew chief told him after the race. When Brookes finally came in, the rear tire that went onto his bike had been unplugged for too long and was cold and he crashed on the next lap. What goes through a rider's head when she or he hears that? How do you even show up for work the next race? And yet, you do, because if you walk away from that situation, you run the very real risk of walking away from your career.

- Sometimes the rider senses the oncoming decline in fortunes, and desperate to reverse it, makes it worse. It is a spiral, tightening like a noose, a python that slowly and painfully crushes a promising career. Karel Hanika won the 2013 Red Bull MotoGP Rookies Cup championship, winning half the races that season. He moved up to Moto3 with a front-line team and struggled initially. Then he struggled some more. In two years of Moto3 competition his best finish was a seventh. Dropped by the Ajo Motorsports team, he joined Mahindra for the 2016 season. Seven races in, he was pointless, and the team decided that continuing with him was as well. Hanika found a ride in the Repsol CEV European Championship in the Moto3 class. At the last round, in Aragon, he demonstrated why his former crew members had nicknamed him "Gravel" Hanika. In an overataking move that reeked of desperation, Hanika flung himself into a corner and crashed, taking out two other riders. In 2014, Hanika had a VIP ticket into the GP world. It's hard to see him finding the entrance again.

- Louis Rossi, fired from the GMT94 Yamaha squad in the Endurance World Championship after crashing three times in his first race, landed another ride for the 2016/17 season. It wasn't nearly as competitive or as lucrative, but at least he was in the game on the Tecmas Racing Team's BMW S1000RR. But he never made it to the starting lights. Incredibly, at the season-opening Bol D'or, in his first appearance for Tecmas, Rossi crashed the BMW on the warmup lap, putting himself out of the race with a concussion and delaying the start of the event.

Winning is hard. Truth. But look down the field and there is a deeper truth to be found. Racing is hard. And sometimes there's no reward at all.

http://www.cycleonline.com.au/2016/09/06/catching-josh-brookes/ 

Images from the 39th Suzuka 8 Hours, Part Five ...

Images from the 39th Suzuka 8 Hours. For the full story of the race and more images, purchase the book  at:

http://thebp.site/87100

High-res versions of the images in the book or posted here also are available on a donation basis. Paypal a donation to morbidelli17@yahoo.com and receive the hand-edited full-resolution image or images of your choice in your mailbox.

At the other rounds of the FIM Endurance World Championship, they were the rock stars. At Suzuka, they were the Nowhere Men, the supporting cast, performing an ancillary storyline. They were the FIM EWC permanent teams, fighting among themselves for the few points on offer after the local squads had eaten their fill. Here Team SRC Kawasaki, which won the Bol D'or 24-hour race earlier in the season, sits ignored before the start of the 8 Hours.

 

Suzuki Endurance Race Team's EWC GSX-R1000 and the Moto Map Supply GSX-R1000 fly in formation. Moto Map, which competes in the MFJ Superbike series in Japan, finished fifth; SERT crashed and was out of the points.

Team SRC's Kawasaki DNF'd.

GMT94 suffered a mechanical early and was able only to climb back into 14th. It would prove costly in the final EWC Championship tally.

 

The local teams put on a production on the pre-grid. On this day, at this circuit, the front-line local teams were the rock stars.

Images from the 39th Suzuka 8 Hours, Part Four

Images from the 39th Suzuka 8 Hours. For the full story of the race and more images, purchase the book  at:

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Apparently there is a rule that at every motor race, anywhere in the world, someone must run Hooters livery. Masahiro Shinjo on the Team Hooters Yamaha YZF-R1.

 

Flower Power - The Sakura Project Kawasaki ZX-10R with Hidemichi Takahashi aboard.

Flower Power programmer. Awesome hair.

Takumi Takahashi on the MuSASHi RT HARC-PRO Honda CBR1000RR.

Images from the 39th Suzuka 8 Hours, Part Three

Images from the 39th Suzuka 8 Hours. For the full story of the race and more images, purchase the book  at:

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This shot is the wraparound front and back cover image from a special edition of the book that I had printed for a few clients. One of the most enjoyable things about detailed photographs is that they tell a rich and complex tale on their own. This is the Team R2CL Suzuki GSX-R1000 with Sebastien Suchet aboard. A permanent but lesser-funded team in EWC competition, its GSX-R1000 is not really competitive with the front-line Suzukis of Suzuki Endurance Racing Team and wasn't even in the horsepower ballpark with the Yoshimura and Team Kagayama GSX-R1000s at Suzuka. Team R2CL claims only 180 horses for the machine, which it lists as a 2013 model. The shot shows the less-expensive, last-generation Ohlins forks clearly, and what appears to be the backyard light string used to generate the illuminated "2" on the tail section. My favorite detail in this shot involves Suchet's leathers. Suchet was racing a Yamaha YZF-R1 in the Superstock World Championship in 2016, so he couldn't use the leathers from that team on the Suzuki. Team R2CL couldn't afford to get him new leathers for the 8 Hours. So he pulled out a set of leathers from last year, when he raced a Kawasaki ZX-10R in World Superstock. Tape was slapped over the "Kawasaki" nomenclature. But hours of the heat, humidity and speed of racing at Suzuka weakened the adhesive. Look just above Suchet's bum and you see the tape peeling away, revealing the letters "asaki." Low-budget, perhaps. But the team ran a quick, steady race, avoided mistakes and beat a lot of the big-name permanent EWC teams in the 8 Hours.

The Edge Of Madness, And Why Living There Is Important ...

The Can-Am sports car race at Road Atlanta in July 1971 was not a good race for Formula One World Champion Jackie Stewart. The Can-Am series paid good money, more than F1, so Stewart flew across the ocean regularly to hustle a fat Lola sports car around North American circuits. 

On this day, he earned his money. 

A flat tire and a struggle to re-start the car after the pit stop dropped him to 21st, three laps down. Stewart went back out. The brakes started to fade and the right front wheel wore a big hole in the top of the fender, showering him with tire and bodywork debris. He came back into the pits, went back out and set the race's fastest lap time - 1.3 seconds better than he'd done in qualifying and 0.3 seconds quicker than pole. The car finally broke for good. When asked why he was driving so hard when there was absolutely no hope of a win, a podium or even points, Stewart said:

"Ooch! Ye must never let y'self fall into the habit o' drivin' at anythin' less than yer maximum!"

The saying is that consistency wins championships. Like many other things in life, that saying is partly true. It obscures a deeper truth. What really wins championships is speed. At the end of the day, to seize a championship requires the racer to finish higher up the order than the other riders, race after race. Slower riders do not win races. They are gifted wins when faster riders falter. Occasionally it happens often enough in a short enough period of time that a championship goes to a slower rider. That is one of the joys of watching motorsport. 

But more often than not, speed gives you a better chance of finishing higher. Speed keeps you out of trouble, prevents you from fighting with mid-packers as you try to get to the front after starting from the third row. Speed puts you ahead of your competitors on the track. All other things being equal, the faster rider/bike combination wins the race more often. And even though all other things never are equal, pure speed gives you more of a chance to take the win rather than inherit the win. As a competitor, you don't prepare to inherit wins. You prepare to beat the others. Yes, most of us would rather be lucky than good. But you can't control luck. You can control speed.

Talent makes you fast. Experience keeps you fast. There's a reason that riders are slower when they come back from the off-season for the first tests of the new year. They're not less talented. They're further from the last time they experienced riding on the edge. They're not as used to the sensation of losing the front tire under braking, for example. In the first practice session, it seems to happen in a millisecond.

By mid-season, when the rider has saved the front-end washout dozens of times, the experience is familiar. The feedback from the bike telling you that it is about to happen is recognizable. Time stretches, and the transition from full grip to slide seems to take longer. The panic reaction is gone. There's more brain power to decode the messages from the tire, suspension and bike, and the messages are clearer because the rider has heard and felt them before.

To be on top, a rider has to be the best at interpreting those messages, and understanding the new ones that come from changes to tires, suspension, engine, brakes and chassis. And the ability to understand the language of those messages is developed and maintained like any other ability - through practice and experience.

It has been mostly a pleasure to watch Marc Marquez dance off with the MotoGP championship lead in 2016. He's won when he could, finished on the podium when he couldn't, and taken what points were on offer when the podium was out of reach. His new-found maturity has met with widespread praise.

But looking at Stewart's comment, there's a reason for a bit of concern to creep in. Backing off even slightly means less time spent on the edge. It means less time with the bike speaking the language of imminent loss of traction, the fine line between slip and grip as the power pours through the rear wheel. 

It is admirable to pace your way to a championship. But a racer does so at the risk of forgetting how to live on the edge. And the less the racer lives in that environment, the fewer experiences on the edge the racer has, the more unfamiliar territory it is and the harder it is to survive there. A lap of 1:27 is flying for a lightweight bike at the big track at Willow Springs. I once heard a rider say, "It's been a while since I've run a 1:27 here." To the best of my knowledge, that rider never did again. I've heard racers say, "At the height of my powers ..." What that phrase means is that they've lost the direction to the edge, and even if they got there, they wouldn't be able to understand the language spoken there.

That is why it is important to reflect on Marquez' race at Silverstone 2016 before it disappears into the mists of history. The setup on his Honda was poor, and the bike has been a handful all year. On top of that, Marquez chose the wrong front tire. The machine was a disaster from the moment the lights went out. The smart thing to do would have been to cruise around and gather points.

Marquez took a different approach.

The two-time MotoGP champion saved countless front-end slides on his elbow. He battled frantically with Valentino Rossi and Cal Crutchlow and Andrea Iannone, ran off the track, came back onto the track, forced his way past Rossi again and then nicked Crutchlow at nearly 200 miles an hour, sending himself off the track once more before re-joining the race and passing his teammate on the last lap for fourth.

It was absolute madness. It was every corner on the edge of disaster. It was exactly what a rider with a 53-point lead in the championship chase should not be doing.

But Marquez and Stewart know that there are worse things in racing than crashing, losing a race or even a championship. At all costs, the racer must maintain a residence on the edge of madness and make it home. And it was glorious to watch Marquez re-stake his claim to that place where mere mortals - including some World Champions - never can go.

Images from the 39th Suzuka 8 Hours, Part Two

Images from the 39th Suzuka 8 Hours. For the full story of the race and more images, purchase the book  at:

http://thebp.site/87100

This guy gave me an energy drink in exchange for taking a picture of the KTM logo on his shirt. And proper respect where it is due; the RC8R only made it 34 laps, but the team had made it to the Big Show.

 

The worst thing about the Saturday crash is that the bike is never quite as good as it could be on Sunday.

I kept wondering when this guy was going to put down his smartphone and get on the bike. Turns out that for his practice stint, he mounted the device to his upper triple clamp and rode out onto the track ...

The media center at Suzuka. Like everything else there, major league.

Lukas Pesek on the Rosetta Motorrad39 BMW S1000RR.

Images from the 39th Suzuka 8 Hours, Part One

Images from the 39th Suzuka 8 Hours. For the full story of the race and more images, purchase the book  at:

http://thebp.site/87100

2015 British Superbike Champion Josh Brookes in practice on the Yoshimura Suzuki Shell Advance GSX-R1000.

 

Michael van der Mark rode the MuSASHi Honda CBR1000RR. Shortly after the race, he signed with Yamaha to race the YZF-R1 in the Superbike World Championship.

Cockpit of the YART Yamaha Official EWC YZF-R1. Note brake adjuster, carbon fiber fairing stay, flexible mount for master cylinder. Buttons on far left allow the rider to select more or less traction control on the fly. Upper triple clamp is a work of art.

Another iteration of the Endurance World Championship series-contending Yamaha YZF-R1. Carbon fiber parts galore adorn the front end of the GMT94 Yamaha YZF-R1. Riders use buttons on the left handlebar to select engine maps and other settings. Remote brake adjuster also loops over to left handlebar. Upper triple clamp is a work of art, as is the fairing stay, which anchors into the steering stem nut. And just because you're a front-line Endurance World Championship team doesn't mean you get to throw away a clutch lever that's been down in a crash - if it still works, it gets pressed into service.

Katsuyuki Nakasuga after the Top 10 Trial. Nakasuga has dominated Japanese motorcycle road racing for years, and is the lead test rider for Yamaha's MotoGP program.

Redemption ...

Anthony Delhalle was certain that he had thrown away the championship before the 2016 FIM Endurance World Championship season had reached the two-hour mark. The Suzuki Endurance Racing Team rider has won the World Championship multiple times in the past. He knows what it takes to earn the title.

But there he was, his first stint of the season, sliding down the road at Le Mans in the season-opening 24 hour race, the bodywork making the sickening crunching noise that comes with sliding a road racing motorcycle across the pavement and into the gravel trap. After two hours, SERT, the defending champion, was in 53rd place, 11 laps down on the leaders F.C.C. TSR Honda.



The team had clawed its way back to fifth by the end of the 24 hours. But that left SERT with a big deficit. The championship was still visible, but the obstacles on the path to the top of the charts were massive.

The biggest problem was speed. In qualifying for the 24 Motos, SERT had edged the GMT94 Yamaha Official EWC Team, but that was only good enough for fourth on the grid. All the other teams expected to challenge at the front for the title were quicker, and some of them by a significant margin. The aging GSX-R1000 platform could no longer be counted on to put in chart-leading lap times. If SERT was going to take the 2016 season, it was going to do so with race strategy and mistake-free performances in the pits and on the track. The bike had to be mechanically perfect, the pit crew perfect, the riders perfect.

And Delhalle had just blown a gaping hole in that plan.

The next round was either more or less heartbreaking, depending on your perspective, but heartbreaking either way. After 12 hours of racing at Portimao in Portugal, SERT was beaten to the line by GMT94 by 0.081 seconds. Drag races are won by bigger margins. And while the time difference was insignificant, the points difference wasn't - that tiny margin cost SERT six championship points.

But over 52 hours of racing in 2016, every team was due to suffer a setback or two. When and where those setbacks happen make all the difference in racing. In Portugal, the Le Mans-winning SRC Kawasaki team dropped out after seven hours. At Suzuka, SRC dropped out again. And while SERT crashed and comprehensively wrecked its Suzuki in Japan and scored zero points, its closest competitors fared equally poorly. The Japanese teams that race only the Suzuka round of the EWC championship took all the big-points placings, leaving six teams with a mathematical chance of winning the title at the last round at Oschersleben.

Seven hours into the race in Germany found SERT in the lead. The other title contenders had either dropped out or suffered so many problems that they were no longer a threat - that is, all but GMT94 Yamaha. It came down to a simple formula - GMT94 had to win and SERT had to finish third or lower for the Yamaha squad to take the title. If SERT finished second, it would win by a single point.

SERT put Delhalle on the GSX-R1000 for the final stint of the season. Delhalle had been here before. Six years prior, in his first season with SERT, the team won the title by one point. He knew what he had to do - and that was, at all costs, to not repeat the mistake he had made in Le Mans at the season opener, all those long, long racing hours ago.

Delhalle was flawless on his final stint. The GSX-R1000 came across the line in second, 21 seconds behind GMT94.

The record books show that SERT did not win a single race in the 2016 season. But those same record books show SERT as the 2016 FIM EWC Champion. And when testing opened at Circuit Paul Ricard for the 2017 season, the SERT machine had a big number 1 on the front of the fairing. 

"Endurance is crazy. After Le Mans, I thought it was not possible to come back on the top of the championship, but ..." Delhalle says.