How does a successful club racer become a factory-backed World Champion? I saw the rig that Freddie Spencer’s dad put together – a substantial motorhome with a big trailer behind, containing bikes for several WERA classes. Dad as mechanic, Freddie managing to keep the several bikes in mind well enough to win. Erv Kanemoto, already established with Gary Nixon as a successful racing operation, was the natural choice when Freddie’s big step to national racing was next.
Over and again I’ve heard clubmen saying things like, “When I have as much seat time as Mr. Wonderful, I’ll be as fast as he is.”

Or “I know there’s a secret to this, and if I could just get Kenny Roberts to tell me what it is, I could win races. I know I could.”

Meanwhile, Freddie was teaching himself and creating new secrets. After his retirement he described two dirt tracks in Kentucky. “They weren’t really ovals, they were more like foot-ball-shaped, so you could kind of play with the front, going in.”

He learned what the meaning of the old dirt-track aphorism, “When in doubt, gas it” might be. Entering a turn is hard for front tires –grip initially used for braking has to gradually be switched to turning – without glitch or upset. Go in faster and faster until you feel the front giving up, moving around. That’s it – work on something else now, because if you lose the front, you’re down.

Freddie discovered otherwise by “…kinda playing with it.” If, as the front began to sign off, he gave it a whiff of throttle, it could magically grip again. Developed into a corner entry technique on those dirt tracks, he wondered if it could work on pavement.

Years later, just after Mick Doohan had retired, my editor sent me to Australia for a talk with him. This was one of those expeditions that has you in the plane longer than you’re on the ground at the destination. I described Freddie’s method.

“You can ride like that,” he began. “I’ve ridden like that. But you can’t do it all day.”

The advice given by Albert Gunter (America’s great rider-engineer) to a young Dick Mann was, “You’ll never beat those guys using their ideas – they’ve been using them a lot longer than you ever will. You’ve got to have an edge – something nobody else has.”

Successful riders never stop experimenting and learning from it, because the ultimate “edge” is to constantly update your riding – to learn faster and more often than others. This is especially so when the equipment is evolving rapidly – as it has been doing recently. Riders’ careers are over when the equipment (especially tires) changes in ways that conflict too much with the rider’s by-now established style.

Freddie tried his discovery at Loudon, New Hampshire, and it worked.

I remembered a Dunlop graph showing tire grip versus applied load. It rose on a near constant slope, then arc-ed over and headed back down. It showed that an overloaded tire lost grip. Riders entering the falling part of this graph lost the front. Freddie’s “whiff of throttle” transferred just enough weight off the front to push conditions back up to peak, enabling him to complete the corner.

The fans’ idea of racing success is otherwise. They attribute success to the fire and drive of young riders, while their older opponents are sated, their motivation weakening, so overloaded are their trophy shelves. The day comes when the younger blazes past the elder.

I see it differently. Bikes and tires evolve constantly, and for a time no one finds the way to turn such changes into quicker lap times. Barry Sheene, 500 world champion on Suzuki in 1976 and ’77, rode in the European corner-speed style that was natural for lower-powered bikes – 125s and 250s, and the big classic singles, whose power-to-weight ratio put them in the same category. Along comes Kenny with the Yamaha two-stroke. Acceleration is so strong that the front becomes too light to steer. You pull yourself forward to load the front, and that helps, but there’s still power, begging to find a use. Do you stop there? Others did. Kenny’s dirt experience told him no. If the front won’t steer, try the back – throttle-steering. A 500 Manx Norton couldn’t do it – not enough torque. But the Yamaha 0W-48 definitely could. Kenny was champion three years in a row, 1978-’80. He had found a way to use the novel qualities of the 500 two-strokes before anyone else. And Yamaha engineers had found a way to smooth torque delivery in corners – exhaust-port “eyelids” that varied exhaust timing to allow earlier throttle-up. The Suzuki’s torque “hit” was harder to ride.

Doohan raised that, saying, “If conditions are right, you can go really fast with corner speed. But once the tires go off that becomes too dangerous – then you have to switch to steering with the throttle.”

Now for Freddie’s motorcycle-to-be – the NS500 Triple. The legend is that the head of Honda’s ‘MX Block’ – the two-stroke motocross R&D group – Shin’ichi Miyakoshi, had made a trip to Europe to see the Dutch road race TT. What impressed him there was how close were the lap-times of the 350 twins to those of the much more powerful 500 fours. In his mind he imagined a “hundred-horsepower 250,” able to lap competitively because of light weight and its less destructive effect on tires. There are tales of such a motorcycle, in a private test at Willow Springs in Northern California, being crashed, with an unknown Japanese rider being whisked away for private treatment.

The 100-hp 250 was as daring a departure from accepted practice as were Freddie’s increasing number of riding discoveries.

Why would Honda, a company firmly devoted to the four-stroke cycle, be developing a two-stroke 500 cc Grand Prix bike?
The reason was the failure of the 19,000 rpm 130 hp oval piston NR500 four-stroke to win even a single GP point.

Engineer Tadashi Kume’s experience dated back to Honda’s first two Grand Prix four-strokes, and he had continued his work in Honda’s F1 GP car projects. The decision to redefine what four-stroke could mean is attributed to him, although we suspect higher leadership can’t have been pleased to see two-strokes dominate every FIM GP class in 1975 (even sidecar).

The numbers looked good—with eight valves per cylinder the engine could on paper stuff itself with mixture up to a peak at 23,000 rpm. That should be able to send 150 hp by chain to the rear wheel. Alas, they had chosen a peak piston acceleration that was 30% above F1 practice. It was worth a try – their pistons, measured front-to-back, were smaller than in F1, which should help. But try as they might, piston fatigue cracking reportedly held peak revs to 19,000.
Freddie, given a ride on it, found that it just revved, without the “hit” usual to highly-tuned four-strokes. A hint of what might be next was Honda’s choice of solid but not championship-winning riders for the NR race program.

After much expense, the V4 engine architecture was the NR’s major achievement.

Having entered the series, they could not leave with nothing. They switched to two-stroke power – Miyakoshi’s 100 hp 250. Freddie and Erv were by now the obvious choice.

Erv, Freddie, and Honda’s sometimes truculent program manager Yoichi Oguma, with a team of techs arrived in Brazil for pre-season testing. Erv had brought a speed gun, expecting to find differences in corner-speed among the many combinations to be tested. There was no point – Freddie’s corner speeds didn’t vary.

The engineers had sent components such as chassis and swing-arm in various weights. He went fast on all. What did vary was the sweat in Freddie’s helmet. The lighter parts, being less directionally stable, needed more help from the rider. Erv asked a mystified Oguma, “Do you know the word ‘compensation?’

Later, persons watching bikes go through GP tech would see the talented and intense Oguma spit on the Yamahas. Much later, in retirement, he would volunteer to design a balance system for the KR Team’s Triple, whose vibration was breaking chassis members and spoiling its carburetion.

Surely riding five or six classes in WERA ha something to do with Freddie’s ability to compensate for machine shortcomings. Later, in 2003, talking with a Yamaha engineer about Wayne Rainey, I was told, “We lost our way because Wayne could ride anything we gave him. This gave no direction of improvement to guide us.”

Fans want their heroes to be masters of all they survey. In reality, racing knocks such people for six. All riders struggle with performance anxiety, which takes many forms – fiddling with equipment, falling asleep, inability to decide set-up questions until it’s almost too late, womanizing. Let’s not forget nail-biting – the year before Casey Stoner stunned everyone with his 2007 performances (ten wins on the 800 cc Ducati) I saw him staring up at a monitor, at work on nails already bitten to the flesh.

Freddie might wake up Sunday morning and say, “Erv, I don’t think we oughtta be here,” but after something comforting to eat and routine discussion of gearing, he would do incredible things in the race.

In 1982 the Honda Triple began at 108 hp with a traditional tubular steel chassis. Regular updates arrived. The mag crankcase was supposed to be align-bored at 600 kilometers to give 1200 km life (750 miles) but Freddie’s habit of hanging on in first if the shift pedal was out of reach required more frequent replacement. Cranks and pistons of improved reliability. Aluminum chassis. Here comes the Kintetsu Air Cargo van.

In his first year at the Grands Prix Freddie won two races—one at the ultra-fast Spa in Belgium. Why didn’t the high-horsepower disc-valve square-fours crush him there? Because they were busy destroying their tires. The 100 hp 250 concept was vindicated.

He was world champion the following year. In 1984 Lawson was champion – even if Freddie was leading, he could hear Eddie’s engine just behind. Eddie, too, was learning fast. Then in 1985 Freddie doubled, winning both 250 and 500 classes. It would be said by insiders that “Nobody will ever know how much that year took out of him.”