AGV Backmarker: On the Road Again…

This edition of Backmarker is being written on the road. I’m driving up and down the West Coast, hawking books. Actually, I’m spending most of my time in the passenger seat of my friend Ed Milich’s pickup truck. He’s regaling me with tales of buying old Ducatis and parting them out on eBay. Hopefully, we’ll return like a couple of hunters from the field, except that instead of a dead deer with its tongue hanging out, we’ll have a bike in the bed of the truck, dripping oil. Butchering it and selling the parts will cover the cost of gas.

Since buying such moto-carrion is strictly a business proposition for Ed, he harbors no emotional oh-I-could-restore-it-over-the-winter fantasies. So most sellers are underwhelmed by his cash offers. “What I do,” he says, “is take other people’s problems off their hands.” They finally sell their bikes to him when they realize they’re never going to fix them themselves.

Maybe he should offer to take road racing off AMA Pro Racing’s hands.

Do you live in Portland or San Francisco? This is your chance to save a muskrat from a tragic death

If you’re reading this on Thursday afternoon, there’s still a chance for you to catch the “Riding Men” book tour, in Portland at Vicious Cycle on Thursday at 6 p.m., or on Saturday in San Francisco at Ace Café SF at 8 p.m. I’ll be reading from Riding Man, and Ed will be reading moto-poetry from his book Wrenched: Man and Machine. We’ll happily sell you a book for $15, and it makes a great Christmas present for the motorcyclist on your list—and you’ll be doing your part to save cuddly animals, too.

You see, as a struggling author, I’ve learned one thing: books are hard to eat. No matter how you cook them, they taste terrible (pulpy) and are of questionable nutritional value. The only thing you can do with an unsold book is grind it up and feed it to a muskrat. Then you can kill, cook, and eat the muskrat. Even then, it’s not so good; muskrats taste terrible too (musky).

So come out to…

Vicious Cycle: 4711 North Interstate Ave., Portland on Thursday at 6:00 p.m.

or

Ace Café: 1799 Mission Street at 14th, San Francisco on Saturday at 8:00 p.m.

Save a muskrat.

Alternating currents

Over the last few weeks, it’s emerged that there are now two separate bodies sanctioning and promoting high-profile racing of electric motorcycles. Azhar Hussain, who was responsible for the first such race (last year’s inaugural TTXGP event on the Isle of Man) has, evidently, had a falling-out with the FIM. Motorcycle racing’s international governing body made no mention of Azhar or his TTXGP class when it announced the e-Power “international championship” it will hold in 2010. That leaves Azhar as a private sanctioning body and a promoter, putting on races on the Isle of Man, in the U.K., and in the U.S.—but without a world championship.

Azhar isn’t just promoting races, he’s now selling his own electric race bike (built to TTXGP rules, of course): the Mavizen. There’s an apparent conflict of interest in this situation, which has been explained well in two good posts here on the Asphalt and Rubber blog.

I haven’t seen any evidence that Azhar’s decision to go into the bike business turned the FIM off—nor have I seen any evidence that he’s actually used his position as both promoter and manufacturer to give teams using his equipment an advantage.

The 37.73-mile Isle of Man Mountain course remains, as far as I’m concerned, the definitive test of both race fitness and practicality for this new category—just as it did when gasoline-powered bikes were new at the turn of the last century. But it sure would’ve been nice if there were one set of rules, and one definitive world championship in the electric class. Last time the FIM spurned the TT (when it was boycotted by the top GP riders in the early ’70s) the Isle of Man was a big loser.

New rules, same old problems

The as-yet cryptic 2012 MotoGP engine formula (1,000cc, four-cylinder, maximum bore size 81mm) has people talking about a conflict between MotoGP and SBK.  There’s not an inherent conflict between the two yet, but there’s the potential for one, since the FIM hasn’t mentioned that old “prototype only” rule. Though it’s unspoken, this new attitude would presumably have the FIM considering modified versions of current liter bike engines as viable MotoGP powerplants.

The goal of the 2012 rules is obviously to reduce costs for engine suppliers and/or teams. In theory, a motor built to the 2012 rules’ 81mm bore limit could spin to higher rpm and make more power than any current Superbike-spec motor, but that advantage would be marginal, and come at a huge incremental cost. So, I guess a cash-strapped team could adapt a current superbike engine and race it in MotoGP (much the same way that MZ has purchased a current 600cc World Supersport bike and adapted it for Moto2—though that’s admittedly only development purposes).

One way to amortize the cost of developing an all-new motor built to the limit of the rules would be to sell a production version, much as Ducati did with the limited-edition MotoGP-replica Desmosedici RR. (Though inspired by and based on the MotoGP machine, the RR uses different actual parts, and anyway, Ducati inadvertently dodged the old prototype-only rule by releasing the 990cc Desmosedici RR after the 800cc MotoGP rules had taken effect.)

Either of those scenarios would no doubt make work for lawyers. InFront Sports—the company that runs SBK—would seem to have reason for being upset because when it acquired its franchise, FIM rules made SBK the top-level championship for production-based machines.

The presence of a few production-derived motors in MotoGP wouldn’t actually decrease the value of InFront’s investment, but the irony in all this is that changing technical rules, whether to rein in speeds or costs, hardly ever works.

Limiting bore size to the still-significantly oversquare 81mm dimension should, in the FIM’s view, limit costs by limiting peak revs. But as CJ noted last Friday, teams could find a “work-around” by spending fortunes on ultra-light and/or ultra-strong reciprocating components.

I’ve seen this law of unintended consequences before. A few years ago, I heard an engine builder lamenting the fact that World Supersport technical rules forced him to use steel valves, because that was what his bike had been homologated with. He spent more custom-making waisted, lightweight-steel valves out of an ultra-strong alloy (which in turn required trick guides, etc.) than he would’ve spent on titanium valves (which would’ve been a relatively affordable off-the-shelf solution).

In Formula One car racing, when the sport placed testing restrictions, the “have” teams focused R&D on computer simulation, so that they could get more value from the limited “real” testing they were still allowed to do. If anything, rich teams’ spending increased, as did their competitive advantage.

Trying to limit costs by limiting engineering options is wrongheaded anyway, because every team spends all of its budget; that’s just the nature of racing. The amount of money a team spends is determined by economic and business factors—not engineering considerations. No team manager has ever said, “Well, that’s it—there’s nothing left to spend money on.”

The only realistic goal of this current round of rules-tweaking is to reduce the advantage that rich teams have over poor ones, by reducing the amount of bang rich teams can get for an extra buck.

I have a different idea: Don’t tighten the rules, but instead radically loosen them. As it is, the control-tire and fuel-capacity rules are enough for me. Why not say that other than those factors, design is free? In this economic climate, no one’s got much to spend, but my rules would at least allow poor-but-ingenious teams the maximum freedom to compete with relatively well-funded ones. And, think what they’d save on technical inspections….