Honda Resurgence in MotoGP | On the Rebound

Notably absent as a consistent presence on the top step of the podium is Honda, which is ironic since it was Honda who drove the change from 990cc to 800cc. Dani Pedrosa won twice in 2007, ’08, and ’09. Andrea Dovizioso took Honda’s other win, in difficult conditions at the 2009 British GP.

Hayden’s championship was the last of the 990cc era and marked the end of a fertile time for Honda. From 1983, when Honda won its first 500cc World Championship, through to 2006, Honda won 14 premier class titles. The list of champions begins with Freddie Spencer and continues with Wayne Gardner, Eddie Lawson, Mick Doohan, Alex Criville, and, for the first three years of the new millennium, Valentino Rossi. In that same period Yamaha won eight championships, Suzuki two, and Ducati one.

HRC seemed to lose its way early in the tenure of Satoru Horiike, who many on the team believe was more interested in Superbikes. It would take Masumi Hamane and Tet Suzuki to get Honda back on course. The problem was that Hamane was unbelievably busy at R&D with many new projects and he also knew he was to retire two years after he got the HRC job. He simply couldn’t devote enough of his considerable energy to sorting it all out. But he set them on the right road and Tet Suzuki seems to have learned what it takes to make men tick. Late in 2008, Shuhei Nakamoto, who had extensive experience in both the motorcycle and Formula One championships, was put in charge. When the HRC vice president joined Honda in 1983 he met a young mechanic named Jeremy Burgess.

“They haven’t won in the 800 era and this would be something that may not mean much to the average bloke in the street, but it probably, corporately, is a period of great unsuccessfulness,” Burgess said. “So I would say they would be quite keen to win at least one in the 800 era.”

“We never really talked,” he said. “Nakamoto and I go back a long way and of course they were putting together an operation with Casey (Stoner), I guess, and I’ve got a lot of friends at Honda. He asked would I be interested in coming back to Honda or would it be possible. But he didn’t indicate for this year. It was just a very loose sort of thing…but it’s always nice to be asked.”

More than any single individual, Nakamoto is responsible for Honda’s resurgence, though he doesn’t see it that way. Nakamoto speaks very good English when he wants to, which is most of the time. His round, friendly face invites conversation and he’s quick to engage, even joking in English. But during an extended interview unit at the Portuguese Grand Prix at Estoril, Nakamoto was uncharacteristically reticent. And on the subject of Honda’s resurgence, he thought—though he’s ultimately responsible for the machine—that the RC212V wasn’t much better.

“I want to say yes, but only rider can make a good lap time,” he said, adding, with a smile, “That machine, I couldn’t make such a good lap time. That means rider. And also rider learn a lot how to use the Honda machine. Both mixture…rider approach, rider improve, machine improve. Not only the machine.”

One of the first things that Nakamoto recognized back in 2009 was how relatively primitive the electronics were. Earlier this year he said motorcycle electronics were three years behind Formula One. “Now MotoGP electronics are catching up,” he said in Estoril.

Late in the 2009 season Nakamoto hired two data engineers from Yamaha. “Yes, they stole the Yamaha electronics guys, didn’t they?” Burgess asked with a smile. “We knew what they would probably get after what we had at Yamaha. And the guys left Yamaha because they could offer more. But Yamaha, at that time, wasn’t prepared to go down that road. So those electronics guys become somewhat frustrated twiddling their thumbs when they knew they could do more. And Honda offered them an opportunity and they took it. And whether they get spit out after a couple of years or end up in the same boat, where Honda says, ‘yeah, we’ve got what we want now’ and the development will slow down, we’ll have to wait and see.”

“I don’t know how you could work with a rider for three years and not go forward,” a Honda insider said of Pedrosa’s early years. The lack of direction, of authority, of a commanding presence like Oguma, for example, was blamed for Honda’s less than stellar results. Nakamoto has changed the culture inside the race team.

“I think the addition of having Casey (Stoner) down there has made them all put in a little bit more,” said Burgess. “And of course when you can see that one guy’s going fast, you don’t have any real excuses. You’ve got to get on with it. Honda has always said when our bike is right we’ll win and they always believe it’s the bike that does it. But I think Nakamoto, without saying it, was smart enough to say, ‘Well how good can we have the bike before we have to get a rider good enough to ride it? Let’s put some pressure on. Let’s get some riders.’” Nakamoto agreed. “We need a strong rider,” he said, and he had the right partner to go out and get that rider.

Italian Livio Suppo is the HRC Communications and Marketing Director. Suppo speaks fluent English, and came from Ducati where he worked for 11 years. From 2003 through 2009 he was the MotoGP project leader. It was Suppo who made the forward-thinking decision to have Ducati ditch long-dominant Michelin for Bridgestone in 2005.

“When you sign with a strong rider, first of all you take a strong rider away from the competitor,” he said. “This is the first effect; somebody else don’t have him. Then, the more you have, the easier it is. In the last three seasons…you know we always speak about the top four guys, Vale, Casey, Dani, (Jorge). Yamaha had two, Ducati one, Honda one. So Honda and Ducati can only win races basically with Casey or Dani, while Yamaha was possible to win with two. This is a big advantage as a manufacturer. Of course, now we have one more very strong rider and that result looks even more.”

What Stoner brings to Honda, as much as anything, is a fresh approach. Clearly what Pedrosa was doing wasn’t working. Dovizioso is getting better, but he’s not a podium threat. And Marco Simoncelli is too inconsistent to be driving development.

“When you get an engineering group who work and trust and believe in the rider—which is something the rider has to create in the first instance—then you move forward very quickly,” Burgess said. “Mick Doohan was able to do it with Honda. Freddie (Spencer), Wayne Rainey…all the good guys have been able to work very closely with the engineering group and what the rider says versus what they deliver takes you forward very quickly.” Nakamoto insists that all riders have the same input, but the words of the rider who wins are always given greater weight.

By the time winter testing began in Sepang in January, the evidence was overwhelming: Hondas were the fastest in every session in both Sepang tests, the pre-season test in Qatar, and the Qatar race weekend. When Yamaha’s Jorge Lorenzo crossed the line victorious in the rain-hit Spanish GP in Jerez, it was the first time a non-Honda was atop the standings in any session this season.

The knock on the Honda is that it lacks braking stability. Nakamoto agrees that braking stability was the biggest problem, but that it’s improved. “Not fixed. Better,” he said.

What’s definitely improved is the new transmission, however (see sidebar)—though Nakamoto wasn’t voluble in discussing it. Stoner and Pedrosa said the shifting is much smoother under acceleration, upsetting the bike less.

Whether it’s the transmission or not, Edwards said the only thing that seems different is that “this year they seem really good on new tires, new soft tires they seem like they can extract the maximum potential. Our times are better, but [only] by tenths. They seem to be able to put a soft tire on and, man, they can just extract every bit of traction and side grip out of it. Other than that, the bike does seem good. When you follow ‘em, it seems pretty good.” And this year, a lot of riders have been following them.

Numerous theories and conjecture were thrown around about how the new transmission was constructed, but thanks to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s website (www.uspto.gov/) as well as Google Patents (www.google.com/patents), the patents applied for by Honda regarding this transmission were found. A patent describing a “multi-stage transmission” shows a motorcycle transmission utilizing an innovative cam/pawl setup inside the countershaft itself to engage transmission gears (similar to the Xtrac IGS, a company that works with Honda’s IndyCar engine program) rather than sliding the gears across a mainshaft as with a conventional constant mesh sequential motorcycle transmission.

A conventional motorcycle transmission changes gears by sliding one gearwheel across a mainshaft until it locks into a driven gearwheel via internal “dogs”—lugs cast into one gear that fit into holes in another gearwheel. Moving the gears across the shaft is accomplished by yokes or shift forks, which are controlled by a shift “drum”. Because the dogs are made so that the gears lock together under power, power must be interrupted so that the gear wheels can be disengaged. Sliding the gearwheels across the shaft requires time as well.

With the Honda multi-stage transmission, there are no shift forks, and there is no lateral movement of the gearwheels. Instead of using dogs cast into the gears to lock them to the countershaft, the Honda setup uses a series of cam-type rods that slide back and forth inside the countershaft itself. The cam-type control rods actuate swingable pawls inside each gear that lock them to the countershaft when a gear change is enabled. The pawls and the steps machined into the inner portion of the gears are designed in such a way that when the next gear becomes engaged, the pawls on the previous gear detach naturally. This means that there is no power cut needed, power is continuously transmitted, and no clutch actuation is necessary.

Because there is no large shift drum to control the shift forks, and since the gearwheels do not slide laterally on the countershaft/mainshaft, the gear cluster can be made more compact. The gears can be made stronger as well, since there is more room for gear teeth width.

Will we see this transmission setup on a future Honda sportbike? It’s very likely. -KK