MotoGP changed forever and a day when regulations inviting four-strokes back into the top class finally came into place in 2002. And all the manufacturers responded and reacted differently.
Suzuki threw away years of hard-won transverse-four knowledge and grabbed the V-four concept by its downdraft throat, squeezing their corporate brows inscrutably to make it work. And you could see their point; with all that GSX-R four-stroke racing experience they were bound to come up with a belter sometime soon. And in building a V-four - many people's idea of the ideal racing platform for four- or two-stroke racing - they seemingly stole a technological march on their immediate realistic rivals.
Trouble is, they haven't made the V-four work anything like as well as most manufac- turer's first, second or even third MotoGP attempts, and that's now exacerbated by the fact that they are not on Michelins, the best tyres in the series. In fact, with a lack of sheer performance, a more than occasional (and very un-Suzuki-like) reputation for unreliability and riders who either try too hard or not hard enough, Suzuki's MotoGP effort has dropped even further off the radar in the last couple of seasons.
After Kenny Roberts won the 2000 season championship for the Movistar Suzuki stroker squad, 2001 proved somewhat more challenging. The RGV500 had always been a fickle beast, suffering in acceleration and lacking in clear throttle response. But there was one area of racing in which Suzuki not only had as much experience as it did in 500cc Grand Prix, but it also had an increasing level of consistent success - four-stroke racing, of almost all kinds and all on GSX-R machinery, from Endurance to AMA, from Formula 1 to Production racing, from 600cc to the new-from-2001 1000.
Early V-four circuit tests, and others on the dyno back home, were so encouraging that Suzuki - prodded by the riders - pushed to get four-strokes in MotoGP from day one. The 2002 bike came shod with Dunlops, but these lasted only a couple of outings before Michelins found their way back onto the rims. Now we could at least see what was a tyre issue and what was a machine worry. Suzuki were by no means alone in having to iron out the wrinkles, and compared to Yamaha and Kawasaki (the latter only late-season arrivals) they had a good reason to need some more time. Yamaha and Kawasaki had adapted their across-the-frame-four technology to MotoGP; Suzuki were boldly re-inventing their wheels of motive force with the V-four.
And maybe that was the problem. And maybe it still is.
As Yamaha and Kawasaki ploughed on, using at least the shape of the engines they have been building as roadbikes (albeit with heavy-hitting help from specialist engine firms and vast parent companies), Suzuki have gone through various revamps of their V-four, none of which has really worked.
GSX-R winning formula
Even now Suzuki has only won one MotoGP race since the end of the two-stroke era, with Chris Vermeulen taking advantage of his wet riding prowess at Le Mans in 2008. But in 2002 it was worse, only Roberts ended the year inside the overall top 10, finishing ninth in 2002. Show Roberts a wet track (like Donington) and sometimes only Vale can best him, but otherwise it's midfield, midfield, midfield, even after the best of qualifying sessions.
In 2004, after a swap to Bridgestone tyres, John Hopkins was 16th, Kenny Roberts 18th - a marginal improvement on 17th and 19th the previous year. Contrast this with the success of the GSX-R series in every single class it competed in. In 2005, Troy Corser rampaged across the World Superbike firmament like a yellow and purple bruise spreading across his rivals' faces, Suzuki had a full set of major titles won with their GSX-R series, and in truly global terms.
Looking back results proved, in most places on the planet the GSX-R influence just gets stronger and stronger, and the GSX-R1000 has been a winner pretty much since day one, in Britain (Reynolds, 2004), in America (multiple Mladin and Spies), in Japan (loads of titles and wins), in World Endurance (Castrol Suzuki SERT), in Proddy racing, at the TT - no doubt GSX-Rs would win in tractor racing if Yoshimura had the parts in their catalogue. The Gixxer legend continues, albeit attenuated by the GSV-R's lack of potency in the biggest four-stroke class of all.
The sheer scale of Suzuki's racing operations (or lack thereof) is cited as a big factor in Suzuki's lack of MotoGP progress. Visitors to Suzuki's home factory have always been amazed how compact and bijou the operation is, certainly compared to the heavy hitters like HRC and, to a slightly smaller extent, Yamaha. The link with Yoshimura is nonetheless strong; Yoshi play a part in the MotoGP push, but obviously not with the same degree of success as they have with GSX-Rs. When Suzuki were running two-strokes their resources looked stressed at times. Quadruple the budgets to run four-strokes and you can see one obvious increasing problem.
Both Honda and Yamaha, by comparison, also have a great deal of racing partners to do the techno tango with, to share info and expertise with, all of which they undertake in the four-stroke arena. In a nutshell, the big Japanese two can say categorically what not to do even before they finish the computer simulations, and far more easily than almost anyone else. And if you know what not to do, then the job of what to do gets defined more quickly.
The closest rival that Suzuki had in terms of factory competition was Kawasaki, however, they were bigger than Kawasaki in sheer motorcycle terms, and given that Kawasaki were even further behind Suzuki at the start, to see the ZX-RR go from not great to often podium finishers must be pretty galling.
Factory focus
Paul Denning took over the reigns of team-boss in 2005, so we asked just how much."I don't know if it's galling for the team but it's something we need to look at, have looked at, and asked why that should be," he said. "Kawasaki had a small race department but it worked in quite a pro-active way. They used a lot of European sourced material and engineering processes, reacting quickly to changes. They also made a big step when they signed up Mr Yoda from Yamaha. They also took the key steps of sourcing better skills, gaining instant experience, reacting more quickly and developing more quickly, and in Shinya Nakano they had a rider who was very well suited to all their changes. I think for a small factory, what Kawasaki did was absolutely the right way."
Denning knows the job is hard and not easily fixable, but offers some highly plausible reasons why the GSV-R is missing its GSX-R's X-factor so far.
"There are a number of reasons," he recounts. "Suzuki has had a lot of experience of four-stoke production racing with the GSX-R series since its introduction in 1985. The difference for a motorcycle manufacturer to go from a mass producer of the best quality sportsbikes to a very limited producer of a prototype race bike is completely different. The abilities required to do the latter are quite different. If you design a very good production bike, as Suzuki has always done with the GSX-R and particularly the 1000, the difficulty to make it competitive at the racetrack is quite small. In simple terms, you are competing against manufacturers who all start out with a streetbike worth about eight to ten grand to the customer. The GSX-R teams still have to work hard and the manufacturer has to work hard to get it as good as it can be, but compared to the overall effort put into the racing programme for the MotoGP bike, it is nominal. I would say Suzuki's internal focus, development cost and people resource is completely different from most people's perceptions."
So what's the split between Suzuki's efforts in production-based racing and MotoGP? "Because the GSX-R is winning people think that's where the focus is, but the race department has got something like a 75-to-25% GP-to-Superbike split. In terms of resource and development, everything is pointed at the GSV-R."
There is a key difference between Suzuki and the rest of them at present and it's not just scale. Kawasaki privately (but not too privately) left a lot of the cycle parts and specialist items to the team side of their operation, and Honda and Yamaha not only have themselves to rely on in the scrap, they also have bigger brothers to ask for help if they start to get beaten up.
As Denning states, Suzuki has a "lack of a 'sister' facility. For example, Honda and HRC have all that Formula 1 technology behind them - Yamaha is part of Toyota and has the Toyota automotive group doing the engine on the M1, using a lot of F1 technology. Now that doesn't mean that it's the only way or the best way to do it, but, for MotoGP, Suzuki is starting a process that is quite different from its normal production processes."
Looking forward, and through the fog of other distractions, Denning reckons the current GSV-R is not too far from the very best. In practice times at least, MotoGP has never been closer than it is now."At the moment it is potentially acknowledged that Honda has the best engine in GPs, as a package and with a mixture of torque, but our engine is really not far away from the Yamaha in terms of speed and acceleration. I think it would be wrong to go back to the start and say whether building a V-four was a mistake or not. Certainly in terms of the results in the last few years that's something you could point your finger at because a V-four is a completely new technology to Suzuki. In fairness though, the biggest mistake they could make now would be to scrap it. The processes to make that type of engine competitive in MotoGP are so completely different to production ones that you couldn't even dream of starting with a GSX-R1000 and making it competitive. The character of engines in MotoGP are completely different from Superbike. It's not just about peak torque and horsepower, it's about how the engines work and so on." Tantalisingly he added: "The 'V' engine angle has already changed once in the GSV-R's lifespan."
It's difficult to see how Suzuki can leap-frog the constantly developing Hondas and Yamahas. Even so, maybe our original question should not have been 'How can Suzuki not get their MotoGP bike to win when they win almost everything with GSX-Rs?', but 'How can Suzuki maintain their level of GSX-R success when they are putting so much of their effort into MotoGP?'
Should we be damning them for not quite making it in the most expensive, closely contested and technologically challenging class ever? Or praising them for taking on Honda and its hordes, and Yamaha and Valentino, and still making championship-winning Superbike weapons for all and sundry the world over? Like all things in racing, I guess it all depends on your particular point of view.
