On this weeks episode Mark and Kevin talk about motorcycle racing and the supernatural powers of racers and their ability to concentrate, focus, and even attain an altered state of consciousness. Check out the show and see if you can attain a "flow state" with us! Well, check out the show...
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00:00 Welcome to the Psychworld podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer. I'm here with Kevin Cameron,
00:04 technical editor. This week we're talking about the soft topics of rider
00:10 intelligence, supernatural memory, and then something that some riders, racers,
00:17 do talk about and others don't want to talk about, the altered state of
00:21 consciousness that is achieved. So it's sort of what makes world champions or
00:25 heck, what makes a national champions different than the rest of us
00:29 who wobble around or can only achieve 26's at Willow? What's the difference and
00:36 how does this... yeah, what is the difference in the championship
00:41 mind and what is the nature of the intelligence that allows world-class
00:47 riders to perform? What do you think, Kevin? Well, I had some nice conversations
00:54 with Kenny Roberts about this and he emphasized concentration. And of course
01:04 we're told that the reason that Russian software writers were as good as they
01:14 are is that having poor computers as a basis for their work, they had to
01:20 eliminate unnecessary program steps. And I think that's what concentration does.
01:26 It stops you worrying about your girlfriend, your income tax, the failing
01:32 transmission in your van, so that you can focus on what you're doing. And the
01:37 ability to concentrate is not entirely voluntary. People can't put it out of
01:45 their minds. And in fact, there are people who are driven nuts by their anxiety. So
01:50 I think that one very important thing for racers is the ability to put it
01:55 aside and do the job. And I think that Gary Nixon is one of those examples.
02:05 He was at Laguna, practice was over. His neighbor phoned and said, "Hey,
02:14 Gary, I don't know if this, you know, I'm talking out of school or what, but your
02:20 partner's got a big truck backed into the business and they're loading all
02:25 kinds of stuff in there." And then supposedly there was also some kind of
02:34 domestic stress caused by, oh, I don't know, racers always are in this kind of
02:43 trouble. And so what did Gary do? He went out and won the national. And I can
02:52 just hear his voice. I couldn't think about them things. I had a racer, I just
02:59 went up there and rode around.
03:01 - Just went up there and rode around.
03:04 - Yeah.
03:05 - Yeah.
03:06 So I think that concentration is a valuable element in a racer's list of
03:15 abilities.
03:16 - Well, maybe that's something that sets even us mere mortals apart from other
03:22 people who don't ride, is that ability to concentrate or the desire even to
03:27 concentrate. Because I get on a motorcycle and as...well, there's a
03:33 television writer, producer who's also a track school instructor named Ben
03:37 Younger and he wrote a column not long ago and he said something along the lines
03:45 of he wanted to ride fast enough that he couldn't think anymore. That was one of
03:51 the pleasures of going to the track.
03:53 - Absolutely. Absolutely.
03:55 - And so I think a lot of...I mean, it's cited, it's just everywhere in
04:00 motorcycle riding, right? Like, why do we ride? Well, one of the reasons is it
04:05 takes the noise away. You have this forced concentration or...it's not forced,
04:11 but it's certainly...
04:11 - It's required.
04:13 - It's required, right? And you seek that and I certainly have in just
04:18 motorcycle testing and going to the racetrack had moments where I'm not going
04:25 to try harder than I'm trying right now because I don't feel 100% present with
04:32 riding, so to speak. Other times, Sardinia 2003, Multi-Strada, original
04:38 Multi-Strada press launch, the roads were made of volcanic rock and they were
04:42 incredibly grippy and the Multi-Strada was this beautiful, lightweight 17-inch
04:48 wheel, you know, disregard what you think of its styling. It was a really nice
04:55 performing motorcycle and it was just this incredible immaculate road ride at an
05:00 incredibly high pace and never...I mean, rock walls on one side and precipice on
05:06 the other. And I never went out of my lane and we just...I took off with this guy,
05:10 Andrea Forney, the head tester, and he was on a 620 Monster and he had a more
05:15 immaculate moment than me because I was on an 1100 or a 1000, whatever it was,
05:22 and I tried my best to drop him and there was absolutely no getting rid of him.
05:28 But for me, it was one of the most focused and, I don't know, clean,
05:35 clean, just an immaculate state of being. It was really beautiful.
05:39 - A problem with that, of course, is that it implies that you can get into this
05:45 state where you're no longer aware of much, but we know that top-level riders
05:50 are constantly re-evaluating the grip. "Oh, last lap, that corner was...
05:56 felt different. What's going on here? I'm going to have to be careful next lap."
06:02 And all these things that are changing all the time, top riders are very much
06:09 present because they're planning the strategy for how they're going to pass
06:12 that guy ahead. They're minding their fuel, they are minding their tires,
06:19 and then they may get a message on the dash that says, "Suggest mapping nine."
06:29 So politics can even be brought to the rider on MotoGP day. So I think the ability
06:38 to perform in that highly focused way, pure concentration, that's almost like a
06:49 separate channel because the higher-level functions are going on at the same time.
06:54 A friend who was a pilot told me that each higher level of license required you
07:02 to do more things at once. And I think that a motorcycle racer is doing a large
07:10 number of things at once. Now, getting into that state, Mike Baldwin told me a
07:19 story about his time riding Honda Superbike and Formula 750 in the US.
07:28 And he said, "There we are at Daytona. This new bike is there. I haven't ridden
07:33 it before. I get on, I'm pushed off, I go around. And there's all the cars parked
07:41 there. There's the big transporter. There's journalists. I'm expected to put
07:46 some hot laps out to justify my existence." So he said, "I approach the chicane,
07:54 and I can see my right hand turning the throttle back, and I can't stop it,
08:02 although I know where I have to go in to that last board." And he said,
08:08 "A couple of laps go by like that, and I am in real trouble." And so he said,
08:15 "Finally, I make this big effort. I apply all the pressure I can to myself,
08:22 and suddenly, it all slows down, and I can see that I'm angling over for the
08:31 chicane, having nearly finished my braking. And everything is going past me as it
08:37 should. There's that pothole. There's that break in the pavement." And then he's
08:42 accelerating up onto the east wall, and it's fine. And he said,
08:48 "It stays that way for the rest of the season." So it's not something that just
08:58 deals upon you like sleep. It can be quite a transition. And then there was a chemist
09:10 that I knew who rode a BMW and saw no reason for anyone to ride any other
09:16 motorcycle. And he said, "When I came to a problem that I couldn't deal with,
09:24 I tried and tried. I would go for a three-hour ride." And this was what you
09:31 were alluding to before. He said, "When I came back from the ride,
09:35 I had cleaned out my mind, and I had a solution to the problem without thinking
09:40 about it." And another individual, also a non-racer, in fact, a poet,
09:49 a regular contributor to The New Yorker at one time, wrote about the experience
09:56 of using the motorcycle as a way to clear his mind.
10:01 - Sure, it's taking out the garbage, man. That's absolutely...
10:05 - Yeah. Just like those Russian programmers that, "We don't need this step.
10:09 We don't need this step. What is this object-oriented programming?
10:13 Down with it." And with minimum number of steps, the problem is solved more quickly
10:21 when you don't have processing power.
10:23 - Well, that was...even any of the early programmers always talked about the
10:30 elegance that when you had only so many K of memory to work with,
10:33 you couldn't put all this billions of lines of code. And now, people writing
10:39 base code, it's all widgets. All the base code is buried under all these things
10:43 that you drag around on a screen, and you can do your C++ doing whatever you feel
10:49 like. We have so much memory now. So, you know, the multitask management is
10:59 certainly one thing. You know, as a motorcycle racer, you're feeling so many
11:04 things, and there's so many dynamics going on your body. You know, a car racer
11:09 interacting with a car is a lot different than a motorcycle racer interacting
11:14 with a motorcycle. You talk about tires, and you're managing your tires.
11:19 You've even mentioned sound of tires in the past.
11:22 - Yes.
11:23 - You know, think of all the channels of stimulus that are coming in,
11:29 all the things you're feeling through your hands, in the brake lever,
11:33 from the tank, your knees, your feet, your foot pegs, brake pressure,
11:38 shift pressure.
11:39 - And those little fuzzies inside the cochleas.
11:44 - Yeah. And then you're actually hearing the noise of the tires,
11:47 which is one of your classic stories.
11:51 - Yeah.
11:51 - Taking that to a tire guy and saying, "You should put microphones on your
11:54 tires." Funny old cab, but it was actually a real thing. Like,
12:00 riders had been talking about getting information about the state of their
12:04 tires, from how they sounded.
12:06 - And our favorite vintage racer, Todd Henning, said, "If I was riding hard
12:19 behind a guy, and I didn't want to take the risk of trying to lay a move on him,
12:27 I would wait for his tire to go off. How would you know?" He said,
12:31 "It gets a special look." He said, "When the tire,
12:35 when his rear tire gets that special look, I know I can just go around him,
12:40 and he can't do a thing about it."
12:42 - Yeah. It's all those channels, and managing all of that,
12:48 paying attention to all that, and then I think remembering all of that,
12:52 noticing the patterns and the differences, and then having the...
12:56 - The patterns, yes.
12:57 - And having the memory.
12:58 - Yeah.
13:00 - Because if you ask, you know, you ask Freddy Spencer about Suzuka,
13:05 there's a famous picture of him pushing the front at Suzuka, I think it was.
13:09 And, you know, like, he remembers every molecule of pavement,
13:14 and like, what the air smelled like, and they just have this really spectacular
13:19 recall, the top people.
13:21 - Well, he was...when he was riding for American Honda, he was taken to a track
13:28 that he hadn't ridden before, and they gave him another rider to show him around.
13:36 And he passed the guy, and in three laps, it set a new lap record.
13:41 And years later, Irv Kanemoto said, "Well," he said, "that ability to learn
13:48 tracks like that," he said, "Freddy told me that he would look at a corner and say,
13:55 'Oh, this is a lot like Turn 7 at such-and-such a track, or something at Loudon,
14:04 or Sonoma, or whatever.'"
14:06 And he would construct a model of the track, and what it was,
14:13 and what he had to do that was sort of schematized that way, and off he would go.
14:23 And, of course, there are differences.
14:26 There are riders who ride to a line, and then there's Gary Nixon,
14:33 who rode where there was grip.
14:38 The great old story about the policeman trying to help the man looking for his
14:41 lost contact lens, where'd you lose it?
14:44 Over there.
14:46 Well, why are you looking here?
14:47 The light's better.
14:52 There have been cases of people who have tried to lay a pass on somebody who was
14:58 looking like he was on a bad line.
15:00 Turned out it was the only line with good grip.
15:03 Try to pass him, you're going to be in big trouble.
15:06 -Yeah.
15:07 Well, Rich Oliver...
15:08 Yep, sorry.
15:09 Go ahead.
15:09 -You just have to know that stuff and instantly recall it.
15:13 -Yeah.
15:15 Rich Oliver described exactly what you said about Freddy Spencer,
15:19 about having the catalog of corners.
15:21 -Yeah.
15:23 -To a T.
15:23 I mean, Rich was a multi...
15:27 What is he?
15:28 10 times?
15:29 250 Grand Prix.
15:30 He won an entire season of races, I think.
15:33 He was just...
15:34 -He was the guy.
15:35 -Yeah, really just spectacular, super smooth, could spring his motorcycle on the
15:41 soft side for more grip.
15:44 And just especially if he got out front, he could just run these laps,
15:48 lap after lap, just fully repeatable.
15:51 I interviewed him at Laguna years ago and asked him many questions about doing that.
15:57 And he was doing his own work on his bike at the time as well.
16:02 And he just had notebooks and he pulled out a notebook and the notebook had every
16:08 jetting change, all the barometer, everything he did with the spring,
16:13 the damping, all of that.
16:16 And then the catalog of corners and the feel for the motorcycle and just the
16:21 repeatability.
16:23 Better than anyone else, the repeatability was there and, you know,
16:29 intelligence, organization, memory.
16:34 He was an unstoppable force there.
16:38 I know this is a car thing, but it speaks to the altered state of consciousness.
16:44 And I've had some motorcycle racers sort of offhandedly talk about, you know,
16:53 getting into a different state of mind.
16:55 And this is Ayrton Senna at Monaco in, I think it was 1988.
17:01 The quote from him, because he went out and he did a qualifying lap that was like
17:05 one, one and a half seconds faster than I think than pros at Monaco,
17:10 which is a very hard track.
17:11 And it's not, you know, getting gains on a track, you know,
17:16 it's a street circuit.
17:18 It's just difficult, right?
17:19 And he says, "Suddenly I realized I was no longer driving the car conscious and I
17:23 was in a different dimension for me.
17:25 The circuit for me was a tunnel.
17:27 I realized I was well beyond my conscious understanding."
17:31 And that's always been fascinating to me.
17:34 And I think, you know, you've mentioned some riders in the past,
17:39 you know, you've brought that to them, like tell that story because I was always
17:44 fascinated by the reaction.
17:48 - Well, I think the feeling of the motorcycle can be very instructive.
17:55 And I have noticed that the dominant rider in any given era is generally the rider
18:06 who has best exploited recent technical changes in the motorcycle suspension or
18:14 the tires or any combination thereof.
18:18 When Kenny arrived in Europe, the Europeans rode the classical big line,
18:26 the largest radius, the circle of the largest possible radius inscribed into the
18:31 roadway.
18:33 And that had worked well with the European model, which was 125, 250, 350, and 500.
18:41 These were all relatively low-powered machines.
18:44 For example, a Max Norton, a factory Max making 54 horsepower is basically at 125
18:51 in today's terms.
18:53 Because when the GP125s were finally laid to rest, sent to the museum,
19:01 they were making close to 60 horsepower.
19:05 And they didn't weigh a lot either.
19:08 I noticed the team manager has just picked up one of the machines.
19:12 They must be quite light.
19:14 So then there are other things that happen.
19:19 If something gets the rider's attention, his concentration can be gone.
19:26 -Well, that's the next part of that Senna story is he's in a different world.
19:33 He qualifies.
19:34 He smokes everybody qualifying.
19:36 And he's leading the race by a huge margin at Monaco.
19:40 And someone comes on the radio and says, "Ayrton, you have a huge lead.
19:46 Slow down."
19:47 And he hit the wall.
19:49 -Yeah.
19:51 Well, Hurley Wilbert told one like that.
19:53 Hurley Wilbert said, "When you see the flag, do not slow down because you'll lose
20:00 your timing and you'll crash.
20:04 Make a regular racing lap and stop after the flag."
20:09 And I think that's excellent advice.
20:11 But I've seen more than one rider who, if he brought a distraction to the racetrack
20:21 in the form of a female person, concentration would just evaporate.
20:28 I saw one rider go out and do 18 laps of practice, each of which was slower
20:34 than the one before it.
20:36 And when I showed him the board, he said, "What's this?"
20:41 And I said, "It's disappointing.
20:43 You're thinking about something else."
20:49 And so there are riders who say, "I don't bring a distraction of any kind
20:56 to the racetrack."
21:00 In the days of man in a van with a plan, when a rider would come in off the track,
21:06 he would typically go to one of those one-pound lawn chairs that folds and sit there.
21:16 And woe unto anyone who attempts to speak to that person because what he's doing is
21:23 running laps in his head.
21:27 Mike Baldwin stayed here one night when this house was just a shell with a wood
21:34 stove in the kitchen.
21:36 He slept on the floor in the kitchen.
21:38 In the middle of the night, I heard this crash and I called out, "You okay?"
21:48 Dreaming.
21:49 I lost the front.
21:52 -Terrible feeling.
21:53 -Yeah.
21:56 Now, Freddy, on the other hand, learned to recover the front.
22:01 And the way he did that, he told me that, he said, "There's a couple of dirt tracks
22:06 down in Kentucky."
22:08 And he said, "They weren't oval like in Annapolis, four turns with little straightaways on one
22:15 end and big ones on the side."
22:18 He said, "It was more like a football."
22:21 And he said, "So you're turning all the time and you could kind of play with it."
22:26 And he said, "I learned that if I lost the front, I could bring it back with a little
22:36 bit of throttle."
22:37 Now, I didn't understand that for some time, even though we all know the old dirt trackers
22:45 adage, "When in doubt, gas it."
22:49 And that's what they're talking about.
22:51 But what's going on, I found in Piero Taruffi's low red book, The Technique of Motor Racing,
23:00 which is about cars.
23:02 And there's a Dunlop graph in there showing load versus grip.
23:07 And it goes up in a linear slope, it softens, and then it drops.
23:13 When you're losing the front, you're in the dropping part.
23:18 And so he said, "I decided to try it on pavement."
23:23 He tried it at Loudon and it worked.
23:28 And there was a period of time when Freddy was so unbeatable in GP racing, and other
23:37 people had no idea what he was doing.
23:42 He was just mysteriously fast.
23:46 And of course, when you don't understand something, you call it magic.
23:51 - Yeah.
23:53 So, I wanna go back to that alternative consciousness.
24:02 Who did you talk to about that?
24:04 You have a story related to that.
24:06 - Well, there's a bunch of literature on this, actually.
24:13 And one of the places you would look is in Richard Gabriel's little book, Madness and
24:25 Psychiatry in Warfare.
24:30 And soldiers, mountaineers, racers, all those people report this altered state that Ayrton
24:42 Senna described.
24:48 And I think that it is probably a sort of auto-concentration.
24:56 You can't think of anything else.
24:58 All that's going to run is the minimum number of steps that are needed for the performance.
25:06 And evidently, top racers can let that run like a stew simmering on the stove, and do
25:15 other things.
25:16 I'm gonna chop an onion, I'm gonna answer the phone, I'm gonna do all these things,
25:21 and the outcome can be very good.
25:27 But of course, think about the difference between looking at the score and playing the
25:32 notes and just playing the music.
25:40 Once the music is inside you, it becomes part of you.
25:48 It's no longer, "Next we'll play this note, and then that one."
25:53 It sounds like those automated voices on the phone.
25:58 Anyway, so there's quite a lot to read about this, but I don't think that there's a self-help
26:10 12-step.
26:11 Yeah.
26:12 Well, you talked about Kenny going to Europe and sitting in the trailer or sitting in the
26:19 tires or something.
26:21 Oh, yeah.
26:24 That was a wonderful gift that he gave me in 1980.
26:30 I got the rental car at the airport, and I drove, and I followed directions, and there
26:36 was no GPS in those days, and I went to arrive at his house.
26:41 And on the seat beside me was the tape recorder and the notebook and all that stuff, and I
26:46 thought, "I don't want testimony, I want a conversation."
26:54 So I left all that stuff there.
26:57 And the story that he told me was, he said, "I was there at the match races in England,
27:05 and I was at Brands, and I was third in practice, and I couldn't figure out why."
27:15 And he said, "Nothing that I did seemed to work.
27:21 Those other guys, like Nixon said, when a neighbor asked, 'How come you didn't win,
27:27 Gary?'
27:28 He said, 'My mother and two fellows wrote better than me, that's why.'"
27:33 But what Kenny did, and mind you, this is a person of monumental determination.
27:42 He said, "We had this Goodyear truck, and there were hundreds of tires in there, more
27:47 than we could ever hope to test.
27:49 It was like a mystery.
27:51 What are we doing with all these tires?"
27:52 I went up in there, and I pushed a couple of stacks of tires around until I made a kind
27:58 of an office.
28:00 And I sat in there, and I thought about it.
28:03 And he said, "After a while, I began to do a frame by frame."
28:12 He said, "It was just, I could see it in my mind.
28:16 And after I'd done that for a while, I began to see what those other guys were doing that
28:22 I wasn't doing."
28:24 And then after a while, he said, "I was in there about three hours.
28:31 When I came out, I said to Kel, Kel Carruthers, his crew chief at that time, the only other
28:37 person on the team for a long time, "Put some wheels on this thing.
28:44 I'm going out."
28:45 He said, "I went out, and I was on the record."
28:48 He said, "That was the first time in my life that I realized the lap time was not coming
28:57 from my hand, it was coming from my brain."
29:01 And I thought, "This is pretty good.
29:03 I'm going to go back in there."
29:07 So he went up in the truck again, and he gave himself another session.
29:13 And he said, "When I came out, I had a new lap record."
29:17 Now, not everybody works that way.
29:23 When I asked Eddie Lawson about this, well, Eddie said, "I was at Laguna, and Eddie had
29:37 just bought some fancy automobile."
29:40 And he said, "Get in, I'll give you a ride around the track."
29:44 So we're roaring out onto the track and going at a tension-getting speed.
29:51 And he said, "That seatbelt on your side doesn't even work.
29:54 Don't worry about it."
29:56 So I didn't.
29:57 Basically, what he told me in response to my curiosity about how he went at racing,
30:05 he said, "The more I think about it, the slower I go."
30:11 So there is no single way to be a motorcycle racer.
30:20 And when Cook Nelson, who was the editor that turned cycle into the giant that it would
30:31 become, rather than Floyd Climber's forum for riding Harleys while seated on them backwards,
30:44 he said, "I just came back from talking to Kenny."
30:55 And he said, "He's like an intellectual of racing."
30:59 He said, "He knows everything that he's doing, and he can describe it well."
31:05 He said, "I went into the interview, and I was thinking, 'Okay, I'm going to go talk
31:11 to this quick-risk kid that kind of gets out there and skids around.'"
31:16 Well, that was the misfortune of Anthony Gobert.
31:23 Because when I asked Gobert to tell me something about his learning process, he said, "I never
31:30 learned anything."
31:31 He said, "I could just always ride them out of my way."
31:35 Yeah, he's a real interesting case.
31:38 Yeah, but another way to do it.
31:41 And it could be that that flow state or that state of perfection or whatever you want to
31:48 call it was just a switch on the wall for him.
31:53 "I'm going riding," click.
31:56 Seemed to be.
31:57 But he knew what he was doing, too, because I noticed when he came down the corkscrew
32:02 and made the right-left...
32:04 At the bottom of the corkscrew, you make a right-left direction change.
32:10 And I noticed that he was hesitating at the top of the roll.
32:14 So I went to talk to him, and I said, "What is this?
32:19 Why do you do that?"
32:21 He said, "Because if I don't, the bike goes crazy.
32:25 It just goes nuts."
32:26 Let me guess, was that a Ducati?
32:28 Sure it was a Ducati.
32:30 Yeah.
32:31 Well, they had that flex in the chassis that helped them so much for so long.
32:37 I watched that happen at Monza and all those chicanes at Monza.
32:41 And Yanagawa would go through the chicanes on the Kawasaki, and his left-right transition
32:48 was nonstop, and it was light speed.
32:51 He could just whip, whip, whip.
32:52 I went to Colin Edwards, and I said, "Hey, Yanagawa goes through..."
32:56 And he's like, "I don't care what..."
32:57 He was on the RC-51, and he had to pause the RC-51.
33:01 He would pause, but then you watch the Ducati guys.
33:03 It would wind up as they're lifting it.
33:05 They had to wait for the spring to relax, and then they could put it down the other
33:09 direction.
33:10 Yeah.
33:11 And I think Edward is such an interesting case, because he was in some way...
33:16 He was so affable, and he was really cool.
33:19 I saw him at Monza, and it was after he'd been kicked out of MotoGP for the drug use.
33:27 And he was really positive, and he was cruising through the pits after the race, and the air
33:32 was warm, and it was really nice.
33:35 I asked him about being in Superbike versus Grand Prix, and he's like, "Oh, they're so
33:39 uptight in Grand Prix.
33:40 Over here, we can just sit around and have a couple of beers, smoke a joint with your
33:44 friends and whatever."
33:45 And it was just a completely different thing.
33:47 But looking at him in the States versus someone like Matt Maladon, Matt was so intensely focused
34:00 and disciplined, so disciplined.
34:03 And Gobert didn't appear to have any discipline, but how do you ride like that if you don't
34:07 have...
34:09 I mean, he had command of something, right?
34:11 He certainly did.
34:12 Yeah.
34:13 He was doing it right.
34:15 He wasn't casual.
34:17 You could see that he was doing it right.
34:21 And of course, another thing about at the top of the roll is that the motorcycle is
34:27 rotating rapidly in roll, and at the top of the roll, the tires go light.
34:35 And so, a lot of the damping from the footprint, footprints get small, damping goes away.
34:43 So you get a big shiver.
34:47 Yeah, big shiver.
34:49 But then again, now, Colin talked about the Ducatis.
34:52 I said, "I notice," and this was while he was riding the RC, I said, "I notice that
34:59 the Ducatis just wallow their way through the corners."
35:03 You could see that they had that looseness, and that chassis, Tamburini chassis was...
35:13 It had no...
35:14 My hands are the steering head.
35:16 It had very little resistance to lateral movement, and I'm sure that helped them.
35:22 Because what Colin said then was, "Yeah, they wallow, but they dig in and go around the
35:28 corner."
35:32 And years later, he said to me, "I had arrived at Motegi in 2000 and something, '03, I think,
35:43 and I felt like the little lost boy.
35:46 Oh, this is a series that I don't know anything about, and I don't know anybody, and I'm just
35:54 lost here."
35:56 Colin came and said, "Come with me.
35:58 I want to tell you a few things."
36:02 And we went out on the pit wall.
36:05 It was evening, and he told me all this fascinating stuff.
36:10 And one of the things that he said was that Honda bought a Ducati, and they measured its
36:19 stiffness and the different aspects of the stiffness.
36:22 And he said, "It was half the stiffness of the RC."
36:30 And so what Honda did was to create a kit of parts that allowed you to progressively
36:37 decouple the engine at the front from the rest of the chassis to allow some of that
36:42 lateral movement.
36:43 He said, "Each time they'd loosen it a little bit, I could go harder before it started to
36:50 chatter."
36:51 And he said, "Eventually, I was able to break balance with that thing."
36:58 And I went to look at the RC in the paddock at Laguna in that same period, and there it
37:08 was sitting with the fairing off.
37:09 And I looked for the engine bolt that is sort of in the middle at the top, and I could look
37:18 right through.
37:19 The hole was empty.
37:20 The bolt was gone.
37:24 So all this action is going on unseen by the spectator, or I should say the fan, and there's
37:34 no reason for them to care about it.
37:36 But I find it fascinating.
37:39 Yeah.
37:42 It's really interesting the different approaches that different riders bring to it.
37:47 Oh, for sure.
37:48 I mean, Colin was always, I don't know, Colin was on the surface anyway, very practical.
37:55 I saw Bayless at that Monza race in 2000, and I was talking to him.
37:59 And he had just been basically, he got pickpocketed from Vance and Hines because Fogarty had broken
38:07 his arm, and they weren't sure he was ever going to race.
38:10 And he really didn't.
38:11 Well, he had weak nerves.
38:12 The nerves.
38:13 Yeah.
38:15 So Bayless had just, he got pickpocketed from Vance and Hines in the States, and they plopped
38:20 him on a factory Ducati with Michelin tires, which he hadn't really ever raced on.
38:25 And I asked him about that in the paddock.
38:27 I'm like, Hey, you know, um, cause there he was, you know, he's out breaking like three
38:31 riders going into chicanes on tires he's never raced on.
38:35 And Michelin's at the time were, you know, basically, oh yeah, they have more outright
38:39 grip, but they let go suddenly.
38:42 Yeah.
38:44 And uh, I said, Troy, you're out breaking all these guys going into the chicane.
38:50 What are you doing?
38:51 He's like, ah, I reckon I just squeeze a bit harder, mate.
38:53 I was like, you know, just, yeah, whatever.
38:56 I just, yeah, I just got to, just got to out break him.
38:59 That's it.
39:00 You know?
39:01 And I said, yeah, but Michelin, you know, you've, you've spent a career on Dunlops and
39:03 now you're on Michelin.
39:04 He's like, I don't know.
39:05 They're just round and black.
39:06 You know, they're tired.
39:07 They just feel what they're doing.
39:08 And away he went, you know, he had this incredible career with them, uh, after that.
39:13 So it's, it's very practical.
39:17 And you know, I mean, he's, you know, he's talking to a journalist and it was a quick
39:20 interview in the paddock at, in Italy and so forth, but it, it really, obviously he's
39:27 got a level of concentration going on on the bike that would mimic anything else that we
39:32 have talked about.
39:34 Right.
39:35 Um, and the flow state, I suppose.
39:38 Uh, I think you mentioned Kenny that you, you went to Kenny Roberts and said, you know,
39:43 Hey, there's this thing, this flow state and his, he had a very, a very definitive response
39:49 to you.
39:50 Yeah.
39:51 He just said, that's something that I just don't talk about.
39:54 Yeah.
39:55 And I think that for some of these people, it is racing is a church in which it is possible
40:08 to achieve grace, a state of grace.
40:13 And I think that can be very valuable because the din of everyday life makes you glad to
40:21 lie down in bed at night and you hope for oblivion, not for lying there and thinking,
40:27 Oh, tomorrow I've got to do this.
40:28 And then, Oh, I have to call so-and-so and all these, these things are gnawing at you
40:35 and eventually you do go to sleep.
40:37 Yeah.
40:38 Well, Matt Maladon in recent times, um, if, if you aren't, if you aren't following Matt
40:43 Maladon on Facebook people, you should do that because it's so interesting where he's
40:48 been.
40:49 He's had an intense career in America, right?
40:51 Doing fantastic, uh, multiple multi-time championships, highly focused, evolving the motorcycle, traction
40:59 control, electronics, all the things, intense focus, uh, adrenaline, all the things that
41:05 happened and, and he, for decades, or not decades for a decade, 10 years after racing,
41:11 suddenly he woke up and he didn't have that anymore.
41:13 And he's talked about struggling with addiction and all the things because he had this thing
41:18 in his life that was suddenly gone.
41:20 And yeah, you're, you're, you're not achieving the same state of grace and ability to find,
41:27 you know, focus, concentration in a, in a sort of peace.
41:31 And freedom.
41:32 Yeah.
41:33 Because you know what's going to happen and nothing's going to intrude on it.
41:38 Yeah.
41:39 I remember seeing a photograph of a, of a fighter pilot who had flown for the Indian
41:46 Air Force in the India Pakistan war in 1971.
41:51 And he had, uh, shot down, engaged and shot down a Pakistani F-104, which was basically
42:02 a jet engine with, with little wings sticking out and a place to sit.
42:09 And, uh, he had made a textbook job of engaging the other aircraft.
42:18 But in the photograph, here is a chubby older man.
42:24 His face is starting to sag.
42:26 Surrounded, surrounded by Victorian excesses of furniture and upholstery and pictures on
42:36 the wall and on a table next to him is a photograph of him descending from his MiG 21 ML or whatever
42:45 it was and his ground crew all sort of, they're going to carry him around the, around the
42:50 airbase on their shoulders.
42:52 So he had participated in a extremely intense competition in which he had succeeded.
43:03 And the rest of his life, he was a staff officer.
43:07 And you know that it's terrible for, for football players because there's more than one agency
43:13 that exists to help them with the transition.
43:18 So, uh, I really, I feel badly for people who have, have achieved grace and can no longer
43:29 do so.
43:30 Yeah.
43:31 Well, I mean, we all, you know, we, I think it's a good, it's a good way to wind up because
43:40 I think even us, as we talked about earlier in the show, you get on a motorcycle to achieve
43:46 some kind of state of grace, even mortals like us, you know, we participate, we're looking,
43:54 we're looking for that grace and you know, your reflexes change and all the things change
44:00 and you, you ride just fast enough.
44:03 So you can't think like, like, uh, like Ben said, been younger, just fast enough.
44:07 And that maybe that speed changes.
44:11 But um, yeah, it's, uh, it's amazing.
44:15 I remember that they had a, uh, master's class at Daytona where retired riders, greats from
44:25 the past competed on, uh, a spec motorcycle.
44:30 And some of those people were quite badly injured because what happened was that their
44:36 competitive, uh, instinct urged them to do things that they once, that were once easy
44:46 for them, but had become impossible.
44:49 And that's, that's a heavy price to pay.
44:52 It is.
44:53 But then again, that's, uh, that's life.
44:58 Yeah.
44:59 It's not personal.
45:00 Yep.
45:01 Well, maybe I'll achieve our states of grace as they fit us.
45:06 Yeah.
45:07 Um, that's it.
45:08 If you like what we're doing, uh, like comment, subscribe, comment, please let us know if
45:14 there are topics you want to cover.
45:17 Um, we always want to hear what Kevin has to say about it.
45:20 And uh, thanks for joining us on the show.