Cycle magazine editors Cook Neilson and Phil Schilling bought a Ducati 750 Supersport in the 1970s and made it into a superbike racer, which launched the Italian marque's reputation in the US. Dubbed the California Hot Rod, the bike was unrelentingly modified and developed to become a Daytona winner. It is perhaps the most important Ducati V-twin behind Paul Smart's 1972 Imola 200-winning machine and helped establish the worldwide performance reputation still enjoyed by the company.
The build and racing effort was molecularly detailed in the pages of Cycle magazine, and Kevin Cameron recalls the story with Mark Hoyer to share its fascinating development and the string legends that helped it go fast---faster than anybody on the track with great frequency.
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The build and racing effort was molecularly detailed in the pages of Cycle magazine, and Kevin Cameron recalls the story with Mark Hoyer to share its fascinating development and the string legends that helped it go fast---faster than anybody on the track with great frequency.
Looking to buy? Get prequalified
https://octane.co/flex/1?a=171
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6CLI74xvMBFLDOC1tQaCOQ
Read more from Cycle World: https://www.cycleworld.com/
Buy Cycle World Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cycleworld
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SportsTranscript
00:00:00This is the Cycle World Podcast. I'm Mark Coyier and I'm with Kevin Cameron and we're here to talk
00:00:04about motorcycles again. This week it's the California Hot Rod. What is the California
00:00:11Hot Rod? The California Hot Rod was a Ducati that was built by Phil Schilling and Cook Nelson
00:00:16for Cycle Magazine. Cook and Phil inarguably ran Cycle Magazine through its
00:00:23whole definite peak and heyday. Exceptionally great riding, large circulation and they really
00:00:32transformed the magazine from whatever it was, which I don't know what it was because I wasn't
00:00:36around for that, but I was around for their version of Cycle and certainly we have the
00:00:41archives here. We've owned the Cycle archives for a long time and in that is the California
00:00:50Hot Rod. So the California Hot Rod was was Ducati's v-twin of the 1970s and it was a 750
00:00:59Supersport and it was made into a super bike during the the birth years of that class of
00:01:08production-based racing and it was Ducati's first big motorcycle. There's lots to talk about here.
00:01:15Kevin Cameron worked for Cycle Magazine and it was Cook Nelson. I believe Cook asked you to write
00:01:23something about the upcoming season, which you did and you seemed to do that in English and
00:01:28it kind of went from there. I don't know. If I'm coughing like a 90 year old with
00:01:35pneumonia it's because I feel like that, but we'll carry on. Go ahead. Well,
00:01:45what happened was that I had written a sort of Military Strengths of the Powers regarding the
00:01:531971 season and what the various brands might bring to Daytona and I had written it originally
00:02:01for Bob Hanson, who was running Team Kawasaki at that time, Team Hanson, and I thought I'll
00:02:08send a copy to the magazines and the one that hit the mark reached Cook Nelson and he made a
00:02:18note of it and at a later time he phoned me up and said that thing you wrote is grammatically
00:02:29acceptable and would you like to do something about your last summer's work with the home-built
00:02:39750 Kawasaki and so that was the beginning of that. That was published in I think January of
00:02:4873 after the 72 season. So in 1972 Kawasaki finally resolved a question that had been
00:03:02facing him for some time. How do we break into this new big bike market? Because the Italian
00:03:09industry up to this point had served the Italian nation with 125s and 175s. It was a very vigorous
00:03:20175 racing class in Italy, but they could see that 750s were the coming thing. What are we
00:03:29going to do about it? Well, they built their 450 Desmo and being a single and not having a balance
00:03:37shaft, it had a tremendous piston shaking force and you can't balance a single so that it's
00:03:47smooth. All you can do is cut the maximum force in half. So that didn't cut it. They decided, well,
00:03:55the English don't know how to build a smooth parallel twin, but we're Italians, aren't we?
00:04:01So they built one and idling, it crept across the concrete shop floor because of the vibration.
00:04:09A parallel twin with 360 degree crank pins is a single as far as vibration is concerned.
00:04:17Yeah, GTL. So at this point, Dr. Taglioni realized that a real departure would be required
00:04:28and he did what anyone could have done at that time, which is to look in a standard
00:04:34engineering text that lists the balancing possibilities for engines of all numbers of
00:04:40cylinders and configurations. And it turns out that with nothing but a crank shaft mounted
00:04:50counterweight, you can balance the primary shaking force of a 90 degree V-twin completely.
00:05:00What this meant was a marriage between Ducati's long adherence to making power through RPM
00:05:11and the new 750 displacement was perfectly possible because if the engine isn't trying
00:05:19to rip itself out of the chassis, or isn't trying to turn the fuel in the fuel bowls
00:05:29of the carburetors into froth or break parts off, which has happened. Or make your hands numb.
00:05:36Yes. Or other things. Yes, other things. And then you've got to go in concern.
00:05:46And they built these things and they entered the Imola 200, which was a
00:05:54Daytona style long distance race for big motorcycles. And you were there. Yes, I was there.
00:06:03By the way. Yes. That was the introduction of the, that was sort of the coming out party for
00:06:09this motorcycle. That's right. For Ducati's forging into the big bike market and the V-twin.
00:06:15And it wasn't, you know, Dr. T wasn't making some grand, brand new engineering discovery. It's just
00:06:23like, well, we got this single that's doing this and we've got a crank case and wouldn't it make
00:06:30sense to make a V-twin? And away you went. They made a V-twin and they applied their
00:06:36desmodromic valve and their, you know, bevel overhead cam and stuff. The thing is,
00:06:45Ducati had Bruno Spaggiari as rider, who was, had a long distinguished history.
00:06:52They knew that Agostini was going to ride a shaft drive MV in the Imola 200. And they decided,
00:07:02let's add Paul Smart. So they phoned up, Maggie Smart, Maggie Smart, who is Barry Sheen's sister,
00:07:11picked up the phone. No, he's not here. Who is this please? It was soon amply clear who it was.
00:07:20Would he like to ride the motorcycle in the upcoming Imola 200? Well, I'm sure he would.
00:07:26So just mark it down as a yes. And when he came home. You'd like him to ride what? Where? Of
00:07:34course. Yes, naturally. Air tickets were enabled and Paul arrived in town and there were a few of
00:07:50us. Myself, my rider, Cliff Carr, Englishman, who knew Paul Smart. And Paul, we're standing in front
00:07:58of Ducati's glass van. Oh, it's beautiful. Tremendous sheets of glass you could look in
00:08:05and see, but not touch. It's like, like the, the windows of the great department stores before
00:08:12Christmas. So we have, so Phil Schilling went there with the art director of Cycle at that
00:08:18time. And they took, they took cameras and a lot of black and white film and they took tons and tons
00:08:24of pictures, which we have in the cycle archive of, of all of this period of the glass van, all that
00:08:29stuff. So Phil was, Phil was there. Imola 200, I mean, that was kind of a niche European race,
00:08:37right? Like that didn't really, I mean, it wasn't part of any series yet. Yeah. So it was just some,
00:08:43you know, it was just some like, Hey, big ratio, but it wasn't, it wasn't as if it was the defining
00:08:50race of the global motorcycle championship or anything. It was, but it turned out to be
00:08:58a, a mighty accomplishment for Ducati because suddenly they were a believable
00:09:06manufacturer of big, powerful motorcycles. It established them. Now, Paul said to us at that
00:09:15time, he said, they're telling me to upshift this thing at 9,750. Is that even possible?
00:09:23Because this is a man who had raced max singles, Norton Manx singles, which 7,200 was
00:09:33getting to be iffy. So the idea of 9,750
00:09:41unbelievable, unbelievable. Furthermore, he said, they told me I can take it to 11 if I have to.
00:09:49Ooh, special occasion revs. I like that.
00:09:52Yeah. My friend who, who built the 3.8 liter Jaguar engine in my E-type, I asked him like,
00:10:03you know, like, Hey, what, you know, just keep it, keep it at 5,500 RPM red line. He's like,
00:10:07well, you know, you can go to six for special occasions. Rods are shot peened,
00:10:11et cetera. So stroke there, 106 millimeter stroke, I think.
00:10:17Wartime aircraft engines, the throttle had a little glass rod in it, which broke if you pushed
00:10:25all the way to war emergency, that was power for special occasions. So
00:10:35Paul won the race. Agostini was out. Something happened to the MV. And
00:10:41um, suddenly here is this new motorcycle on the map and back at cycle magazine.
00:10:54Uh, the two editors, uh, ha presently are able to get their hands on, uh,
00:11:01something like the Imola motorcycle and they, they loved it and they had it for a number of weeks.
00:11:11And they hatched the idea of going racing with it. They knew that in 1974, for various reasons,
00:11:19the 1972 models would become unavailable or unable to be sold in the U S. Um,
00:11:30and so they ordered two bikes and when the bikes duly arrived after a period of time,
00:11:41they had one of them running immediately. They could not postpone gratification.
00:11:49And you have to understand something about these, these two men. These were not people
00:11:56who came to cycle magazine as a result of the journalism course. They were people
00:12:04who wanted what motorcycles could give personal freedom and autonomy of a kind that you can't get
00:12:15by fighting to become department chairman at university, which is the life that was,
00:12:22that lay ahead of Phil Schilling. He was a student of professor Mosse in German history,
00:12:31but he wrote a fantasy piece about pretending to be racing as he rode around, uh, Madison,
00:12:40Wisconsin's city park, uh, internal roadways. And Nelson saw this and exfiltrated him from the
00:12:55academic life. He was the atrium of pedantry. He was extracted. And, uh, Cook Nelson doesn't like
00:13:07to be called Cook Nelson. Nelson likewise had striven for autonomy. He was born into a family
00:13:20in which he was expected to ride and he rode, but not horses, was motorcycles.
00:13:28And at the time that, uh, cycle was converted from a, a yes book, this new triumph model is
00:13:37ideal for everything from racing to family sport into, uh, an authoritative fact-based
00:13:45new journalism, which was their work. These two men did this.
00:13:55They, uh, Nelson had a Harley fueler that he was riding and kept it in his New York city
00:14:02loft department. The magazine was originally in the New York orbit. It was ultimately
00:14:08moved to California, but, uh, here were two people who had escaped.
00:14:15They had become free agents and they were so in love with this new motorcycle. They had,
00:14:24they had identified by their road testing three motorcycles that they felt were had promise
00:14:32the Laverda and what they called the Z1 with cool shocks, meaning not that they were hip,
00:14:41but that they weren't hot yet when they got hot, not so good. And the new Ducati 90 degree V twin.
00:14:52And by degrees, they somehow persuaded themselves to put a toe in the water and a foot
00:15:01and a calf and up to the hips. And Nelson had not, to my knowledge, done any racing before this.
00:15:13He soon found out that there was a difference between hard street riding
00:15:18and racing. And he set about learning how to do it. And the series of magazine articles beyond
00:15:27racer road described the steps by which he learned to be a serious threat in racing.
00:15:39And the two of them built a motorcycle that was intended for one purpose into one intended for
00:15:48racing. And those several beyond racer road stories
00:15:57lists the races, the modifications, the lightenings. Pierre Desroches came a couple of times
00:16:07and took things away. Center stand brackets and all other unwanted material. If it's aluminum,
00:16:18let it be magnesium. If it's steel, let it be aluminum.
00:16:25The cylinder heads were a concern because they had an 80 degree
00:16:33valve included angle, the angle from one valve stem to the other. That results in a deep
00:16:39hemispherical combustion chamber that has a lot of surface area. And if you want a high
00:16:46compression ratio, that means there's going to be a lot of aluminum piston dome poking up
00:16:54into that chamber. And in that series of articles are cataloged all of the steps.
00:17:07More compression. Oh, we're dragging the right-hand pipe. Let's put on bigger tires.
00:17:12Oh, we're going faster now. Let's put on actual race tires. Oh, our critics are saying our bike is
00:17:22ski hopping and skipping. It's time for slicks. It's time for Morris mags.
00:17:30By all these steps, the motorcycle was transformed from a really nice sporting
00:17:39street bike into something capable of winning a major race, which it did. In 1977,
00:17:48Cook Nelson decided that although the Kawasaki's were expected to be very fast,
00:17:58they couldn't use their speed because they lacked stability. The harder you tried to
00:18:03come off a corner, the more the bikes weaved. And you don't want weave getting stronger.
00:18:13I saw Mike Hillwood at
00:18:19Mosport in 1967, the Canadian Grand Prix.
00:18:24Off every corner, mind you, he was winning the race easily because all Agostini had to do
00:18:29was cruise and he would be champion for the second time. Off of every corner that I could see,
00:18:38it was yay, yay, yay, yay. And that was the problem with warmed over street bikes. The era
00:18:48of super hot, quick lap time, 1000cc super bikes was soon coming, but it had not yet arrived.
00:19:00So in a sense, these two editors turned R&D engineers and racers
00:19:11had to do this at this time because with the Kawasaki's improving at a steady rate,
00:19:21as more Pierre de Roche style reinforcements were added to the chassis, a stiffer swing arm,
00:19:30different forks, all the things that happen.
00:19:35Triangles everywhere.
00:19:36Yes. Those bikes were going to be unreachably faster than a Ducati. They got their motor
00:19:45to just over 90 horsepower. And in that 77 race, they reckoned that they were able to reach
00:19:55150 miles per hour, which was cutting out in those days. But the steps to get there were many
00:20:06and difficult. Three times, at least, they went back to Jerry Branch and said,
00:20:12what can you do for us? The first time he put in oversized, two millimeter oversized intake
00:20:19and exhaust valves. The intakes were from XR750 Harleys because Jerry Branch did so much Harley
00:20:28work. We should really note for those listeners who Jerry Branch is because...
00:20:33Branch Flow Metrics. He was the man who saw that, like other people, some other people did, like
00:20:43Harry... Oh, what's his name? The Englishman.
00:20:48Westlake.
00:20:49Harry Westlake. Those people saw that airflow ability of the cylinder head,
00:20:56in through the intake, out through the exhaust, was a primary determinant of horsepower. If you
00:21:02can't get the air, you can't burn the fuel. So your power is limited. So they went there and
00:21:10they got big valves. The first engines were valve spring engines. They were not Desmo.
00:21:18These were 750s. And they went from cam to cam. They started out at valve lifts of 26%
00:21:28of the valve head diameter, which is a real 1930s number. And they moved on to 30% while as...
00:21:41As Mark just pointed out before we came on the air, the valves were getting bigger too.
00:21:48So that has to be factored in when you say 30% of valve head diameter. The engine
00:21:55was flowing enough air for its production role. But as they
00:22:01delved deeper into methods of pepping up this motor, they found that there was lots more to
00:22:09come. Who can resist that? Let's spend the money. And as examples, they began to flake
00:22:20Desmo valve levers. So they had them replated. You have to go to someone... This is not someplace
00:22:34that does bumpers. This is hard chrome and it has to stick. It has to stay on there.
00:22:42748s later had that flaking issue.
00:22:45Yeah. So they were discovering the who's who of the Southern California racing scene.
00:22:54Well, it was quite a spot too, because at our old office in Newport Beach, we had,
00:23:01within a mile, we had Ron Wood racing and we had Formula One gear cutters. And there's lots of
00:23:08really, really good stuff in the...
00:23:10A whole lot of shaking going on. But they had to find out who. And I'm sure there was a
00:23:18Joe sent me aspect of all of this. You have to network your way in.
00:23:23Bud Axlin told about how hard it was for Kenny Roberts Racing to break into the supply network
00:23:32in Britain's Formula One district around the city of Banbury.
00:23:37Well, England's notorious for... A friend of mine is in the British parts business and
00:23:44being American, he said... So he makes British parts for classic motorcycles and lots of
00:23:51suppliers in England. And he went over and I don't remember what supplier it was, but it might've been
00:23:56like the seat guy or it could have been... It doesn't matter. But he's like, Oh, I'm in business
00:24:02in America and I'm doing everything Western Mississippi. I'm pretty big time. I'll go have
00:24:08an appointment with this guy. And he hadn't been officially introduced. So he went there
00:24:14and he called and said, I'd like to meet such and so. And he got the lobby treatment, he called it.
00:24:19And so he went there and she said, Oh, do have a seat. And he had a seat and he just sat there
00:24:24forever. And then finally just left because he hadn't been introduced. Then he went to the party
00:24:30that someone else had and he got introduced at the party and then he could have a meeting because
00:24:37he'd been socially introduced. And that is England in a nutshell. In electronics,
00:24:43they call it plug to plug compatibility. So all this while they had had little problems
00:24:53with gear shifting, some problems with defects detected by
00:25:03magnaflux. Now, if there's a crack in a part, a tiny crack at the surface that is too small to see,
00:25:15they magnetize the part and then apply a liquid with magnetic particles in it.
00:25:23And because there is a discontinuity in the magnetic flux within the part where the crack
00:25:30exists, some magnetic flux arcs up out of the metal into the air, kind of like fish jumping,
00:25:42these little loops and the magnetic particles align with that. And there they are. They're
00:25:49saying, there's a crack here. So they were having this problem, but they had so many other problems
00:25:56that they couldn't really bear down on that one. One of the great things that happened to them
00:26:05in their next to last year, I think it was, was that Kenny Roberts rode their bike.
00:26:13And of course, Kenny was from the Formula One of motorcycling, namely 500 Grand Prix,
00:26:21riding two-strokes. And the people in that group called four-strokes diesels,
00:26:31because they were, like the famous Parkway in Boston at rush hour, heavy and slow.
00:26:38So this was a nail-biter. Kenny goes out on the bike, does a few laps,
00:26:52each one quicker than the one before. He comes in, pretty nice bike, handles well.
00:27:01And then he listed a bunch of things. Steering's a bit slow. I'd raise the back,
00:27:08take some angle out of the front, and made a couple of other remarks, and then went back to
00:27:15his own affairs. What a wonderful curse. Well now, there then. So they were right to replace
00:27:25the 12-inch long, whoever it was, shocks on the back with 13-point something, because
00:27:34as Doug Chandler was always turning his motorcycle into a stink bug,
00:27:43which stink bugs look like they're nosed over. And that comes from raising the rear
00:27:50to speed up the steering. Now, all of this, the series of wonderful articles,
00:27:59Beyond Racer Road. I just want to pause for one second. Do we think Kenny Roberts was
00:28:06complimentary, or was he not uncomplimentary? I think he was probably surprised that it wasn't
00:28:17a street bike piece of, you know what. What a third-party validation that would be.
00:28:24Yeah. I think a lot of times when you've been doing this journalism thing, you get a little
00:28:31imposter syndrome, because you're always covering other people who are largely doing actual things.
00:28:38And even though journalism is an actual thing, and trying to do a good job, and tell the right
00:28:43story, and tell a good story, and tell it factually, and capture the drama, and the human
00:28:48emotion, and all of those things is a real job, and it is really something, you're still sort of
00:28:53like, yeah, well, I'm covering somebody, and they're actually making crankshafts, or gears,
00:29:00or whatever, all that stuff. And so to have done that work, and then said, hey, Kenny,
00:29:05what do you say to be validated by someone of that caliber? Someone who's going to find
00:29:12whose job it is, is to make the product come unglued. I mean, that's our job as testers. We
00:29:18want to make it do the wrong thing. Use it until it does something that's like, oh, I see now,
00:29:23you know, to have Kenny do that. What a great feeling that would be if you've put all this
00:29:27work into this motorcycle, which they had. Yes, they certainly had. And let's not forget that
00:29:35this motorcycle had the problems of its age, of its period, because everyone in the world
00:29:45was still under the influence of Jalera and MV, whose engines were back against the rear tire.
00:29:53And the belief was, this boosts traction. Now, put the engine back, this boosts traction.
00:30:02Well, when you have a 90-degree V-twin, it's a problem. Are you going to install it this way?
00:30:13You're going to install it this way? Or, Guzzi even built a 120-degree engine, where one cylinder
00:30:21was like this, and the other cylinder was like that. So, it's not easy to package a big motor
00:30:29with a 90-degree V-twin, you know, with a 90-degree V-angle.
00:30:34Well, Ducati worked on that for...
00:30:37Forever. Yes, they really did.
00:30:41You would notice, you will notice on many of the later model V-twins that the exhaust side of the
00:30:52cam box is lower than the intake side, and that was done for front wheel clearance.
00:30:58So, with this log-like cylinder, 15 degrees above the horizontal, the heavy crankcase is pushed
00:31:07back against the rear tire. So, there's a lot less weight on the front end than modern standards
00:31:14would suggest to be advantageous. So, stability on a motorcycle depends so much on footprint.
00:31:25The footprint is the amount of rubber that is on the ground able to produce a damping force,
00:31:36and with the front end as light as it was, there was less of this. So, they had to give it a bunch
00:31:41of geometry. Kenny had said it's got too much geometry, and it certainly did. It was 30 or 31
00:31:49degrees of rake with a four and a half inch trail. Now, that was not a choice. It was a necessity
00:31:56because of the light weight on the front. That made the motorcycle into a corner speed vehicle
00:32:07because you couldn't make certain adjustments if you didn't have the weight on the front to
00:32:12give you the control authority necessary for those adjustments. So, you're on rails,
00:32:18as they used to say. Locomotives actually are on rails, and you're going to have to be close
00:32:27to the grip limit all the way around the corner where the point-and-shoot guy breaks, breaks,
00:32:33breaks, twits the motorcycle around, gas, gas, gas out of the corner. He's at great risk for a
00:32:41very short time. Yeah. That's the great advantage of point-and-shoot. If you've got the power to
00:32:47recover through acceleration, a satisfactory exit speed. Think of a football. That's what I want to,
00:32:54it's how it was useful for me to do a couple of things in learning to kind of pick up my pace to
00:32:59a new level, and that was thinking of the corner, trying to make it into a football instead of a
00:33:05soccer ball, instead of a long smooth arc where you're, yeah, you're on the limit with the front
00:33:10tire, and you're like, when can I pull the trigger, and you're carrying too much speed
00:33:16at the slowest point of the corner, and you may need, in their case, they needed to do this for
00:33:21this motorcycle, but if you can do what Kevin said, which is sacrifice corner speed at the
00:33:27slowest point of the corner, do it for a short period of time, and really rotate the bike,
00:33:32and then pull the trigger, and if you have the power to do that, that's a great line,
00:33:36as Kenny Roberts would demonstrate for many years, and it's very useful. I learned that
00:33:43from riding on the back of a motorcycle with Jason Pridmore. I was at a track day, I was at a school
00:33:49with him on a Suzuki Hayabusa. I had an original Hayabusa as a long-term test bike, 1999 model,
00:33:55copper gold, and I rode it up to Thunder Hill for a Jason Pridmore school, and I was out there
00:34:02cooking it, and I'm riding a Hayabusa with 160 rear wheel horsepower, and 100 foot pounds of
00:34:07torque, and about 550 pounds of weight. I'm riding that on the front tire, because that's how I
00:34:13learned to go the fastest, and so I'm like, through all these corners, and I'm doing that,
00:34:20and then I'm not really taking advantage of my exit ability by turning the bike, and you know,
00:34:26Jason rode around, he says, you know, let's go for a ride, which is what he would do, so I hop
00:34:31on the back on like a Suzuki Katana 750 or 1100 or something, and went around, and I was like, oh,
00:34:40I mean, I'm big, dude, I'm big, and I'm on the back, and Jason's not exactly small either, so
00:34:44we're like footballed on top of this thing, but doing that corner, sacrificing that, and pulling
00:34:51the trigger, it just turned the light on, and I went out on that Hayabusa, and I was like, wow,
00:34:56seconds a lap faster. Yeah, it was cool. Anyways, that's what we mean. Football shaped that corner,
00:35:01if you can think about it. So that was the principal drawback of the motorcycle, was
00:35:13it's difficult to get weight on the front end with a 90 degree engine,
00:35:17and Ducati would wrestle with that from the 851 Otto Valvolet onward,
00:35:28and eventually the V4 is a much less tall engine, and it packages better
00:35:36in a class MotoGP, where everybody but Yamaha has a V4, so that was one of the things that
00:35:46they had to overcome. So they would get to a certain point, and they would go to the drag
00:35:52strip and say, let's get a baseline here, so there's so many seconds with such and such a top speed,
00:35:59and they're going to... Pointing out, Cook Nelson was racing Nitro Sportsters, so he's no slouch
00:36:07at a drag strip. He's got clutch technique, and he was racing, I think one of the great lines
00:36:12that Cook wrote for us was about his XLCH and running Nitro, and what he called Nitro was the
00:36:19golden trust engine torching bitch goddess.
00:36:26It was magnificent. So he's no slouch, like it's a very good test, because Cook can throw the
00:36:30clutch and go. And then they're constantly racing in ACA and whatever regional California events
00:36:38they can, against the people who are the national guys, namely Reg Pridmore on the torque rich
00:36:47BMW, and whoever happened to be riding the Yoshi Z1. Well, Reg was also a beneficiary of this
00:36:59period in time where a BMW could win superbike races for the similar reasons that they...
00:37:07Namely the power wagons.
00:37:14Nelson talked about this once. He said, I was really annoyed with CP750 because
00:37:23you wrote it hard and you had all these problems. So one day I'm at a new model thing,
00:37:29and there's all these engineers, and I go up to this guy and I find out that he's
00:37:34a chassis guy. So I say, what's with your motorcycle that it has all these terrible
00:37:43problems? And of course, this was in the early days when Japanese engineers were
00:37:51anxious to please. They didn't realize the power they would soon have.
00:37:58Or that they already had.
00:38:00Well, they did have it, but they weren't using it. Yes. And he said,
00:38:07oh, you're talking about Hondering? I am a chassis department. You must talk to
00:38:16Hondering department. I think it was an interesting period of time because
00:38:20Japan's ascension to primacy was through organization and testing and looking at
00:38:31what's there and trying it and then evolving it. And I think imposing a structure that maybe we
00:38:38hadn't seen before. And so you had these separations of departments. And
00:38:47I talked to a guy at Suzuki once. He was the, I believe it was Mr. EO, and he was the large,
00:38:54he was leading the project for GSX-R circa 2006, the 600 and 750. And I said, what was your first
00:39:03job at Suzuki? And he says, I designed brake levers. Like only brake levers, not the master
00:39:12cylinder. He would get a spec on the cylinder, I'm sure, but he was just designing a brake lever.
00:39:20That was the first thing he did at Suzuki. Not that that was his only job, but it was like,
00:39:24here you go, do this. And I think that structure is useful. They also said, Tim,
00:39:35our motorcycles are handled very well at U.S. speed limits. What's the problem?
00:39:46Yeah. Well, again, that's the job is to make things come unglued.
00:39:49Yeah. And of course, the thing is that in a densely populated nation,
00:39:59there is a value placed upon getting along that does not function here in the U.S.,
00:40:08which is why people, a friend of mine said, it was John Owens. He said, I rode from Boston
00:40:19to Providence, Rhode Island at 150 miles an hour. And he said, I got there and I was just
00:40:27knackered. I hadn't an ounce of energy left. Because having that squirrel-like vigilance
00:40:37that's necessary when you're going so much faster than the traffic around you, it's a madness.
00:40:45But many Americans are interested in such things. So they must have motorcycles that
00:40:53are competent under circumstances. The best kind of fatigue though,
00:40:56having a long, hard, fast day riding a motorcycle at speed, that's a good fatigue. Feels good.
00:41:06Yeah. So Nelson was trying to push the idea of motorcycle handling as a value to be sought
00:41:21as a sales point, as an advantage. And it would not really happen until
00:41:33Interceptor- 84, man. 83?
00:41:3683. Yeah, 83 it was.
00:41:3883, yeah.
00:41:39And they brought in something like 1,200 of them and poof, they were gone. And nobody understood it.
00:41:48So they did a little asking of questions here and there, and they said, thing handles so
00:41:52bitching, man. I had to have one. So where did that come from? Somehow...
00:41:58It came from people riding Levertas is where it came from. I had a 75 3CL, man. That thing
00:42:07was terrifying. It was just terrifying. It was before they moved the shocks. Sorry, this is
00:42:12Leverta detailed dude guy, but because I owned one, but they had vertical shocks. The later
00:42:20Yoda, Joda, Hoda 1000s, they tipped the shocks into the part of the frame where the rear upright
00:42:27came and met the rear loop. And it was a little stronger, but my bike was like this and it was
00:42:32just notorious. So you rode... That entire generation of people came up riding bikes,
00:42:39as you described, H2s with the motor in the back and like...
00:42:44Nothing on the front.
00:42:45Nothing on the front and massive power and Z1s and CB750s. And so what a revelation because
00:42:56everybody's riding them and they're coming unglued. And then you finally get a bike that
00:43:00does something wonderful. It's the first time you ride on slicks, the first time you ride on
00:43:06an incredibly well set up Owens fork. I rode an OW01 Yamaha with Owens suspension from the
00:43:15homologation special circa 92 low production. It was their super bike. And that revelation
00:43:26of quality damping was shocking. It was like, what? Who's been withholding this?
00:43:33Well, what we have to remember is the story frequently denied
00:43:39that when Hailwood was summoned to ride the 250cc6, there was at the time, but is no longer,
00:43:51a pond at the circuit where the testing took place. And he came in from test riding
00:44:04and he asked the mechanics to remove the rear shocks, whereupon he walked over to the pond
00:44:10and threw them in. Now, this is not European flair at work. This is not the difference between
00:44:19a whiff of raspberry and a note of peach. What was happening is that the shock absorber testing
00:44:32machines were a crank and a crankshaft arrangement that rotated at a ponderous speed. And it drew the
00:44:41most beautiful flattened oval, like a raindrop actually looks. It's flatter on the bottom and
00:44:49curved on the top. Beautiful curves of force versus velocity. And they handled terribly
00:44:57because the compression valves were orifice limited. They got into the V squared
00:45:06sudden spike to infinity of damping force. Well, the machines weren't working in the
00:45:13shafts, the actual shaft speeds. And when I was told by some of these people in this field,
00:45:20they said, when we built a testing machine that could actually move the damper rod at realistic
00:45:26speed, everything broke. It broke the dampers. It broke the machine. And we realized that we
00:45:35had a problem. So, if he actually did ask for the shocks and took them over and threw them
00:45:42into the pond, it was for that reason. Because at the speeds that he was going,
00:45:51compression damping was spiking to infinity. And people who rode Daytona on that vintage of
00:46:00shocks said, you always made the upshift at the transition between the infield at turn five and
00:46:11the banking. Because that would take away one thing that was yanking on the rear suspension
00:46:18and possibly contribute to a little less unpleasantness. But when they got the new
00:46:24damper technologies arrived, where they used a variable L orifice for the compression valve
00:46:33and for rebound, mind you, a variable orifice valve, which got bigger as shock rod velocity
00:46:41increased. It clipped those infinities off and made them normal. So, yes, I hit a bump.
00:46:51So what? Not, I'm in orbit. I hope I re-enter successfully. So,
00:47:02Nelson also was given a set of shocks with a kind of reverence. These are our best. These are our
00:47:11perfected racing shocks. He said, I put them on my bike and I couldn't tell any difference.
00:47:18It's because the transition had not yet happened to variable area compression valves
00:47:25that did not go into orifice limitation at high damper rod velocity.
00:47:32We did a whole podcast on V squared and how damping works if you want to go back in time,
00:47:37because I'm always, whenever we start talking about this, I just want to talk about it again,
00:47:42because I find it so fascinating, like a damper rod fork, that if you make the orifice a certain
00:47:47size, and if you make it small enough to work at low shaft speed to get rid of wallow in the corner,
00:47:54it becomes, it effectively disappears when the shaft speed goes up because the
00:48:00curve goes straight up. There's so much friction that the hole essentially no longer exists. And
00:48:05it just goes bang on anything that you hit hard. And if you make it big enough to work
00:48:11in the range where the shaft speed is good, then you have no low speed damping. That's why
00:48:14valving is like great valving is great. And then there's the whole philosophy of like,
00:48:21you know, like, uh, Gil Valencourt at works performance, you know, the way he built his
00:48:27valving, he liked to use a combination of, uh, like ball check valves essentially, and some V squared.
00:48:36But if you talk to like Paul Thede at race tech, like he wants no V squared. He wants
00:48:41everything controlled by a valve. He's going to make a valve cookie. That's this size inside the
00:48:46fork. And he's going to, which is, and he's going to make as much of that. Like, it's just going to
00:48:52be all the aluminum is machined out so that the, that the shims are doing. Yep. And then
00:49:02and everything happens in between that with your Olin's and somewhere in that range is
00:49:06what we're seeing. They're getting, they're getting along in, uh, 76, I think it was, and
00:49:14they take their transmission to, uh, what is it? ZDM to, to get it Magnaflux. I described Magnaflux
00:49:23and how it works. Uh, and it came back. Essentially everything is, is defective.
00:49:29There are cracks everywhere. So what do you do? Order a new transmission and have the same process
00:49:39again? Not so good. Now, mind you, it's not because the transmission was garbage. It's
00:49:45because the transmission was made for a different duty cycle, lower tooth to tooth pressure,
00:49:53lower RPM, no bang up shifts. So they're asking around what, what do we do?
00:50:04Webster Gear at Mill Valley. Webster Gear was operated by a gentleman who had lots of money
00:50:13that he'd made in other ways, uh, something to do with digital electronics perhaps, and had taken
00:50:20to manufacturing high class gears for champ cars and other special applications.
00:50:29And they had a look and they said, sure, we can do something for you. It'll take a little while.
00:50:38And then they thought, oh, could you do something about first gear? Every street bike,
00:50:46just about every street bike, first gear is there for starting from an uphill stoplight with a
00:50:52passenger and a full tank of gas. It's a very low ratio so that you're not embarrassingly revving
00:51:00your motor and slipping the clutch and maybe appearing to be a klutz, something we all wish
00:51:07to avoid. But in racing, if you have five speeds, you want to be able to use all of them. Street
00:51:16bike with five speed, it has a one starting gear, one starting ratio. So, and the rest is a four
00:51:23speed close ratio. So they had the first gear raised and the transmission arrived. It was installed.
00:51:35It worked perfectly. And what a relief because it's, I can tell you, it's no fun to get
00:51:47all your gears back from Magnaflux and find that you have three defects
00:51:52because the three defects are going to turn into a failed gear. How, in how long? Well, we,
00:51:59you cross your fingers and hope for the best. Soon enough. Yeah. The last thing you want is
00:52:04gearbox problems, folks. You do not want gearbox problems. You can't pull the clutch and escape
00:52:09from a locked gearbox. The lock of the gearbox is between the clutch and the rear wheel. So
00:52:16good luck folks. But what a relief to have a working transmission that did not constantly
00:52:24come back with a detection of problems. A wonderful thing. The heads go back to Jerry
00:52:34Branch a couple more times. The last time he comes up with a 7% increase in flow.
00:52:42Earlier after the first go around, they had asked him, how big an engine will this support?
00:52:49And that's why they started out with an engine on the smaller side, because
00:52:56with the first oversized valve step, they were somewhat limited in airflow. So
00:53:05Jerry Branch said, well, maybe high 800s, 900 maybe CCs.
00:53:12All the time they are getting a wonderful high class education. Nelson is teaching himself to
00:53:23ride and is being taught to ride by the people at either elbow. Teachers at either elbow,
00:53:31and one before and one behind. Take it all in. Learn the lessons and reproduce them
00:53:40with your own solutions. Anyway, good old Phil is attending to the engine tuning,
00:53:51setting the timing, jetting, what have you. And all the time improvements are coming.
00:53:58They're lightening it. They are going from KR83 to slicks. They are making all these steps.
00:54:08Meanwhile, Nelson is having to adjust his riding to the constantly different motorcycle.
00:54:17Now we've all heard about how Mick Doohan, when he was riding Honda's NSR500 two-stroke,
00:54:27told the engineers, I do not want any changes made to the motorcycle of which I am not told.
00:54:36Because my job is to win races. If the motorcycle is different every time I get on it,
00:54:42my problems become all the greater. So Cook Nelson was not a professional rider being handed
00:54:53a racing tool that had been raised to the highest level of excellence. He was a student rider
00:55:02student rider trying to improve his lap times while the motorcycle under him got stronger and
00:55:10stronger. So in that final race, that Daytona Superbike race, 1977,
00:55:22he decided that what he was going to do was not worry about the others. He was going to get the
00:55:27best start he could, put his head down and do 10 laps and then look. And it seems to have worked.
00:55:41That development story that you talk about, about him improving his riding and improving the bike
00:55:46at the same time is really is super classic. And it's a lesson for anyone who wants to ride fast.
00:55:53And that is yes, prep your bike. If you're going to go into the track, prep your bike,
00:55:58bleed the brakes, inspect, you know, make sure your axles are tight. Your wheels are on the
00:56:03right direction. It happens, folks do all the things that make it personal tech inspection,
00:56:08make it, make it safe and make it the best you can make it, you know, change you on the fork,
00:56:13all anything, just get it ready for the track. And then you got to, you have to ride that bike
00:56:18until it does something wrong and then try to solve that specific problem and keep doing that.
00:56:25And you will end up an excellent rider. You don't start off like, Oh, I'm going to buy this bike
00:56:31and I'm going to pull, I'm going to throw $12,000 of suspension at it. Like that it's not wrong to
00:56:36do that. Like if you could do that, great, but it's actually better to find the flaws and try
00:56:42to correct the flaws. Use, use the motorcycle, advance your riding before you go out and,
00:56:50and spend 12 grand on suspension or whatever. In the end, Nelson said that
00:57:03the motorcycle that they were doing all of this with, and I quote, was the most
00:57:11functionally superior motorcycle that has ever been produced for public consumption.
00:57:17Now, is that a selling review or what? Wow.
00:57:24And of course, being magazine editors and constantly reviewing
00:57:30all the motorcycles available, this is an authoritative statement.
00:57:34So, Ducati remained
00:57:43sort of under the umbrella of European flair, but this success in the U.S. made it a serious
00:57:51motorcycle in America in the same fashion that Paul Smart's victory at Imola had made it a
00:57:59a huge statement that Ducati has arrived as a big motorcycle producer in Europe.
00:58:07It had the mystique, but it had actual, it'd been validated.
00:58:13Race winning validation. Yes.
00:58:15This is, this is legit. And it, it really is. It established the brand in the United States.
00:58:20Yep. Now the third step, which built upon these other two was decided upon by Claudio Domenicalli,
00:58:33who is now the CEO at Ducati, when he decided we are not going to rely on European flair anymore.
00:58:44We're going to meet them head on with superior performance in every category.
00:58:54Now, he could say that because he knew that they had the tremendous
00:59:03long line of successes and world superbike titles in competition, and that they had the people
00:59:11on staff, the engineers who had the experience to come up with what he wanted them to build, namely
00:59:20a motorcycle that is clearly superior in all respects. Now, the other manufacturers make,
00:59:29strive similarly, but at this point with the major manufacturers sort of seeming
00:59:41to be taking a day off each week as they concentrate on Southeast Asian sales,
00:59:51where there are new middle classes coming into being who want something they can do
00:59:57with their disposable income. We just happened to have something you might like, sir. So
01:00:06Ducati has become, of course, a premium price product. You pay for what you get in terms of
01:00:16high performance. Their bread and butter is less extreme, and they have a wide range of
01:00:28wide range of products for the motorcyclists. But those were three great leaps, and this is why
01:00:39I had said earlier in another production that Ducati has
01:00:48operated in a state of continuous revolution, because they were never able to say, as Honda did
01:00:57in the later 60s and early 70s, okay, we've got the lineup. They look good. They're selling well.
01:01:08Great. What's for lunch? Because they were always tackling the next
01:01:19peak, and it's become a habit with them.
01:01:242008 was a defining moment for Ducati in what you were describing about we're going to hit them head
01:01:30on. The 1098 was really, they changed final drive gearing. They had been talking to Andrea Forney,
01:01:39who was their head test rider for a long time. I rode with him on several press launches, and
01:01:44a really cool guy, fun to talk to, very practical. He's the guy who told me about their frame
01:01:50development, where they would build the trellis frame for the new model, and they would overbuild
01:01:55it, and then they'd start taking tubes out until the test rider complained, and then they'd put
01:01:59the last one back in. Maybe a little bit of showmanship there, but yeah, 1098. Anyway, their
01:02:09bikes were geared for top speed. They would put these sort of ideal ratios so that the bike would
01:02:14achieve a maximum top speed, and the 1098 was really geared. No, we're going to do like a 10
01:02:19second quarter mile. We're going to just hit you right there, and they actually made a point of
01:02:25putting more accurate weights. We've always had a little, I don't know, fudge factor,
01:02:32a correction factor from what the manufacturer claims like, oh, it's dry weight, like so dry
01:02:37that there's no battery, and things like that, but yeah, they really, at that time is when they
01:02:42really focused on meeting all the other products in the same space, not relying on European flair,
01:02:49like alone. They still had European flair, but they were really hitting it with technology and
01:02:56an actual performance, so. And Claudio Domenicali became extremely important,
01:03:03Claudio Domenicali became extremely important to the company, and on one of those
01:03:11Ducati evenings that you might attend if you go to the great international shows,
01:03:18the Milan, for example, just as you're stepping forward to hoping for a word with the master,
01:03:28a large Audi draws up 12 cylinders. Someone steps up smartly and opens the rear door.
01:03:40He boards this limousine and is carried away. I really like Claudio. I like Claudio's story,
01:03:49and he should be whisked away in a fancy car because. I agree 100%. I met him when he was
01:03:57a junior engineer who had been sent to the SAE annual meeting at, what was it, Cobo Hall, and
01:04:11he was young and fresh. And later on when he had just become CEO, he had those
01:04:2230-second manager books on his desk, and he seemed under pressure, nervous, burdened.
01:04:32And then when I had another opportunity to speak with him a couple of years later,
01:04:39he seemed much more himself, more relaxed, more confident. And I remarked on this because I felt
01:04:47that he had done himself a great favor. It's all very well to bear the mantle of responsibility,
01:04:56but if it makes you feel itchy, that's quite a compromise. But he looked comfortable,
01:05:04and he said, I have learned that not everything can be done today, and some things cannot be done
01:05:12at all. I have learned not to bring my responsibilities home in the evening.
01:05:22Well, when he was hired, he was hired as one of not very many engineers at the company,
01:05:29as I recall. I mean, a small number, and there he was. And so look at him now. I think it's
01:05:37important. I think having someone in charge of a company who has that background in racing and
01:05:44as an engineer, I think that's really important for the direction of a company. I think if your
01:05:49leadership doesn't have it motorcycling woven into their very DNA and suffered the realistic
01:06:02terrors of problem solving, and why doesn't this work, and just banging your head against the wall
01:06:08and just iterating, going to track, staying up late, and all that stuff, I think you're missing
01:06:14a key element in the way that the brand ultimately will communicate with the customer.
01:06:21It's an unseen force that comes out in the showroom.
01:06:26Yeah. I think it's also wonderful to note that when he was elevated to the leadership,
01:06:36he had a program, which was to meet the competition head on and to best them.
01:06:47And so quite often when some people are elevated to the high center chair,
01:06:55they are lost for some time because they hadn't imagined it would ever happen,
01:07:02and they have no program. Not so with Claudio.
01:07:10So California Hot Rod, we ended up something on the order of 67 pounds lighter than stock.
01:07:1767 pounds, about 90 horsepower. Your Yosh bike at the time was making maybe 117.
01:07:24Yeah. But it didn't turn. It didn't turn as well. Let's put it that way. They were still
01:07:28trying to figure out how to make that bicycle frame and all that work. And so this beautiful
01:07:35moment in time, taken advantage of by BMW as well, with Reg Pridmore,
01:07:41this beautiful moment in time where lightness, power, and good handling coalesced.
01:07:47Stability. Stability. Stability. Yeah, let's call it that. So we're not puckering down the front
01:07:51straight weaving. What a story and what amazing folks. They really brought a literary flair to it.
01:08:07They were having a good time and it sounded like it.
01:08:10Yeah, that's the best thing possible. That's what I try to talk to.
01:08:15Imagine this, working eight hours at the magazine and then trying to put as close to eight hours
01:08:22into this project as possible. This was not going home, having dinner, dandeling the children on
01:08:30your knee, and then going down to the basement to fuss with some cylinder head. This was a second
01:08:38job. A second job. And they did this over a period of years
01:08:47to get this motorcycle into the condition in which it won the Daytona Superbike race in 1977.
01:08:58Thank goodness. No wonder. It's related to the day job. That's what's so great about
01:09:06the job period. We do a video over on Motorcyclists that I did called Motorcyclists
01:09:13YouTube channel called Randwin Parked. I went in the shop and I messed with a greasy old XS650
01:09:18that hadn't run in years. I got it running and I took it for a ride. Then next time we're going
01:09:23to put a clutch in it. We're going to do all this other stuff. I have real joy with that.
01:09:29We think it came across in the video and that's all we're trying to do. Get it across in the
01:09:33story. I love doing this. Let's be honest about our evaluations and critical where necessary.
01:09:41Celebrate the joys. Highlight the failures and wait for the next model to come out.
01:09:50Well, that's California Hot Rod, folks. Thanks for listening.
01:09:56Octane Lending sponsors this episode as it does many of them. Check out the link in the description.
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