Motorcycle Classics – September-October 2019

(National Geographic (Little) Kids) #1

http://www.MotorcycleClassics.com 71


reckon a few 500cc GP bikes would have
struggled to stay with it out of a slow
corner. It even sounded different. That
flat drone became a whine as the revs
soared and suddenly I was hitting the
14,750rpm rev-limiter.

HRC Chief Engineer Shuhei
Nakamoto, later to head up the com-
pany’s successful onslaught on the
MotoGP World title, with Marc Márquez
winning five World titles under his
supervision, was the HRC development

engineer leading HRC’s RC45 R&D team,
and was on hand for my Indonesian
escapade. He explained how Honda
had developed the engine to this level.
“Between the 1996 and 1997 seasons,
we made many detail changes to the

you, and that’s how it worked for us. I still say to this day that
without any shadow of a doubt John Kocinski is the most tal-
ented motorcycle racer I’ve ever worked with — and as you
know, I’ve worked with a few! He was the guy with the great-
est talent of anyone I’ve ever worked with, and very versatile
into the bargain. He won the 250cc World Championship
with Yamaha, he won 500GP races with Yamaha and Cagiva,
and of course he won the World Superbike Championship for
Castrol Honda. What a range of ability — and I hear he’s not a
bad dirt tracker on top of that!
AC:  In terms of developing the RC45 Superbike from 1994
to 1997, how much of it was done by your Honda Britain-
based team, and how much by HRC? Because HRC had a
stand-offish relationship with the Flamminis, and thus with
World Superbike as a whole, didn’t they?

NT:  Yes, that’s true — they did a bit, but in fairness we
had Nakamoto-san on board from HRC at the time, and
he was pushing very strongly for us to be successful. He’s a
very hard man, and he pushed HRC quite strongly with the
development. So obviously, on setup, it was the team, but on
the changes to the bike and the specification, that was HRC
— and that came from Nakamoto pushing hard all the time,
using the feedback from the riders and the team themselves.
Certainly, the success that the RC45 had, and indeed the
SP-01 and SP-02 V-twins later on, came predominantly thanks
to his efforts.
AC:  Was reliability ever a problem with the RC45? Because
after all it was a development of the RVF which copiously won
the Suzuka 8 Hours.
NT:  The only time when I ever recall us having a really seri-
ous problem was in Race 2 at Monza in 1998,
when Aaron Slight was lying second and he
did have an engine failure two laps from the
end. If he’d finished second in that race he’d
have won the World Championship that year,
which would have been our second in a row
with the RC45. But that was genuinely the
only time we ever had a mechanical problem
— it was generally a very reliable motorcycle.
AC:  In spite of which, Honda then decided
to go the V-twin route in 2000. Why?
NT:  Yes they did, because of the way the
rules were. With a V-twin you could obviously
have lighter weight and a 25-percent bigger
engine capacity, and things just seemed to be
loaded so heavily in Ducati’s favor. My person-
al feeling is that Honda just wanted to show
everyone that if they wanted to win cham-
pionship titles and races with a V-twin, they
could. And they did, and they won it again
in 2002, and very nearly in 2001, as well. So
I think having proved their point, they then
reverted back to just supporting private teams
to go Superbike racing with the help of local
importers, like Ten Kate with Honda Europe —
John Kocinski on the RC45 in 1997, the year he won the riders’ champioinship. call it the Fireblade era. — Alan Cathcart


On the RC45, Honda’s engineers improved horsepower by introducing twin injectors, larger air intakes and a larger airbox.
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