88 / CYCLE WORLD
“I built the Tul-Aris because I’d
always wanted to ride a GP bike,
but I quickly found out I wasn’t
good enough to ride one,” he says.
“The power was absolutely terri-
fying—the bike still makes more
torque than any MotoGP bike, and it
weighs only 270 pounds. It’s like a
250 with a really vicious GP motor.”
His next side project was a Super-
moto racer around a Yamaha YZ450
motor, in his own modified chassis.
He’d met Keith McCarty, head of
Yamaha racing, and asked if he had
a rider who’d campaign it. McCarty
replied, “I’ve got two guys, but you
have to decide: Eddie Lawson or
Doug Henry.”
“I fell off my chair,” Tuluie says.
“We decided it should be Doug
because there’s so much motocross
involved.”
Taking the Yamaha to a go-kart
track to test was a revelation in
several ways.
“After practice Doug said, ‘Wow,
it’s got so much grip!’ The tires?
‘No, asphalt!’ He’d never ridden
on pavement. He’d slam on both
brakes and leave black streaks
from both tires. He could drift both
wheels in a full lock, and I was run-
ning data acquisition on the chassis,
so we designed a custom shock
linkage for the unusual loads.”
As usual, Tuluie’s team won
races against factory teams with
riders such as Ben Bostrom, Kevin
Schwantz, and Jeremy McGrath.
While working at Polaris, Tulu-
ie encountered MTS Systems in
nearby Eden Prairie. MTS is as sexy
an engineering firm as you’ll find,
creator of the world’s largest driving
simulator—a $70 million machine
he helped design—and testing
everything from motorcycle chassis
to F1 cars to skyscrapers to space
shuttles. Its seven-post hydrau-
lic-ram simulators can replicate an
entire F1 race using data retrieved
from sensors, and can accurately
predict lap-time changes from even
minor chassis adjustments.
MTS is where Tuluie mastered the
art of chassis design through dataABOVE: Quiet workshop hours building
very loud racers is the story of Dr. Robin
Tuluie’s life since the mid-1980s. He com-
bines a deep grasp of physics and the
ability to test any theory with a champi-
on’s visceral understanding of speed.and simulation, leaving “eccentric”
empirical methods behind him for
good.
“I started in the vehicle dynamics
group, which is where I learned my
craft,” he says. “Some skyscrapers
have a tuned mass damper, and the
guy who invented it was working
there, Neil Petersen, an old guy who
was so cool. He’d sit down if I had a
question and say, ‘Let’s figure it out,’
and he’d work out all the calcula-
tions on paper with me.”
One of the industry heavyweights
Tuluie met at MTS was Bob Bell.
“Bob is really good, we got along
well, and he ended up as technical
director at Renault F1. I visited
Renault in the U.K. to improve a
seven-post simulator, and Bob asked
how I was doing.