Chemistry of Fire

by Laurence Gonzales

  At the time I met him, Rich Oliver, thirty-six, was the oldest rider in the Superbike class, having moved up in 1997 from his position as “the all-time winningest rider in AMA 250 Grand Prix history with 32 career victories.” In that type of competition, however, the bike he rode had been more like a street bike that anyone could ride, though admittedly not the way Oliver rode it. “And when I won, I won by a mile,” he said. He was actually modest, soft-spoken, and articulate. As we sat at dinner one night, he described to me what it was like to ride when he was winning. “I was in the zone. It was as if I wasn’t there.” He said that he would take the energy of the crowd, the team, of everyone who was watching as well as racing, and in some ineffable way, he would let that energy pour through him. He described it as a transcendent state in which he was not thinking at all. “I was hardly there,” he said more than once, groping for an expression that would capture what he had experienced.

  Crossing the finish line was ecstatic. “I couldn’t figure out how I did it,” he said. Like jockeys, most motorcycle racers are lean and lightly built. Rich wore a goatee, his black curly hair was neatly trimmed. Although his education had ended with high school, he had a large vocabulary and picked through it carefully to create thoughtful sentences. “I suppose in any athletic event people have that experience,” he told me.

  He was distressed because, as he put it, “I spent ten years learning how to ride supersport and 250cc bikes. And when I moved to Superbikes, everything I learned suddenly became irrelevant. It was worse than knowing nothing. Jamie is just starting out,” he said of another racer, Jamie Hacking, who was ten years younger, “so he doesn’t have anything to unlearn. But now I do what I know how to do instinctively. And I crash. It’s very discouraging.”

  Worse than that, worse even than losing, was the spiritual loss of not being able to ride “in the zone.” He could no longer transcend. Contrary to what a rider might say (and even believe), he did not ride to win. Winning, which is an absolute requirement for the industry, is secondary to the best riders. Oliver said that he raced in order to reach that transcendent and timeless interval in which he could lose himself to the machine, to the energy of momentum, and to the myriad forces that he at once battled and recruited to his purpose. Oliver hoped (and perhaps did not yet believe) that in time he would recapture that essence on the Superbike.

  Part of the reason that the racers find their work so deeply spiritual may have to do with the fact that they begin riding at a very early age. Mat Mladin, a former Australian Superbike Champion, started when he was four. Doug Chandler, who eventually wound up in the American Motorcyclist Association Motorcycle Hall of Fame, started when he was five. When Miguel Duhamel was a baby and couldn’t sleep, his mother would strap him to her body and ride around in the night air on a motorcycle. In the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA) Superbike series, he won thirty-two times, second only to Mat Mladin. Incidentally, they all began on Hondas.

  In order to succeed, the racer’s mind must tell him that everything is all right when his engine is at its breaking point and his body is traveling at 185 miles an hour. At 14,500 revolutions a minute, the engine sounds like a human cry.

  I asked Oliver to explain why the transition from supersport to Superbike was so cruel. One would think that a motorcycle is a motorcycle, and racing is racing. “The Superbike is so much heavier,” he said, “that its momentum works against you. And it has so much power, so readily available, that it requires a completely different touch.” The Superbike can accelerate its 355 pounds of mass to more than a hundred miles an hour in the equivalent of a city block. It takes about three seconds.

  Given the power and sensitivity of the instrument, the precision required of the rider is difficult to imagine. A typical rider’s lap times may vary within no more than two-tenths of a second. A lap may take a minute and a half to complete. At some tracks it’s two minutes. It is a variation of less than 0.2 percent.

  During a turn, the back wheel spins from so much power, while centrifugal force causes the front wheel to slide. The bike is going sideways as it completes the turn. If the slide remains steady and the weight is distributed evenly between front and back, the rider drifts through, straightens up at the end, and continues in a new direction. But applying as little as 5 percent too much power can cause the rear tire to slide more than the front tire. “In a 250 you can actually flick it back in line with the throttle and with your body. You can kick it back. The Superbike is so heavy that once it gets away from you, momentum carries it around. You can’t save it.” Instead of one body composed of man and machine in perfect coordination, it becomes like two men in a donkey costume, and the back steps out ahead of the front. In supersport racing, as racers say, the throttle is your friend. After the transition to Superbike, you’re no longer friends. And the same is true for the street rider who decides to go 120 on the Crest.

  The gulf between American culture and Japanese culture would not be bridged quickly and not by victory alone. There was still the problem that a motorcycle was, in America—if not in Europe or Asia—a completely nonessential product. Honda’s concept—that motorcycling was a family pastime for everyone—was wrong when it came to America. In Europe and Asia, people rode motorcycles because gasoline cost too much there, because cars were too big and expensive, and because there was simply not enough room on the streets.

  But Americans couldn’t imagine going without a car. Owning a motorcycle in the United States was like owning a pair of skis. There was no practical reason for it. But that was a difficult concept for the people at Honda to understand.

  Honda’s success in America would depend on its ability to satisfy an ineffable American hunger. It required a deep comprehension of a purely American lust. It had to do with attitude, with soul, with styling. It had to do with the fact that the American market was a mile wide and an inch deep and was dominated by products that were often pure style. Honda seemed unable to comprehend that concept and therefore needed a surrogate in America, essentially someone who could think for the company.

  The American surrogate was Dirk Vandenberg, whom Ray Blank called “the mind of the American motorcyclist.” It was his job for all those years to take the achievements of the Japanese engineers, developed through racing, and to wage a campaign (and sometimes bitter battles) to transform sophisticated race hardware into a rough, tactile, sensual experience that seduced the broadest possible range of American thrill seekers. Even after Honda had begun to win races worldwide, there was still a wide range of technical problems that needed to be solved, and Dirk was often at odds with Japan not merely about how to solve them but even about which problems were worth solving. When you dominate the world of racing, it’s difficult to admit that you have problems. It was Dirk’s freakish gift that in a sort of T. E. Lawrence fashion, he could cross those cultural boundaries. He could communicate with the Japanese (though he knew little Japanese). I saw him do it with gesture, grin, and pidgin. He could bring the two worlds together in the manifest and undeniable reality of a red motorcycle, which, when placed on the showroom floor, sold like there was no tomorrow, which was exactly how Dirk rode.

  Dirk’s role in creating the VTR 1000 Superhawk was emblematic of his struggle. When I first returned to motorcycling with Lyle Lovett and the Clubhouse, the Italian Ducatis at Pro Italia were the sine qua non of sport bikes, bikes on which a rider could lean hard and fast around the mountain byways, contesting Newton’s right to define the rules that govern how we move about our planet and how our planet moves around the sun. The problem with a Ducati is the demands it places on even a highly skilled rider. A Pro Italia mechanic named Ed irks his boss, Earl Campbell, by riding a Honda to work. Earl ranted and raved and ordered Ed never to mention the name Honda again. I asked Ed what he thought about the Ducatis on which he spent his days working, and he said, “They’re not for most people. They’ll just spit you off if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  I spent several days r
iding up and down the Crest on a variety of bikes to see which bikes I could ride the fastest. The top Ducati, the 916, proved to be my slowest ride. The reason was that it was uncomfortable and it frightened me. Confidence equals speed. Rick Nelson, who had warned me to “ride your own ride,” said, “Oh, you just need to get going over eighty, and the wind kind of lifts you up off the handlebars and takes the stress off your wrists.” Tim Carrithers told me that the 916’s steering didn’t really function well below that speed. Dirk understood the mind of the common motorcyclist. He understood that riders of my skill level weren’t going anywhere near eighty on the Crest. He understood that we might like to ride a bitchin’ bike that through its inherent engineering qualities would give us a natural and confident feeling. He understood if we felt that good on the bike, it wouldn’t matter how fast we were going.

  It took him twelve years to convince Honda to manufacture the Superhawk. Honda didn’t want it. The reason was strictly a cultural one. Honda had spent decades developing the best motorcycle engines in the world, most especially a V-four, used in the RC45 Superbike. It had a perfectly good street bike built around that engine called the Interceptor or VFR 750 (later increased to 800), which could, in the hands of a competent rider, whack a Ducati on the Crest.

  During the seventies, Soichiro Honda, through his studies of metallurgy and his patented designs, solved the problem of how to make a small engine produce tremendous horsepower. But European bikes still handled better. (Honda won races, but most people don’t race.) The main problem was the frame, which would flex in a turn. Steering was unpredictable. As a result, the bike did not impart great confidence in the rider. The nose wandered. Tim said, “The Japanese didn’t figure out how to make a motorcycle go around a corner until 1980,” which was about the time that Dirk began testing.

  Dirk explained that the object of his work was to develop a motorcycle that would adhere to the road and behave predictably, that would give the rider that all-important feeling of confidence, which allows him to push himself to the limits of his skill. But at another time, one night after a few Maker’s Mark Black Russians (called Revolvers in the world of bartenders), Dirk explained it like this: “Men want three things: money, horsepower, and pussy. Women control all the pussy and eighty percent of the money. All we can give men is horsepower.”

  Of course, he meant more than horsepower. He meant a sense of inner control. Suspension was the key to the feeling of control. “The reason you feel instantly comfortable on the Superhawk,” Dirk told me after I’d ridden it up the Crest a few times, “is the suspension.” When he says suspension, he means not just springs that absorb bumps but also the frame itself and other components that connect the wheels and motor to the rider and to the road. Over the years, to solve the problem of flex, manufacturers had made the frames more and more rigid. “But that means that every bump the back tire hits is transmitted to the front wheel,” Dirk said. “On a perfect test track, that’s fine. But in the real world, it makes the bike hard to steer.” With Honda engineers, Dirk began to reinvent flex, to give up some rigidity in favor of more control at ordinary speeds on imperfect roads. I rode a dozen motorcycles, but only the Superhawk gave that sense of lovely and effortless control. “The engine is a stressed member of the frame. The swing arm is bolted to the engine,” Dirk explained. “The engine is bolted to the frame with six bolts, but only one pair are solid.” The rest are hollow, allowing for flex. Because the rear wheel is disengaged slightly from the front wheel, the front remains planted firmly on the pavement, with the result that the steering feels rock solid. Dirk also changed the weight distribution, which traditionally puts half the weight on each wheel. Dirk put only 47 percent of the Superhawk’s weight on the front. Since the front was firmly planted, extra weight could be used to allow the rear wheel to grab the pavement more efficiently during acceleration. The result was a subtle but undeniable feeling of settling into the machine, of becoming one with it, and most importantly, of trusting it to go where you point it. “This is the most connected bike we’ve ever made,” he said. On the Crest, going fifty on the Ducati 916, I felt as if I was going to crash. Going seventy on the Superhawk, that feeling never entered my gut. And of course, the gut is what makes you buy the bike in the first place.

  Once the horsepower game was over (and long before the Superhawk), the Big Four understood that handling was destined to be the dominant factor in motorcycle design. In fact, when the motorcycle reaches a speed of around 195 miles an hour, the air is compressed so much that the rear wheel begins to spin on the pavement. The bike hits a brick wall and parks. Although more horsepower is available, the air won’t let the bike accelerate, and then here comes another curve anyway, so the rider has to slow down. The race of the future was going to be won by the frame, the suspension, and the tires, because everybody was already going as fast as they could go on the straightaways.

  Turning, as it happens, embodies the greatest mystery of motorcycling and the greatest challenge faced not only by the engineers and by Dirk but by the race teams as well. Because turning incurs such severe penalties at the hands of physics. It is in the turn that races are won or lost. It is in the turn that the rider going 120 miles an hour up the Crest experiences his death. A motorcycle doesn’t crash going in a straight line unless a car makes a left turn in front of it.

  David Thom, a researcher at University of Southern California’s Head Protection Research Lab, had joined us at the Motorcycle Safety Foundation course we attended before our ride through the countryside around Temecula. Thom helped to write the Hurt Report, published in 1981 by the Traffic Safety Center at the University of Southern California, which set out to analyze the causes of motorcycle accidents and identify what could be done to help prevent them. The researchers conducted an exhaustive investigation of nine hundred accidents. The Hurt Report has not been brought up to date, and critics believe that the industry doesn’t really want to answer the question of how safe motorcycling is. The answer, intuitively, is: you don’t have to do a lot of research to know that a motorcycle turns you into a human cannonball.

  But one of the findings of the Hurt Report is not intuitive. Hurt’s research confirmed a mystifying phenomenon that until then had been anecdotal: one-third of all riders “did NOTHING in the way of evasive action in the pre-crash time,” said the report (Thom’s emphasis). “The ability to intentionally counter-steer and generate the sudden swerve was generally unknown by these riders.” In other words, most riders never learned how to turn a motorcycle. They didn’t know how to ride.

  During the safety course, I discovered that I didn’t know how to turn, either. I had never thought about how a motorcycle turns. I knew that I couldn’t get it to do exactly what I wanted in a predictable way. Sometimes I’d think left, but it would just keep on going straight. Or it would go left but not exactly when and how I wanted. I’d never heard the term “counter-steering.” The truth was, I’d been lucky until then.

  That inability to turn results in one of the gravest dangers, as both Thom and Dirk agreed, which is doing nothing. No one believes he’ll simply freeze like a deer in the headlights. But late one night, sitting in front of a fire at Rancho Valencia, Dirk’s wife, Donna, who along with Candace was one of the few truly hard-riding women I got to know, told me about a trip that she and Dirk had taken. The lead rider had missed a corner entirely, failed to turn, and driven off the road. “Four other motorcycles followed him right off the cliff,” Donna said. “Dirk and I were on the fifth bike, and we managed to stop.” That is the definition of the phrase “getting sucked in.” Which is why Rick Nelson had said to me on that first mad dash I took with Lyle and the Clubhouse, “Ride your own ride. Don’t get sucked in.” Those guys drove off a cliff because they got sucked in.

  There is good reason that so many people are confused about turning. To go left, the front wheel has to be turned to the right. Imagine doing that on ice. Newton’s law would make the bike continue in a straight line, agains
t the direction that the front wheel has been turned. But since the bike is stuck to the road by the friction of tires on pavement, it won’t slide, it will begin to fall over, to lean (toward the left in this case).

  Sensing that the bike is falling, the rider will turn the wheel back toward the left, as if to stop the fall. All this happens in a fraction of a second. Once the bike is leaning and the front wheel has been realigned toward the left, a left turn is established. All that maneuvering sacrifices a lot of energy to friction and heat, so the addition of a little power continues the turn. To come up out of the turn, the front wheel actually has to be turned deeper into the left turn, which has the opposite effect and rights the bike. It happens unconsciously for the most part. I’ve talked to Superbike racers who couldn’t explain how they turned, but they are different from us. Without a thorough understanding of counter-steering, ordinary riders will crash. It’s only a matter of time.

  Since engineering for the racetrack always trickles down to the street, a new generation of more sophisticated riders evolved during the eighties and nineties. Once they became aware of what it felt like to ride a bike that (in Dirk’s words) was connected, nothing else would do. That type of knowledge was very new, almost secret, when Dirk began to wage his campaign for the Superhawk in 1984 and cobbled together his first prototype. He tried to sell it to Japan and failed. “They thought the market was too small,” Dirk said, “and they were right.” But Dirk was ahead of his time, even ahead of the engineers in Japan. Honda was working on suspensions and had a perfectly good V-four engine. Why build a twin (which was what the Superhawk would be)? The answer was that the efficient four-cylinder engines sound like sewing machines. A twin vibrates. It has a throaty sound. It feels and sounds like a real motorcycle. The perfect motorcycle not only had to have horsepower and to handle beautifully. It had to have soul. As good as the Japanese are supposed to be at understanding mysterious things, they didn’t understand American soul.