Huge MotoGP history – It's 50 years since Yamaha's first crown!
MotoGP
Fifty years ago this summer Yamaha made history by winning its first MotoGP championship, which also completed the domination of all categories by the two-stroke engine
Agostini rounds La Source hairpin at Spa-Francorchamps. Note fuel pipes in the seat hump – the Yamaha was so thirsty it needed an extra fuel tank to do race distance
MotoGP dominator Giacomo Agostini knew the writing was on the wall. When Yamaha‘s first 500cc two-stroke arrived in Europe in April 1973, MV Agusta‘s Italian superstar was prepared to do anything and everything to beat Yamaha’s Jarno Saarinen and his 0W19 at the season-opening French Grand Prix at Circuit Paul Ricard.
Trouble was, anything and everything weren’t enough. Halfway through the race, Ago pushed too hard trying to keep up with the speedy two-stroke and crashed, leaving Saarinen to ring-a-ding-ding his way to victory.
Thus Ago knew time was running out for four-strokes in general and MV in particular, although the two-strokes’ ascendancy wasn’t the only reason he stunned the racing world by moving to Yamaha at the end of 1973.
Since the death of Count Domenico Agusta in 1971, MV had been run by the Count’s dodgy nephew, Riccardo ‘Rocky’ Agusta, who liked to hang out with gangsters. The two Italians didn’t get on, and, even worse, Rocky and Ago’s team-mate Phil Read were best mates.
“Rocky liked to be the big boss – ‘I’m Count Agusta, I’m the team owner!’ – I think he was jealous of me,” explains Ago. “Also, Phil wanted to be friends with Rocky, so he always told them the bikes were fantastic, even when they weren’t.”
The Read/Ago relationship was so toxic that some joker at Yamaha’s Amsterdam race HQ applied a Read sticker to the inside of the workshop toilet bowl.
“Poor old Phil, he got shat on, on a regular basis, that’s how bad the animosity was,” recalls Ago’s mechanic Mac Mackay. “To say the tension was high is an understatement. The mind games were really heavy, a bit scary at times. I had to show solidarity by not talking to Phil.”
Ago won seven consecutive MotoGP titles on MV Agusta four-strokes before joining to the move to two-strokes in 1975
Yamaha
Yamaha’s European racing boss – 1970 250cc world champ Rodney Gould, who died last year – had been chasing Agostini’s signature since 1971, trying to lure him away from MV, where he had won every single MotoGP title since 1966.
Gould suspected Ago was looking for a way out.
“Primarily he knew it was over for the four-strokes,” Gould told me a few years ago. “But also he didn’t like Rocky, who was just a playboy. Rocky didn’t know anything about anything – all he was good at was spending money.”
Indeed… when Count Rocky got married he chartered a plane to fly 68 guests from Italy to the USA. Or as one reporter noted, ’68 beautiful people attached to 136 beautiful kneecaps’.
At first, Ago resisted Gould’s advances.
“In 1971 I thought it was too early to race a two-stroke – they were always seizing engines,” adds Ago. “But by 1973 I could see that all the two-strokes were getting faster and safer, while it was very difficult to find more horsepower with the four-stroke, so it was time to change.”
Ago’s defection – to replace Saarinen, killed at Monza in May 1973 – was announced in December 1973, some months after Mackay had received a phone call from Gould.
“I couldn’t believe it when Rod told me Ago was leaving MV,” adds Mackay. “And it was the way he said it, like out something out of a John Le Carré novel.”
Immediately after inking his contract with Gould, Ago flew to Japan. At Yamaha’s Fukuroi test track he had a sneaky go on the 0W20, even though he was still under contract to MV.
“He had an hour on the bike and told the engineers he thought the steering head was too steep – the bike was shaking its head a bit,” remembers Gould. “The next day he rode it again. Ago said, ‘It’s much better now, what did you do?’. They said, ‘We made a new frame’. ‘How did you do that?’, asked Ago. ‘Well, there’s 24 hours in a day’, they replied. Ago was amazed, he said that would’ve taken a month at MV.”
Ago and the 0W26 won four GPs in 1975 to runner-up Phil Read’s two wins aboard an MV Agusta
Yamaha
In spite of good omens and optimism, Agostini’s decision to go two-stroke did turn out to be a little premature. During 1974 he was plagued by engine seizures, and not only by his own. He might well have won the title in his first year with Yamaha if Barry Sheene‘s Suzuki RG hadn’t seized and taken him out at Anderstorp, sidelining him for the rest of the season. Saarinen had lost his life in similar circumstances, when Renzo Pasolini’s two-stroke Harley seized ahead of him at Monza.
“The Yamahas weren’t ready when we got them at the start of ’74,” adds Mackay, who worked mostly on Agostini’s 350 twins. “When we got to the Salzburgring I had to weld up about 30 cranks because the flywheels were moving on the crankpins.
“The 500 was bad but nowhere near as bad as the 350, which vibrated so bad it’d wear holes in the rider’s hands. There wasn’t a single race in 1974 when I didn’t have to weld up the 350’s chassis. But the bikes kept getting better. They used to test with Ago every week – test, test, test – and the flow of new parts never stopped.”
Mackay and his fellow mechanics did everything they could to avoid seizures. “We used to sand all the pistons, crosshatching them with sandpaper, so they’d be smooth but not too smooth, because they needed to carry the oil.”
Engine seizures and wonky cranks weren’t the 0W20’s only problems. While Europe struggled in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, which quadrupled the price of petrol in six months, the 0W drank fuel at a ruinous rate: 11 miles per gallon.
“The combustion chambers always showed the engine was running miles too rich,” says Nobby Clark, who fettled Ago’s 500s. “They were running it rich to be safe, but it didn’t have to run it that rich to be safe. Eventually I said if we’ve got to run these big jets, let’s try softer plugs, which helped the performance so much it was unreal, but it didn’t help the fuel consumption.”
Ago and team-mate Kanaya scored a runaway one-two at the 1975 season-opening French GP, beating Read’s MV by 29 seconds!
Yamaha
Yamaha’s inline-four engine was so thirsty that Ago ran out of fuel at Imola in 1974 and the only way they could make race distance at Spa was by fixing an eight-litre tank in the seat to supplement the 35-litre main tank, which made the bike ridiculously heavy – 43 litres of fuel.
By 1975 Yamaha had got on top of most of the problems. The 0W26 was 20 kilos lighter, drank less fuel and had a monoshock rear end.
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Another huge improvement was Yamaha’s first cassette-type gearbox. The 0W engine had a narrow powerband – about 2000rpm, despite reed-valve induction – so there was plenty of juggling alternative gearbox ratios. And each change of ratios required a full, five-hour engine strip.
“You’ve no idea how many all-nighters we did at races,” recalls Mackay. “Friday nights we’d invariably work all night and then on Saturday until two or three in the morning. A couple of the mechanics got pleurisy [a nasty lung condition], just through overwork. It was murderous.”
In the end, Yamaha had to limit the number of ratio changes.
“There were times when we made two changes in a day,” adds Clark. “At Assen Masayasu Mizoguchi [Yamaha’s race boss] told Ago this is the last time we change the gearbox because tomorrow there won’t be time, so you better go away and think about it, come back and let us know. Ago came back and said this is what I want and it turned out he was right.”
Strengthened by the knowledge gained during their first full 500 season, Yamaha made a perfect start to 1975: Agostini and teammate Hideo Kanaya taking a one-two at Ricard, well ahead of Read.
