Inside a MotoGP rider/crew chief marriage

Maverick Viñales recently got married and became a dad for the first time. Hearty congratulations to him, Raquel and baby Nina!

However, the 26-year-old Spaniard is already on his third pitlane marriage, because many riders and crew chiefs will tell you that their relationship is like a marriage.

To make a rider/crew chief union successful requires many of the same attributes that make a marriage: good communication, understanding, honesty, empathy, forgiveness, management of emotions and so on.

So why has Viñales already divorced two crew chiefs? And who is to blame for the collapse of his previous two pitlane relationships: him or Ramon Forcada, him or Esteban Garcia? And will new garage partner Silvano Galbusera be able to give the 26-year-old what he needs to harness his undoubted talent?

In other words, do Viñales’ problems come from inside or outside?

To understand the bigger picture perhaps we should look back at some of the great rider/crew chief relationships; most famously Valentino Rossi and Jeremy Burgess, who had previously won world titles with Mick Doohan and before that with Wayne Gardner.

During 23 seasons JB won a remarkable 13 500cc and MotoGP titles and he never divorced anyone. Honda first assigned him to Gardner, then Doohan and finally Rossi, who unceremoniously sacked him in favour of Galbusera at the end of 2013

As always JB’s assessment of that event was frank and accurate.

“I’ve read enough sporting biographies to know that sportsmen change their coaches towards the end of their careers,” he told me a while back. “It can give them a spike in results but it doesn’t change the overall story.”

All good MotoGP crew chiefs understand that they must perform two very different functions: they must be psychologists as well as engineers, which are very different jobs.

“A lot of my job is to create an air of confidence rather than an air of negativity,” said JB in 2001. “If we have a problem and we give the appearance that we may not be able to fix it, obviously that’s not a positive. The important thing is to work on the positives and to keep everyone in a positive frame of mind. We will have bad races, and riders will have bad days, you’ve just got to stay positive.

“It’s important to create an attitude of, ‘We can fix it’. Things will come right if you work hard enough. If you have bike problems, you mustn’t move that negativity into the rider. Last year [2000] when the Repsol Honda team were in dire straits, they destroyed themselves. We had a worse bike because we were number four in the pecking order but we isolated Valentino from the nightmare next door and just worked at getting the best out of our bike. We applied ourselves and worked through it logically.”

Burgess always liked to keep things simple in his garage.

“It’s the same in all sports,” he says. “Look at soccer, there are three sides to the game – when they’ve got the ball, when you’ve got the ball and when no one’s got the ball. How much more difficult than that can it be? It’s the same in motorcycle racing – the bike either works or it doesn’t. The rider is going to have problems, and problems are only questions that don’t have answers, so you find the answer anyhow. And when your rider comes into the pits he’s always going to speak about his biggest problem first, otherwise he’s a complete nitwit. It’s that simple. I don’t know, maybe I’m so dumb I can only see the big things but I think you should fix your bigger problems first and then you move on. A lot of people get wound up about small things.

“If I was to describe myself, I was the non-specific guy. A modern racing motorcycle is so sophisticated that it’s impossible for one or two or even three men to work on it, it demands much more than that, but there has to be someone who has an understanding and a feeling for what the rider is trying to explain. Plus there’s a lot to be done, so someone has to organise and prioritise how much time we can give between one practice and the next on a particular problem and what steps we’re going to take to reduce that problem.”

There were great rider/crew chief pairings before JB and his riders: Wayne Rainey and Mike Sinclair, Eddie Lawson and Erv Kanemoto, Freddie Spencer and Erv Kanemoto and Kevin Schwantz and Stuart Shenton and ‘King’ Kenny Roberts and Kel Carruthers.

Even before that there was Geoff Duke and Norton’s Joe Craig, Mike Hailwood and Honda’s Michihiko Aika and Giacomo Agostini and MV Agusta’s Arturo Magni, but those were less intimate relationships, more like rider and factory functionary.

Therefore I’d argue that the first modern rider/crew chief duo was Roberts and Carruthers, who stormed Europe in the late 1970s, taking a hat-trick of 500cc world titles at their first attempt.

The pair were very close, because Yamaha first asked Carruthers to look after Roberts when the youngster started roadracing in the early 1970s.

“The rider/crew chief thing is a marriage,” says Roberts. “It’s the same thing – ignore the small shit to get the big stuff done. And you’ve got to know what to say and when to say it.

“Motorcycles isn’t like Formula 1, where the crew chief is an engineer. In bikes it’s more of a human relationship than an engineering relationship, because motorcycle racing is very touchy-feely. If you aren’t feeling it, if you aren’t comfortable, you aren’t going to win, I don’t care who you are.