Twenty years ago today: Rossi fixes Yamaha’s M1

Pitlane experts believed that the M1’s front end didn’t give riders the quality of feedback required to rush into corners at race-winning speed. In fact that was only half the problem, as Rossi discovered the first time he rode the M1.

Rossi and Honda didn’t part on the best of terms at the end of 2003, so he was refused permission to ride rival motorcycles until his HRC contract expired at the end of December. Thus he had his first outing on the M1 on January 24, 2004, during the opening pre-season tests at Sepang, Malaysia, 12 weeks before the first grand prix in South Africa.

At that stage the M1 was so flawed that most people assumed Rossi and Yamaha would spend the 2004 season addressing the bike’s many problems, then go for the title in 2005, Yamaha’s 50th anniversary.

Instead Rossi and his brilliant crew chief Jeremy Burgess made huge forward strides on the very first day of that three-day test in Malaysia.

“Sincerely, I expected bigger problems, but more or less the bike is okay,” said Rossi at Sepang. “It has some things that are less than Honda, but also some good things. Basically it’s not so bad.”

That statement blew everyone’s minds – surely he was being economical with the truth?

Rossi rode his first laps on Sunday the 24th and soon found out why Barros and Yamaha’s other riders had been losing the front and hitting the ground so often.

Pretty much every time he hit the brakes he nearly lost the front. Usually this would suggest poor bike balance and not enough load on the front tyre, because riders need to load the tyre during braking to generate heat and therefore grip. Burgess and his crew checked the data, searching for clues. What they found was quite a shock.

MotoGP engine-braking systems usually keep the throttle butterflies (which regulate fuel/air flow in the injection system) open during braking, even when the rider has the actual throttle closed, because if the butterflies are fully closed there’s too much negative torque, which will lock the rear tyre. For some bizarre reason the M1’s electronics had the front tyre linked into the system, so when Rossi locked the front tyre the engine increased its rpm. A surefire way to make your riders crash!

This is why Barros and other M1 riders had landed on their heads so often during 2003, because the bike started to accelerate when they locked the front tyre! Yamaha simply wrote the front brake out of the M1’s engine-braking program and the problem was solved.

Mostly, anyway. Rossi still thought the front tyre locked too easily. He also told Burgess and the multitude of Yamaha engineers in his garage that the bike was difficult to turn and that the steering got mysteriously heavy when the forks were fully compressed on the brakes.

Perhaps the air-intake rubber under the front of the fairing was getting squashed against the mudguard, suggested JB. Impossible, said Yamaha. So Rossi’s crew removed the fork springs, bottomed the bike and the intake rubber was hard against the mudguard!

This didn’t only affect handling and steering, it also shut off much of the air intake, which wasn’t good for engine response.

How come Yamaha had failed to notice these problems during 2003, let alone fix them, whereas JB sorted them in a few hours? JB and the crew were certainly perplexed, but they weren’t worried, because they were making giant leaps forward without much effort, simply using JB’s straightforward approach to getting the best out of a motorcycle, the so-called KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid! And Yamaha was certainly learning fast.

The solution to the issues of front-tyre lock, poor turning and the squashed air-inlet rubber was easy: raise and lengthen the motorcycle. Usually engineers might raise the front and rear of a bike by a millimetre or two to solve such problems. Burgess told the Yamaha engineers they should raise the bike by 15 millimetres. The Japanese freaked out – this was madness! – but they relented. And once again Burgess was proved right.

There was also the engine to fix, because the 2003 M1’s power delivery was too sharp for the rider and too sharp for the rear tyre.

On the second day Rossi tried a big-bang configuration engine. This all-new powerplant had been designed and created by Masao Furusawa, the man given the job of shaking up Yamaha’s race department.

Furusawa had taken control of the factory’s motor sport and technology development the previous summer, following the resignation of Hiroshi Ohsumi. He wanted to create an engine that imitated the big-bang configuration of Honda’s five-cylinder vee, which delivered power to the rider and to the rear tyre in a much friendlier way. He therefore designed a new crankshaft and firing configuration for the inline-four engine, which made it fire more like a V4.

The cross-plane crankshaft engine was a revelation, mimicking the rider-friendly and tyre-friendly performance of the RC211V. Rossi immediately understood that this was the way forward, because the friendlier engine allowed him to spin and slide the rear tyre in a more controlled way, which is the secret to squeezing the maximum out of a MotoGP bike over full-race distance.

The new engine needed more work – because the big-bang configuration reduces peak horsepower – but Yamaha had found the right direction to create a better kind of power that the rider could really use.

By the end of the tests Rossi had circulated Sepang in 2 minutes 2.75 seconds, more than a second inside the lap record he had set during the previous October’s Malaysian GP, but 0.165 seconds slower than arch-rival Max Biaggi, riding a Camel RC211V for the Sito Pons team.

Twelve weeks later he took pole position at the season-opening Africa GP at Welkom, just ahead of the Honda horde: Sete Gibernau, riding a Gresini Honda, then Biaggi, Nicky Hayden and Colin Edwards, all of them within half a second of the pole man.

The next day he won an epic duel with Biaggi which went down to the last lap. This was an historic victory, for Rossi was the first rider in premier-class history to win back-to-back races with different manufacturers. He also gave Yamaha its first win in 18 months.

There were three main reasons behind Rossi’s success at Yamaha: his riding talent and intelligence, Burgess’s renowned problem-solving abilities and Furusawa’s big-bang engine.

Burgess had spent the previous 20 seasons with HRC, working with Ron Haslam, Freddie Spencer, Wayne Gardner, Mick Doohan and Rossi. His clearness of thought, his refusal to over-complicate things and his willingness to speak his mind to more senior engineers brought him premier-class titles with four of those riders. He is still the most successful crew chief of all time.

Furusawa shook things up when he was given command of Yamaha’s MotoGP project. He proved, as a few others have done, that one person can make a huge difference to an enterprise involving many hundreds of people (like Shuhei Nakamoto at Honda from 2010 and Gigi Dall’Igna at Ducati from 2014). Furusawa didn’t only create the big-bang M1 engine, he also reorganised Yamaha’s race engineering division to use a “less intuitive, more scientific” approach to the problems of getting a man and a motorcycle around a racetrack as quickly as possible.

Rossi secured the 2004 title at Phillip Island, Australia, with a race to spare. This success made him the second rider to win consecutive premier-championships with different bike brands, following Eddie Lawson, who took the 1988 title with Yamaha and the 1989 crown with Honda.

There was one other factor in this historic title victory. When Michelin engineers designed their 2004 tyres – used by Yamaha, Honda and Ducati – their latest rear slick improved edge grip, which helped M1 riders fully exploit the bike’s advantage in corner speed. Honda riders called the tyre the ‘Yamaha tyre’ because it also caused chatter on the RC211V, which took time to cure.

Throughout 2004 Yamaha continued to make improvements according to feedback from Rossi and Burgess. New engine parts and chassis parts arrived at many races as Yamaha worked towards building an even better bike for 2005. Electronic rider controls – traction control, anti-wheelie and engine-braking control – also got better, thanks in part to Yamaha’s new relationship with Italian electronics experts Magneti Marelli.

“The most important step we made was with throttle linearity and throttle-to-tyre connection,” said Yamaha’s MotoGP technical director Ichiro Yoda, emphasising Rossi’s keenness to focus on user-friendly performance rather than outright performance.

At the end of 2004 Yamaha was happy to credit Rossi with the championship, the factory’s first since Wayne Rainey’s last in 1993.

“Valentino can lead everyone – he leads the engineers, the mechanics, the crew chief, so his influence is very big,” said Yoda at the end of the year. “He finds the correct direction and we follow him, so we can make quick developments.”

Rossi, Burgess and Yamaha were even more dominant in 2005. After their first winter tests Burgess said, “It’s looking pretty ominous for everyone else – the aim is to fix the bad points without losing the good points”.

And that’s exactly what they did. Rossi won nine races in 2004 and 11 in 2005, enough to secure his fifth consecutive title with four races to go.

No doubt, this dizzying success led JB to believe they could do the same when Rossi quit Yamaha for Ducati at the end of 2010.

Burgess was convinced they would win again. “That is without question,” he said in November 2010. “We’ve done it before: we did it when we went from two-stroke to four-stroke, we did it when we went from Honda to Yamaha, we did it when we went from 990s to 800s and now we’re all a bit older and wiser. Also, our starting point is higher than when we started at Yamaha. The Ducati is a great bike, and now they’ve got Valentino to tidy it up a bit.”

However, JB’s optimism wasn’t reflected by reality. In Rossi’s two seasons aboard the Desmosedici the best he managed was two second-place finishes, behind his nemesis, Jorge Lorenzo.

Rossi and most of his crew were disillusioned with Ducati by the end of 2011, let alone 2012. At the end of that second season Burgess vented his frustrations.

“The Ducati is still a frame wrapped around an engine, rather than an engine designed to go in a frame,” he told me. “We’ve needed new crankcases for a while because we can’t keep raising the engine because then the countershaft sprocket gets higher and higher which affects the swingarm pivot and the handling. You’d think we would’ve had new ’cases after the first few races, but we’ve still got what we had at the first test.

“This year we qualified tenth for the first race and we raced the first 12 races without getting a new chassis. Had this been a Japanese factory there would’ve been an immediate response with a variation of the chassis for the next race. A few years ago Honda brought nine different frames for Dani Pedrosa in one year.”

Obviously during the past decade and a half the capabilities of the different factories have changed entirely. Now it’s the Europeans that lead the way on performance and reactivity. Is this just a blip or will it be a long-standing transformation, like when the Japanese overtook the Europeans in the 1960s and 1970s?

Only time and Honda and Yamaha will provide the answer to that question.