For many sportbike riders, the ultimate expression of their love for the sport can be found nowhere else but the Isle of Man TT. Amateurs and pros risk their lives competing, flying down bumpy, uneven roads in excess speeds of mph or more. Recently, a rookie rider died following a three-vehicle crash, totaling to two fatalities this year. The event has been held on the remote British island every year since The race itself allows for several different classes of motorcycles and rider skill levels.
The course consists of The event culminates with the Senior Tourist Trophy event, where the fastest riders and bikes compete for honor and glory. Since the inaugural race in , there have been over deaths on the race course. Then the others started to show up and begin training, and sure enough, they were very fast. It was a bigger shock for me than it had been for the Old Man. After all, I was going to be competing with them any day.
Kawashima wondered what instructions to give the riders. The engine aside, the bottom-link front suspension looked out of date and he was concerned about both frame rigidity and brake performance. Honda's test course, built along the Arakawa River, was a simple arrangement of two flat, straight runs. The data from testing there simply were not relevant to this course, which had many ascending and descending slopes and seventy-four different curves.
Kawashima says:. I soon recovered, though. I started feeling very competitive, and I thought, all right, if we don't win this year, then just you wait until next year! All of us were eager to compete again the following year, including me. Whether you call it youth or stupidity, I don't know," he added, laughing.
The four-valve cylinder heads, which had not been ready in time to be sent by ship, arrived by air freight. Only three of the machines would have their cylinder heads replaced in time for racing. Hirota, one of the team mechanics, smiled wryly as he remembered:. All of us, from the team leader on down, worked till late. The way we saw it, it was easier working at night, when we didn't have spectators.
Then it appeared in the newspaper that the Japanese were like mice in the attic. You could hear them scurrying around at night, it said. Newspapers also reported that the Japanese worked Saturdays and Sundays, too, so their performance must be low and their efficiency probably won't improve.
All of a sudden, I said to myself, then I'll just race the best way I know how. If he had told me to do my best, I might have tensed up. The team leader really knew how to guide us. But to be honest, I just raced without any conscious awareness of it.
It's no easy matter to figure out the braking points and the course lines by watching the other riders. I nearly went over on the corners any number of times, and just left it all up to my good luck. It was thanks to the machine that I managed to finish the race. If the machine broke down partway through, then we wouldn't get any data. We were aiming toward competition two or three years later, so we absolutely had to have at least one bike make it all the way.
So I told all of them not to do it, and walked away. And then all four machines finished the race. That was more than we had expected.
On the seventh lap, the rear brake rod pin on Junzo's bike broke and fell out. We were used to that sort of thing from Asama, so we could make an emergency repair with a quick pit stop and send him back out. The engine gave no trouble at all. In ten laps, it went First place went to Provini on an M.
Taveri came second on an M. The team also took the Constructor's Prize. Naomi Taniguchi, who placed sixth, with the Honda RC Giichi Suzuki came in afer him in seventh place, and Teisuke Tanaka in eighth. Honda was awarded the Prize. You did well. The Honda team was on the front page of a newspaper. There wasn't any writing about mice or anything, and though I couldn't read the article very well, the story seemed to be saying good things about us.
What made me smile, though, was when I saw the Japanese logo for 'Honda Benly' printed upside down. The people over there could read even less than I could, it seems," Iida added laughing. Honda had seen them off, and he was there again to greet them when they returned to Tokyo. Apart from a reporter for a motorcycle magazine, no one from the press had come to cover their story.
However, the morning edition of the Asahi Shimbun and the evening edition of the Tokyo Shimbun did carry stories, though small, reporting Honda's "team victory" in the sports pages on June 4. It remarked that Japanese riders had competed in a world-level motorcycle race against European riders with much more experience and won a team prize.
It also had a photograph of the team's motorcycles. Then it went on to say:. The manufacturer, Honda Motor Co. Practice and qualifying sessions are split with the relevant classes from the solo classes such as Superbike, Superstock, Supersport and Supertwins aka Lightweight as well as the sidecars. These sessions allow the riders to get familiar with their machines and the course conditions which will be especially useful when the riders and teams return after being away for so long.
Six solo races and two sidecar races make up race week which begins between the middle Saturday of the two weeks with the six-lap Superbike TT and the first of two three-lap sidecar races, then alternate days until the culmination, the big one that all solo rider want to win, the Senior TT, held over six laps on the final Friday. After all, weather plays an almighty part at the Isle of Man TT and when riders are hurtling down Bray Hill at maximum speed just seconds after being waved away, this additional lap seems like a sensible move.
By BikeSocial.
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