If Jorge Martin wins the 75th MotoGP crown will he be the first indie world champion?

Roberts may have worn yellow leathers and ridden a yellow motorcycle, but he was green as hell. He didn’t even want to leave the States, he wanted to stay home and race dirt track, his true love.

“I never wanted to go to Europe,” recalls ‘King’ Kenny. “I was young and naïve and I just thought everybody wanted to be a dirt tracker and be Grand National champion. I was floored when Yamaha said they were pulling out of dirt track [at the end of 1977]. I actually cried… I never really considered myself a road racer – I just did road racing to get Grand National points.”

In fact Roberts – who was literally a cowboy before he started racing – wasn’t even sure where Europe was.

“Japan and Europe were both ten hours from home, so to me they were the same.”

Finally, it happened. Roberts was entered in the 1978 world championships, with tuner/mentor Kel Carruthers looking after him. But Yamaha only gave him one 0W35 500, whereas Cecotto and Katayama had two each. And to further complicate matters, Roberts had a TZ250 for 250 GPs, to help him learn the tracks, and one TZ750, for the F750 series.

That’s like a 21st century racer going for the MotoGP, Moto2 and World Superbike titles all at once.

Carruthers was 100% vital to Roberts. He had won the 1969 250 world championship, so he knew how the Continental Circus worked. Or often didn’t.

When Roberts turned up for the second race of 1978, the first European round, at Jarama in Spain, he was in for a big shock. Because he was a rookie he wasn’t on the FIM grading list, so…

“The organisers didn’t want to give me a 500 start because I wasn’t on the grading list because I didn’t have any points. Kel had to get me out of there because I was about ready to kill someone, I was ready to go home. I missed first practice, then they had a jury meeting and let me ride.”

“At seven the next morning there was this screaming noise: ‘Achtung fahrerlager! Achtung fahrerlager’. I said: ‘Oh f**k, we’re in the wrong goddam place and they’re going to shoot us’. I ran out the motorhome and I was beating on Kel’s door and he said, ‘That’s German for, ‘Attention paddock’, now go back to bed.”

Roberts’ main rival was Barry Sheene, 500cc champ in 1976 and 1977. By round four of 11, Roberts had taken the championship lead and by round seven, the Belgian GP, Yamaha Japan realised it had been backing the wrong riders.

“It was Spa-Francorchamps and my bike just wouldn’t run. In last practice I still wasn’t qualified. When I came into the pits Yamaha Japan’s racing manager ripped the numbers off Johnny’s spare bike and stuck my numbers on it. I remember them pushing me off and I looked back to see Johnny pulling in. I thought, ‘Oh boy, this is going to be good’.

“After practice Yamaha asked Johnny which of his bikes he wanted to race, then when everyone was in bed, my truck and the official Yamaha truck pulled out of the paddock and into the woods, where they took the engine out of Johnny’s spare and put it in my bike.”

Roberts was crowned champion at the final round. He was simply way better than the rest, just like MotoGP’s next rookie champ, Marc Márquez, in 2013.

The championship’s next indie champ was twice American Superbike champion Eddie Lawson, who signed with Yamaha’s factory 500 GP team for 1983.

Lawson won the 1984, 1986 and 1988 MotoGP titles for Marlboro Yamaha, then fell out with team owner Giacomo Agostini over money and signed for 1989 with an independent Honda outfit, run by legendary tuner Erv Kanemoto. Honda’s factory team that year was 1987 champion Wayne Gardner and Aussie rookie Mick Doohan. Both teams were bankrolled by Rothmans.

Kanemoto’s team was tiny, numbering just four staff, plus Lawson, so what that tiny crew achieved in 1989 was astonishing.

The year started badly in pre-season testing when the fiery NSR spat off Lawson, breaking a wrist. At round two at Phillip Island, a rival’s bike seized right in front of him, at the super-fast Stoner corner — previously just known as Turn 3. The high-speed collision and ensuing crash left him in a bad way.

“That really beat the piss out of me,” he remembers. “At the start of the year it seemed like there was no hope for the title. People were saying, ‘You might as well retire and go home’. But bit by bit things started getting better. A lot of it was down to Erv.”

Lawson really hit it off with Kanemoto. “After Ago’s Marlboro Yamaha team, the grass really was a lot greener on the other side. Australia was a low point, but he was still 110% behind me. He said, ‘We’re going to make this bike better’, so I was like, ‘Son of a bitch, I want to ride this thing!’. I’d never heard that where I’d been before. With Ago’s guys I’d get second and they’d go, ‘What happened? What happened?’. I’d go, ‘I don’t know what the f**k to tell you, the other guy just went faster’.”

Lawson won his first race on the NSR at the first European round, the Spanish GP at Jerez. No one knew it at the time but Kanemoto has stumbled on the solutions to the NSR’s problems.

“Right from the beginning, Eddie’s comments were that the bike doesn’t turn,” says Kanemoto, who had already won two 500cc titles with Freddie Spencer. “It wasn’t until the third race at Laguna Seca that I was able to relate what he was saying and what was happening.

“I walked down to the last corner [Turn 11], thinking maybe I could see why this thing isn’t turning well. I saw Eddie coming into the turn-ten right-hander and I couldn’t believe it: when he turned in the bike wanted to go into the dirt on the inside, so he lifted the bike up, then when he turned in again he was way wide!

“I said to Toshi [Yamamoto, Kanemoto’s HRC engineer], ‘It’s unbelievable, the bike is turning too quick!’. This was last practice on Saturday, so I said, ‘Get all the data from when we started testing, we’re going to look at it and then we’re going to make a change’. I said, ‘This is what we should do, we’ll slow down the steering, but we better just go halfway because it’s such an extreme change from what we’ve been running’.

“The next morning Eddie came back into the pits during warm-up and I thought, what are we going to do now, because we’ve probably gone the wrong way and made the bike even worse. Eddie stopped in pitlane and said, ‘this is the first time it feels like a motorcycle.’”

Lawson’s Jerez victory made him Honda’s main hope for the title, because Gardner had broken a leg at Laguna and Doohan was having a horrible time adapting from superbikes to 500s.

Therefore Honda puts its weight behind Kanemoto’s independent team, just like Yamaha had done with Roberts’ crew. New parts started arriving from HRC and elsewhere, mostly chassis parts: frames, swingarms, carbon-fibre handlebars and carbon-fibre wheels, plus AP Lockheed carbon brakes and Showa upside-down forks, both radical new tech at the time.

The season turned into a straight title duel between Lawson and Wayne Rainey, riding his second 500cc with Roberts’ Lucky Strike Yamaha squad, also an independent team (Agostini still ran Yamaha’s factory effort). Lawson ran Michelin tyres, Rainey used Dunlops.

The battle raged all summer. Round eight in Yugoslavia was the other big breakthrough. Not the race itself, where Lawson finished third, behind Rainey and winner Kevin Schwantz (Suzuki), but the post-race test session.

“I asked Eddie if we could test the day after the race, but he was so disgusted by the race result that he wanted to go home,” adds Kanemoto. “Anyway, he agreed to test because Michelin had brought their 16-inch front. He tried it and the profile helped the bike a whole lot. Eddie always put in the effort, no matter how bad things were. To see what he went through to win that championship – most people would’ve crumbled.”

The title was effectively decided at the 13th of 15 rounds, the Swedish GP at Anderstorp. The pair fought for the win until Rainey crashed out.

“The lap Wayne fell off, I was right in the middle of the corner going onto the straightaway and I just grabbed a handful, early,” Lawson explains. “I knew Wayne was right on my ass and he went with me. I remember thinking, ‘Man, I can get on the gas early!’.

“I kept getting on the gas earlier and earlier. That one lap I just grabbed a handful and it stepped out and I just drove out of the turn. Wayne tried to go with me. If he had been on Michelins it would have been a different story that year. I think he could have won the championship with Michelins, no problem. I’m glad he was on Dunlops.”

MotoGP’s third indie-team champion was Valentino Rossi, who won the 2001 500cc title with his independent Nastro Azzurro team. The factory HRC team was backed by Repsol, but just as had been the case with Roberts and Lawson, HRC knew where its best hopes lay.

During 2000 HRC had used Rossi’s new ideas to create the final NSR500, the NV4A. This work started when Rossi had noticed how much more corner-exit traction the Yamaha YZR500s had at May’s French GP. The bike was tailor-made for Rossi, improving traction and other areas of performance via a refined chassis, cylinders, ignition mapping and carburettors.

Can Martin emulate Roberts, Lawson and Rossi? Without a doubt. But MotoGP goes into the unknown this week, entering easily the craziest end-of-season the championship has ever known: six grands prix in seven weekends on four continents.

The winner will be the rider who can maintain his focus, his confidence and his speed, while not making a single mistake. Therefore the pressure on Martin and Bagnaia is going to be insane.

Martin may be in an independent team but he rides a factory Ducati Desmosedici, exactly like Bagnaia’s, and has the same number of all-important electronics engineers in his garage. So in some ways his situation is the same as those Roberts and Lawson were in (without the armies of electronics engineers obviously).

There will also be brain-frying pressure on all both teams and especially on their mechanics, who will barely get a moment off during those six GP weeks. They will be either spinning spanners in sweaty tropical pit lanes, sat on planes or driving from racetrack to hotel to airport. They will be exhausted and jet-lagged and praying they don’t make mistakes.

Even though Martin may not become the first indie MotoGP champ, there is one thing that makes this title fight unique: never before has a factory-team rider and an indie-team rider from the same manufacturer fought for the title. So Martin can make a little bit of history.