‘The NSR500 had more than six million gearbox combinations!’

MotoGP

Ramon Forcada has been a MotoGP chief crew for three decades, working on Honda’s NSR500, RC211V and RC212V, then Yamaha’s YZR-M1. He talks about working with two-stroke 500s, the big changes that have taken place in MotoGP in recent years and the category’s current problems

Jorge Lorenzo carries ramon Forcada on the podium after the 2013 MotoGP Catalan GP

Ramon Forcada celebrates Jorge Lorenzo’s victory at Barcelona in 2013. The pair won three MotoGP titles together: 2010, 2012 and 2015

Getty Images

Mat Oxley

I start my chat with Ramon Forcada by telling him that I usually think of him as the Spanish Jeremy Burgess. And he doesn’t seem to mind.

Forcada (winner of three MotoGP world titles with Jorge Lorenzo) and Burgess (winner of 13 MotoGP crowns with Valentino Rossi, Mick Doohan and Wayne Gardner) are both old-school, no-bullshit racing pragmatists who have seen it all. I miss JB a lot.

Forcada’s greatest achievement is his triple championship success with Lorenzo but he’s done plenty more: he won his first MotoGP races with Carlos Checa in the days of 500cc two-strokes, he was Casey Stoner’s first MotoGP crew chief and he’s also won races with Alex Barros, Maverick Viñales and Franky Morbidelli.

“We used sandpaper and oil to fix the cylinders and lose a bit of friction”

Although Forcada has enjoyed his greatest successes with big four-strokes he still regards his years working on 500s as his favourite time in MotoGP, because engineers had a deeper involvement with the motorcycles.

“I only worked with Honda 500s, the NSR500, but there was always something to do with the engine, whereas now we have nothing to do with the engine,” says Forcada, who worked for Sito Pons’ team at the time. “We played with the pistons, using sandpaper to clean them up. We also cleaned up the ports and polished the cylinder heads, never to change the timing or compression, but just to make everything nice. And if you worked like this you always got a little more performance. I always liked this job on the dyno – finding small improvements.”

“At the end of every practice session at a GP we took off the top end and we removed the cylinders at the end of every day. Normally we used three sets of pistons across two bikes at every GP. When we fitted new pistons we had the rider run them in for ten laps or so, then we would remove the cylinders and check the pistons. If there were any high spots or shiny spots we used sandpaper and oil to fix this and lose a bit of friction.”

Carlos Checa with Ramon Forcada and Team Pons crew

Forcada (second left) with Carlos Checa and his NSR250 in 1995. To Checa’s immediate left are Antonio Jiménez (Aleix Espargaró’s current crew chief), team owner and twice 250cc world champion Sito Pons and the late, great engineering genius Antonio Cobas

Team Pons

So you were artisans?

“Yeah, exactly!” he beams. “The pistons always made their best power after about 80km [50 miles], so we used to run in a new set on Friday morning and keep them for the race. And we’d always keep another good set, in case of emergencies.”

Getting the carburation jetting and gearing just right were the other big deals with the 500 two-strokes.

“We played a lot with gear ratios, every session,” he adds. “The range of power with the NSR500 was 9000 to 13,000, but sometimes this was no good because there was too much power, so you might use what was really an incorrect ratio to use the torque in a better area. For example, if the rider was exiting a corner in first gear at 9000rpm it was better to be at 6000, so the rider could manage the power better and the tyre wasn’t spinning like crazy.

“With today’s regulations we are allowed a total of only 24 ratios for all six gears and four primary gears. In the 500s days there was no limit, so for some gears we had 12, 13 or 14 different ratios! With all those gear ratios, plus different primary gears, gearbox sprockets and final-drive sprockets the total possibility of combinations was more than six million!”

Now the factories have 3D simulations of every circuit and yottabytes (look it up!) of data to do things in a different way.

“Now we don’t make the gearbox at the circuit because we have enough data and we usually keep the same ratios for the whole weekend. That never used to happen before. With the 500s we sometimes changed a ratio to make a gear just 1km/h [0.6mph] longer! Now if you have a big gap between two gears you just use the torque map to fill the gap with more power. And it’s the same with controlling wheelspin – we play with power delivery and traction control.”

Ramon Forcada with John Kocinski

Forcada with John Kocinski in 1998. Kocinski had won 500 GPs with Yamaha and Cagiva but never made the podium with his Team Pons NSR500

Repsol

Forcada switched to four-strokes towards the end of the inaugural MotoGP season in 2002, when Alex Barros was given an RC211V to replace his NSR500. The Brazilian beat fellow RC211V rider Valentino Rossi twice in the last four races, including the season finale at Valencia.

The following day I was among a group of journalists allowed to ride Rossi’s RC211V and Barros’s NSR500. That afternoon Barros took his NSR out for a final spin after his first four GPs on a four-stroke. When he returned to the pits he handed the NSR to his crew and said, “This bike is sheeeet!”.

That was his considered comparison between the NSR and first RCV, so please don’t mistake this story for a paean to two-stroke GP bikes. I’m merely asking a great MotoGP engineer to talk about the old days and nowadays.

Related article

Inside a MotoGP rider/crew chief marriage
MotoGP

Inside a MotoGP rider/crew chief marriage

Maverick Viñales has changed crew chiefs for the second time in less than three seasons. So what’s so important about a crew chief? We spoke to ‘King’ Kenny Roberts, Kel Carruthers and Jeremy Burgess to find out

By Mat Oxley

“When we first went to four-strokes we still did a lot of work on the engine, because they weren’t sealed back then,” says Forcada. “We worked on the RC211V’s cylinder head, valves and so on.

“At first there were zero electronic rider controls on the RC211V; nothing in 2002, then it started in 2003, when we started with ride-by-wire throttles. That was the biggest change because with a throttle cable you can’t really have any electronic controls, but as soon as we had ride-by-wire throttles we started with traction control.”

In 2006 Forcada moved from Pons’ team to LCR Honda, where he worked with MotoGP rookie Casey Stoner.

“Casey was such a talent. Even when the electronics weren’t perfect he could control the bike with the throttle and rear brake – he made his own TC with the rear brake!”

In 2008 another MotoGP rookie, Lorenzo, asked Forcada to be his crew chief in the factory Yamaha team and he’s worked with the company’s YZR-M1 ever since.

That year was the year of Yamaha’s comeback – Rossi winning the title for the first time since 2005 and Lorenzo winning his first race.

Ramon Forcada with Jorge Lorenzo and Casey Stoner

Forcada with Lorenzo and Stoner in 2008. Forcada was Stoner’s crew chief in 2006, the Australian’s rookie MotoGP season

Getty Images

“For me the big difference for Yamaha that year was their new electronics and Rossi switching to Bridgestone tyres. When Casey changed from Honda to Ducati in 2007 he said the biggest difference between the bikes was the tyres – he crashed a lot with the Michelin front.” (Honda used Michelin at that time, while Ducati used Bridgestone.)

Electronics have been the biggest area of MotoGP development over the last two decades. Burgess – perhaps the Australian Forcada – was never super-keen on high-tech rider controls.

“When electronics systems became complicated they became difficult in themselves,” Burgess told me a while back. “I didn’t mind the electronics per se, but you didn’t know if you could fix the problem with the rider or if the boffins could fix the problem with the electronics, so you often went into the race with this massive cloud over your head.”

“Check the data after a half-millimetre change and you can’t see anything, but the rider can feel it”

So what’s Forcada view on electronics?

“Masao Furusawa [the race chief who turned around Yamaha’s fortunes when Rossi arrived] hated electronics and computers!” Forcada laughs. “But now you have to work with electronics, otherwise it’s impossible to compete.

“But it’s a balance – how much you trust the rider and how much you trust the electronics. There are some crew chiefs who trust the data 100%. For me, no. Electronics are a big help, but many times I explain to the rider that when we change the settings we don’t change the bike, we change the feeling.

“If we change the set-up by raising the rear ride height by half a millimetre we don’t change the bike, we change the feeling, so the rider says, ‘Now I trust the bike and I can go!’. But half a millimetre is the rubber we use in a few laps, so it’s nothing! Feeling is everything! If you check the data after you make that half-millimetre change you can’t see anything, but the rider can feel it. Most riders are very sensitive – when they trust the bike they can be fast, when they don’t feel confident they are slower.”

Ramon Forcada with Franco Morbidelli

Forcada with Franky Morbidelli in 2020 – they won three races together that season

Getty Images

MotoGP’s most important change in the last half decade or so has been the switch from Bridgestone to Michelin tyres, which required a big redesign by all the manufacturers.

“We changed the bikes a lot, going from Bridgestone to Michelin. The Bridgestone front was so good, it basically worked by itself, so we put more weight on the rear to help the rear tyre. Now the tyres are more balanced, so we have to work with both tyres. We move the weight around, especially rider position, because the bike must be very balanced because the tyres are very balanced.

“You can work on chassis rigidity, on suspension and so on but the tyres are the only parts of the bike touching the ground, so the weight you put on each tyre is very important, plus the transfer of load between the tyres and the speed of that transfer. The Yamaha is a well-balanced bike, but the tyre balance depends on the rider. Jorge used less weight on the front because he carried so much speed into corners – he stressed the front tyre with his speed, not through braking.”

The big thing in MotoGP right now is the closeness of the competition, which is largely down to the tyres, especially Michelin’s front slick.

“The lap times are very close because we are at the tyre limit. If the tyre limit is here [he holds one hand up high] and you are here [he olds his other hand lower] you have room to improve. But once you arrive at the tyre limit you cannot go past that limit because the tyres are always the final limit

“Many years ago we would talk to the Michelin guy and more or less it was like this: put some air in the tyres and go! Now it’s become very, very, very critical because we are playing with a tenth or two-tenths of a second, so we have to go into the small details because when you are close to the tyre limit even a small change can make a difference. When you are playing with half a second or a second the tyres aren’t really critical.”

Ramon Forcada with Andrea Dovizioso and RNF Racing crew

Forcada (far left) with current rider Andrea Dovizioso and crew

RNF Racing

Does chasing these tiny margins of improvement send Forcada crazy?

“A bit, yeah! In Formula 1 they also work a lot on tyre pressure, but when I talk to F1 engineers they say it’s easier for them because their tyre volumes are much bigger and they have only one brake disc per wheel, while we have two discs for the front wheel. They also have room for a heat deflector, to deflect hot air from the brake away from the wheel rim, and they change the deflector according to the track and the conditions. For us it’s more difficult.”

MotoGP’s issues with front tyre temperature and pressure are only likely to get worse in the near future, certainly until Michelin upgrades its front slick in 2024 or 2025.

Related article

“The problem is that the bikes keep getting faster, so the engines are hotter, the exhausts are hotter and then there is more load on the front tyre from the aero, which is the main story.

“Now we see races when a rider is half a second behind another rider and he is OK there, but if he closes that gap he cannot stop his bike anymore [because the heat from the leading bike overheats the following bike’s front tyre]. This is something we should think about, for the fans. For me, Marc Márquez was right when he said that people don’t care if we are half a second or a second a lap slower, people want to see fights.”

Would Forcada be happy to see downforce aero banned?

“For me, yes. It’s the same story with the ride-height devices – we were slower before, but we had good racing. Then we were far from the tyre limit, now we are at the tyre limit, so no one can make the difference, so everyone has the same pace.

“It’s difficult because we put more and more stress on the front tyre. Front tyre temperature and pressure has been an issue for the last five years but now it becomes a nightmare. We now play with pressure differences of 0.01 bar!

“The big difficulty is guessing how you are going make the race. If you decide that you will be in the group and you end up leading the group then your front tyre pressure will be too low. And if you get pole position but make a bad start and end up in the middle of the group then your front tyre pressure will be unbelievably high. So it’s difficult to control.”

Forcada currently works at RNF Racing with Andrea Dovizioso, who is having a horrible time with Yamaha’s current YZR-M1. The 15-time MotoGP race winner has yet to finish inside the top ten this season.

You may also like