Quote:
Originally Posted by roadkill
I really don't want to pick a fight here as I own and enjoy both types as noted here previously.....however, I am totally flabbergasted by the claim that what Rossi/Burgess learned at HRC led them to Yamaha victory....what R/B learned was due to their superior skills....they obviously know far more about MotoGP bikes than HRC and have the trophies and titles to show for it....you have the cart before the horse here. And, very importantly, Furusawa did not care one whit what kind of engine HRC had, used, fooled around with, masturbated over or anything else.....HRC had no impact on his direction....while Honda pegged their success/failure on a strictly V engine design, Yamaha never even gave that notion one nanoseconds' consideration.....Honda was Yamaha's "engine design reference point"? This boggles the mind to comprehend. In addition to your HRC inside contacts, you also have inside contacts with Yamaha's brain trust? C'mon, here....don't put yourself in an untenable position.
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Yamaha had plenty of 500 Gp skills but that lead them down the wrong
path in the new 4 stroke MotoGp... It was during the 2003 shake up at
Yamaha that Burgess and Rossi identified fairly early what the problems
were. They found a bike that was developed by 250 2 stroke riders but a
big 4 stroke is completely different... you need enough feel to a slide into
the corner and enough feel to slide your way out of a corner...
Quote MotoGp Tech:
"Yamaha launched Mission 1 (M1) in the autumn of 2000. The bike was
designed from the start to be a well-balanced rider-friendly
motorcycle."
"Using their well-developed 500cc two-stroke chassis layout as the
basis, Yamaha stuck with proven ideas: 'If you consider that all the
top 500s are similar in layout and dimensions, this suggests that it
is an ideal configuration. That's why we wanted to continue using our
YZR-style chassis with the YZR-M1 - the engine was designed to fit
within the package, not the other way around."
"Yamaha decided that the very compact configuration of the in-line four
would fit best. There was no second bank of cylinders to squeeze in at
the back and, although the engine was wide, it was wide where there
was room for it to be wide - in front of the rider's legs. And, with
one cam drive, one set of cams and one block, it was relatively light.
Marketing considerations were also taken into account - most of
Yamaha's sport bikes were across-the frame fours."
"Yamaha's reputation has always been to produce real-world
racing motorcycles that are designed from the start to maximise their
cornering ability and their initial acceleration out of those corners,
and everything about the first M1 said that they were following that
philosophy. Yamaha's engines were carburetted, even though the factory
had spent several years in World Superbike with their fuel-injected R7
750-4. They decided that it would be easier to produce a more human
response from the throttles by using carburettors on the MotoGP
engine."
"Ichiro Yoda went further: 'Considerable experience has taught us that
the best measure of the overall performance of a race machine is
expressed in the concept of "drivability". Naturally, this was also
the concept we stressed in the development of the YZR-M 1. In other
words, we placed top priority on developing more usable power
development character in the engine. If we were only focusing on max
power output. we could have raised the output. But that would not
necessarily mean better lap times or competitiveness on the racetrack.
We sought to develop engine and chassis characteristics that would
communicate the drive force of the rear tyre to the rider more
directly, create better contact between the rear tyre and the track
surface and produce more efficient tyre performance:"
"Yamaha's initial ideas of m
