Читать книгу Foggy on Bikes - Carl Fogarty - Страница 12

Hideous. That’s the only word for my style when I first started out on the race track. It was probably something I had picked up from watching my dad so often during his racing career. I had a horrible tucked-in style, a bit like Mike Hailwood. That’s not to take anything away from the achievements of Mike. In his day there was no one better. It was just that racing was starting to enter a new era. I guess Kenny Roberts, who grew up on the dirt tracks of America, is the one man credited with introducing the style where riders were hanging off their bikes and sliding the rear end round corners. But Roberts himself will tell you that he picked the style up from Finnish rider Jarno Saarinen.

At the start of my road racing career, around 1984, I used to listen to a friend of my dad called Bill Ingram, who tuned engines. He told me to alter the bars on my bike so that they were pointing in, almost as far as possible, which meant that my riding style was totally tucked in – but as I later discovered, that did not suit my riding style at all.

It was a year later when I finally said, ‘I don’t like the bars like this. It’s really uncomfortable.’

‘Well, why do you have them like that, then?’ my dad asked.

‘Because I was told to have them there,’ I replied. That was typical of me at that time. I was not confident enough to stand up for myself, even if I thought there was something wrong. ‘So I can put these bars where I want, dad?’

‘Yeah, course you can!’

As soon as the bars were moved so that they were a lot further out, I realized immediately I could ride a lot better. Until that point, probably towards the end of 1985, I had been a very slow learner. And I didn’t realize how much more room there was for improvement until I started studying videos and pictures. It wasn’t just the top international racers I learned from. Even the good national racers, people like Niall Mackenzie, were hanging off the bike a lot more than I was doing at the time.

It was clear that I had to start getting my knee down and to throw the bike around more at the corners. Nowadays, there is just no way a rider can stay upright through a corner without falling off. The sheer size and speed of the machine means that the bike has to be tossed from side to side. And it stands to reason that the more a bike tilts over in a corner, the less grip you are going to have as there is less of the tyre in contact with the track. So the more you lean off the bike and put your knee down on the surface, the more upright you can keep the bike.

I found the Honda CBR600 hard to handle when riding in the British Supersport championship in 1991. For one thing, the footrests were too low.

There was another position I’d also become more aware of: the financial position in terms of my dad’s support of my career. Dad had sounded a few warning bells at the start of the 1986 season.

‘Look Carl, we can’t keep putting money into this unless you start winning. This is going to have to be the last year our company can fund you unless something happens,’ he said.

It was obvious that I was going to have to shape up or spend my life working on a factory shop floor.

By April, I had gone from winning club races to winning internationals against 250cc Grand Prix riders like Donny McLeod and Alan Carter. It was as though I’d missed out a step on the ladder – winning national races. You often see a similar leap of form in athletes; someone who has finished third throughout one season suddenly starts winning at the start of the next. Footballers are the same. A season off through injury can make them stronger and wiser. Neil Hodgson suddenly came back a better rider in the 1999 season after time off. It appeared the previous winter had had the same effect on me.

But a bad crash later that year set me back a bit. I came off at Oulton Park during practice and smashed my femur pretty badly. Still, I used that winter, laid up at home and feeling sorry for myself, to study other people’s techniques even more. I was determined to put what I had learned into practice on my return to racing in 1987. But my leg was still causing problems and, during that 1987 season, my tibia snapped because of an infection around the pin that had been inserted to help mend the femur fracture. At the start of 1988 the discomfort of my leg being cramped up on smaller bikes made me switch to the bigger superbikes. I could then really put my theories into effect, and I was soon well on the way to winning my first world championship: the Formula One TT world title.

This is the case with all riders, though. Nobody jumps on a bike and keeps the same style from the start of their career to the finish, although most will probably have a smoother learning curve than I had. Mine was very steep during that period from 1984 to 1988, only flattening off around 1990. And it was not the only thing that flattened off.

I was always altering things to try and squeeze that little bit extra out of my bike. For instance, it was around that time that I noticed that the bars of American rider Fred Merkel were almost totally flat. The superbikes in those days were more like ‘sit up and beg’ street bikes, not like the superbikes of today, which are more like the Grand Prix bikes of those days. So it was more natural to have flatter bars. Merkel looked really cool and comfortable on his bike and I wanted to give it a go.

I tried it first in wet weather conditions at Kouvola in Finland in 1990. If you are going to fall in the wet, you usually lose the front end of the bike, and in those days I was a lot harder on the brakes coming into a corner. I wanted to be as upright as possible so that I was not pushing on the bars as well as putting pressure on them through braking. And with the RC30, which I was riding that year, you could slide the bars off, turn them upside down and slide them back on so that they were pointing slightly upwards. My mechanic, Dennis Willey, thought I was mad, but I felt as though I had loads of control in the wet, even though it looked an unnatural position. It had been dry during the practice sessions in Finland but it pissed down for the race itself – my last ever TT F1 race – so I decided to give it a try. I won the race easily and lapped everyone up to second place, although it has to be said the competition was probably not the strongest I have ever raced against. I never repeated this feat, because that style was probably more suited to street racing than the track, where you have to hang off even more.

My friend Geoff Hopkins owns a Foggy replica which he rides on the road. A couple of years ago he was complaining that his back was hurting. I suggested that he tried turning the bars upside down so that he was sitting more upright in the saddle and not hunching his back as much. My old mechanic, Slick, was staying with us, and after he had turned them over Geoff agreed that it was much more comfortable. I bet there are thousands of riders out there who would benefit from this advice.

When I signed for Honda in 1991, I told Dennis Willey that I wanted the angle of dip to be changed from 15 degrees to around 5 degrees because I felt too cramped. I could not make up my mind whether or not I liked the new position – and my results were not very good that year. I assumed it was the bars and went back to the 15 degree position for the rest of the year and for the next couple of years, but I still had this nagging feeling that the lower the bars were, the more hunched forward I was. So in 1994 I asked Slick to move them back up to a 10 degree dip on my Ducati 916 – a kind of happy medium. I felt that it made mid-corners more comfy, because the riding position is not a natural one for your body to be forced into for 25 laps. I was also that bit more upright when I was braking, and it seemed to be less painful on my knees.

At the end of my career, the angle of dip had probably crept back up to around 5 degrees, probably less than for any of the other riders, who preferred it at around 8.5 degrees. There are those who like their handlebars at around 15 degrees, and a lot of the Grand Prix riders had an even bigger angle of dip. One year in Japan, for some reason, we were using the older style bars with a bigger angle of dip. I simply came in and said, ‘I can’t ride this. I want to go back to the 5 degrees.’

The more I hung off the bike, the more it stayed upright. Somebody like Michael Doohan might have put the bike down more, perhaps losing a bit of corner speed but picking up an advantage exiting the corner.

I always wanted to be on top of the bike as much as possible so that I could throw it through chicanes, where I was always very fast. I did not feel able to do this if I was crouched down. Body strength was never one of my strong points, so that was perhaps another reason why I needed to be on top of the bike, giving myself as much chance as possible of throwing the machine effectively from side to side.

There are two other things to take into account when positioning the handlebars. The main one, as I mentioned earlier, is that as well as up and down you can change how the bars are angled into or away from the bike. And as my style was all about hanging off the bike as much as possible, I always thought that the further I was tucked in, while remaining comfortable, the more I could hang off in corners.

I think this is why people used to say that I looked big on a bike. I was often told that I looked a lot smaller in real life than I did when I was riding. The press have written things like, ‘Never has someone so small made himself look so big on a bike.’ A lot of small riders look lost on a bike, and I’m a small guy at 5 ft 8 in, but it’s because I hung off the bike and moved around the saddle so much that I appeared bigger. Again, if the bars had been angled further out from the bike, I would have been straining forward, with my weight too far over the front.

At some tracks, with a lot of right-handers, I would angle the left-hand bar a bit further into the bike than the right. As I hung off the bike, the movement of my left arm would be limited by the bike’s tank; moving that bar in a few millimetres gave me the chance to hang further off to the right without that left arm catching on the tank. I probably first did this in 1997 when I was struggling with the line of my Ducati, especially at tracks like Donington where I was having difficulty at corners such as Redgate, McLeans and Coppice. Albacete was another track where I sometimes felt the need to do this in order to maximize the contact patch of the tyre and find the best possible grip.

When I asked Slick to do this in Spain, he presumed I wanted the right-hand bar moved inwards as well, and got to work.

‘What are you doing that for?’ I said when I saw he was working on both bars.

‘Well, I presumed you wanted them both doing. You couldn’t ride to the chippy with it like that,’ he replied.

‘Just leave it with the left-hand bar,’ I insisted.

Other riders tended to prefer more of what I would call a motocross style, where the bars are sticking out more in the manner of Fred Merkel. That helps them carry more speed into the corners before braking and sliding the back end round, a bit like a speedway rider but obviously not so exaggerated. It allows them to use the strength in their arms more easily. The riders who are very good at this are Noriyuki Haga, Chris Walker and Anthony Gobert. That was never my strong point. My style was all about carrying speed at mid-corner and my position was perfect for that. One thing the angle of my bars was not perfect for, though, was storage. The mechanics could never get my bike into the transport crates because of the bar positions!

The second thing to take into account when setting the bars is the positioning on the fork-legs. Like every other rider I know, my bars were as high as possible, touching the bottom of the yoke. Again, that was just a comfort thing – I did not want to be crouching any lower than I had to.

The other things that have to be decided on when trying to get the best possible position on a bike are the location of the footrests and how much padding to have on the seat. Much of this was actually forced on me because of my injuries. I had lost a lot of flexibility in my right knee because of the two bad breaks early on in my career. Obviously, on the bigger superbikes there was not the same pressure on my knee to bend as much as there was on a smaller 250cc. But even on superbikes, I could still try to make my racing position as comfortable as possible. The key was to have my footrests a bit further forward than other riders. When Troy Bayliss first sat on my bike after I had crashed in Australia, he could not believe how far forward they were. By moving the footrests forward, though, I stopped my legs being cramped up and also stopped myself from leaning any further forward than I had to. Again, I think some riders like to have their heels as far back as possible to help them slide into corners. That was the last thing I ever wanted to do. I wanted to ride smoothly through the corners and keep the wheel turning forward, so moving the rests back was not something I was bothered about.

At the end of the 1995 season in Australia, after I had agreed to ride for Honda the following season, I asked Slick to check the height difference between the top of the seat and the footrests on the Ducati that I had been riding. I was worried that the Honda was not going to be as comfortable, and when I first sat on the Honda it turned out that the difference was about an inch less. The footrest position seemed okay, so we had to add foam to the seat until the height difference was the same, otherwise I would have been in a lot of pain – the last thing anyone wants to be worrying about during a race.

Tall riders often struggle. A lot of people think Colin Edwards is pretty tall, just because he is slim, but he’s actually not much taller than I am. It’s the six-foot riders that really have a problem, and there just aren’t that many about now. You don’t see many six-foot jockeys, either. My old Kawasaki France endurance team-mate, Terry Rymer, was a big lad and his height must have hampered him. We always had to compromise when setting the bike up because it was a big, bulbous bike – a tank of a thing. The bars had to be angled further out to accommodate Terry, and as a result I really struggled to hang off it.

One more way in which my preferred position meant that my bike differed from a lot of other riders’ bikes was in the size of the screen. Most riders like big screens, but when I’m in a corner I like to see nothing but the track in front of me. If you study pictures of me riding around corners, I’m hanging so far off the bike that the screen just does not come into my line of vision at all. If I’d had the same size screen as other riders – probably about 20 per cent bigger – I would have been cricking my neck trying to look round the side.

At tracks with long straights, however, such as Hockenheim and Monza, I did not have a choice in the matter. Gaining top speed down those straights was so important that I had to use a bigger screen to improve the aerodynamics of the bike. I didn’t like that at all because whenever I came to a bend, the bike did not feel like my own. It always took me a long time to get used to that change. Even so, I still didn’t use as big a screen as the other Ducati riders, probably going for half the normal difference between the two sizes.

When I started out, of course, these alterations were not an option. You had what you had, and you had to make do and mend. Or at least that’s what I thought. When I look back now, I think, You thick bastard! Why did you not make some brackets so that the footrests could have been moved forward after your broken leg?

Everybody said that I made myself look big on a bike because of the way I moved around in the saddle, as this shot at Kyalami in 2000 shows.

Even with all the expertise available to me towards the end of my career, I never stopped questioning things. After I had struggled with Honda in 1996, I expected everything to be perfect when I returned to Ducati for the 1997 season. But something did not quite feel right. In fact, I still believe that I lost the world title that year because the testing hadn’t been right for the bike. This niggling feeling lasted all the way through the 1998 season, when I regained the World Superbike title but was still struggling to hold my line through corners.

‘I still can’t seem to hang off the bike like I used to in 1995,’ I told Davide Tardozzi, my team boss at Ducati. ‘The tank seems to be getting in the way.’

‘Well, Carl,’ he replied, ‘the tank is bigger than it used to be. You need more fuel for a race now.’

‘What do you mean? Nobody bothered to tell me!’

The information just crept out like this because there had been so many changes in personnel at Ducati. The bigger tank certainly explained away a lot of my problems over the previous couple of years. The outcome was that they altered the tank for me and Troy Corser for the 1999 season. The shape and size had to be kept the same, but they managed to take some of the bulk off the top and add it to the bottom. We used it for the first time in pre-season tests at Misano in February. I tested for one day with the old tank, but when it was swapped for the new one I loved it from the word go. I equalled my best time for the test straight away, and that was on old tyres. Troy didn’t like it to start with because he didn’t hang off the bike as much as I did. If only someone had told either me or Slick about the new tank when we returned from Honda, things might have been a lot different in the 1997 season.

Flat out in the tuck position at Brands in 1999.

This experience taught me never to stop questioning even the smallest things. At the start of my final season, before the crash in Australia, I was convinced that something had changed with the gear lever.

‘Are you sure the rubber isn’t thicker this year?’ I asked. ‘Are my boots any different, then? Because something doesn’t feel quite right.’

When I went to the first test in Valencia, I changed the position of that gear lever so many times. The riders have this lever in roughly the same area on their bikes, because you never get the chance to ride other racers’ bikes, I’m not sure whether my preference was much different – it is not as noticeable as the position of the bars or the footrest – but for some reason I just couldn’t get comfortable during this test. I seemed to be hanging over the front of the bike and didn’t seem able to get my foot under the gear lever to go down through the box and change from third or fourth back to first. You cannot alter the position on the splines, because there would be too big a gap. On a factory racing bike, the gear lever bar is egg-shaped and swivels around so that it can either be under your foot or away from it. At this track, though, as I said, I could not make myself comfortable, for no real reason because the lever had not been altered. It was either too high when I was changing up through the box or too low when I was coming back down and had to put my foot underneath it. Perhaps it was because that circuit is hard on the brakes, with almost every corner taken in first gear. And you had to change so quickly down from fourth to second that the position had to be spot on.

Whatever the reason, it just goes to show how many things are going through a rider’s mind, especially that of a perfectionist like me, when he is racing and testing.