‘Bikesare mylife– that’s all’
Frazzle-haired Frenchman Guy Coulon is Motogp’s longest-serving engineer and has lived all his life to the beat of engines and the spinning of wheels…
When Guy Coulon started working as a race mechanic Harold Wilson was prime minister and Led Zeppelin were in the studio making Physical Gra ti.
The 65-year-old Frenchman has had basically the same job since he was a teenager, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Coulon’s lifelong love affair with motorcycles and motorcycle racing is all-embracing. He works on bikes seven days a week, 50 weeks a year, either at Motogp races or at the Tech 3 workshop in the south of France. Even when he takes his annual holiday – between Christmas and New Year, at the family home near Le Mans – he tinkers with his collection of classics. The term petrolhead doesn’t do the man justice. Coulon started fettling bikes and engines for anyone who had the cash to spend, before Honda France spotted his talents and hired him to work with the French importer’s legendary Paris-dakar and world endurance teams of the 1980s. Coulon has lost count of how many Le Mans and Bol d’or 24 hours he’s won. In 1986 he started working in
GPS and in 1990 he went on to establish the renowned Tech 3 team with Herve Poncharal.
During his 35 years in GPS Coulon has been crew chief to Johann Zarco, Andrea Dovizioso, Bradley Smith, Carlos Checa, Colin Edwards, Olivier Jacque, Dominique Sarron and currently Portuguese Motogp rider Miguel Oliveira, who rides KTM RC16 machines for Tech 3. What keeps France’s wise wizard of Motogp endlessly fascinated by motorcycle racing is the dance between man and machine – muscle and metal intertwined as one.
‘When you watch motorcycle racing the bike and rider are like one piece together,’ says Coulon. ‘When you set up the bike and when you prepare for the race you need to understand this.
‘You know your rider, so how you set up the bike isn’t simply about improving the bike setting, it’s about improving the bike and rider setting. Sometimes you understand that if you go in one direction with the settings you won’t make the bike better, but you will make the bike and your rider better.
‘The combination between man and machine, this is the interesting thing, because this is what cannot be set up with a computer. That’s why you have a rider, a crew chief and an engineer in every garage. The rider talks to his crew chief and the crew chief talks to the engineer. The crew chief should be like a filter. He knows that when he’s talking to the rider he must sometimes keep secret some of the information that comes from the engineer, even if the information is true. Perhaps modifying the information a bit, to give the rider a better feeling.’ The fascination of man and machine twisting themselves into a single entity is nothing new. In fact the idea has been there since the dawn of motorcycling. Way back in the early 20th century a group of future-obsessed Italian artists – who called themselves the Futurists – painted pictures of half-man/half-machine organisms, which they called Centaurs, after the mythical beast with the upper body of a human and the lower body of a horse. It’s probably how we all feel when we’re riding well and feeling at one with a motorcycle.
Coulon is a seven-days-a-week motorcyclist. He owns about 40 road bikes, most of them kept in his workshop at the family home. His daily ride is an original CB750, one of the first to roll off Honda’s production line at its Suzuka factory in Japan.
‘The bike was built on 6 July, 1969,’ he grins. ‘I ride it every day, except when it’s raining. I like to ride motorcycles and I also like them as objects. This is a beautiful motorcycle. Also it’s simple, easy to ride and 60 horsepower is enough for me. Every time I stop – at the bakery to buy
‘The combination between man and machine is the interesting thing, it’s what can’t be set up with a computer’
my bread or at the supermarket – somebody always talks to me about the bike. It’s completely incredible!’
Coulon fell in love with motorcycles at an early age. His family had an agricultural machinery business, so he was soon taking things apart and putting them back together again. When he was ten his father took him to the Le Mans 24 hours car race and a few years later to the first French motorcycle GP at Le Mans.
So why bikes and not cars? ‘My biggest interest is in engines, so I like to see the engine. On bikes you can see the engines more easily, same as with tractors.’
Coulon got his first bike when he was 13 – a Motobecane 175cc fourstroke – and started racing a few years later.
‘I raced a bit and I could’ve spent years and years riding in the national championships, but I wasn’t really interested in doing that. Also, my engines were working not so bad, and quite soon some guys asked me if I could do something for them. I understood very quickly that I could manage my life much better if I was a mechanic than if I was a rider. That’s why I swapped.’
Coulon first became famous with race fans when he worked with Honda France’s endurance team. At that time he led the fastest pit crew in the world and he made quite a sight during pit stops – that mad mane of hair dancing around on his head as he twirled spanners and changed red-hot brake pads.
‘I liked endurance racing because the mechanic has a job to do during the race and what you do during the race has a direct impact on the result. But from the mid-1980s interest in endurance decreased and interest in GPS increased, so Honda France created a 250 GP team, so I started working with Dominique Sarron and an NSR250.’
Coulon has seen many changes during his 35 years in GP racing. ‘We now have a much bigger staff for each rider, but even if there are more of us we have less and less free time. We are busy all day long because everything has become much more complicated – you need to control so many aspects of performance.’
In 1986 Sarron’s team numbered four or five people, including the rider. Tech 3 now has 60 staff, looking after two riders in Motogp and two in Moto3.
There’s no doubt that motorcycle racing isn’t as rock and roll or as romantic as it used to be. It’s become less of an art and more of science. Many fans talk fondly of the good old days, when racing seemed more fun, but ask any Motogp mechanic and he will tell you very firmly that right now is the good old days.
‘Now you can spend your whole life in the paddock, because you get a salary and some comfort,’ adds Coulon. ‘In the 1970s and 1980s most mechanics only came to work in grands prix because they were friends with a rider. They stayed for maybe three or four years and then they had to leave to get a normal job.
‘When I started, the job was sometimes a nightmare. You had to fight with guys from other teams to get water, to get an electrical connection, everything – because the teams got bigger during that time but the paddocks stayed the same size. Everything became complicated, until IRTA [the teams association started by Briton Mike Trimby] arrived and organised everything.’
Today’s Motogp paddock is so well organised, so squeaky clean and brightly polished to keep big-money sponsors happy, that Coulon finally finds himself out of step with the system. In the old days most team crew slept in bunks in their race trucks, while riders lived in their campervans and motorhomes, parked in the village area of the paddock. Sadly, the village is no more, because team and VIP hospitality units have grown at such a rate in recent years that most people aren’t allowed to sleep in the paddock anymore. Coulon hasn’t obeyed this directive – he still beds down in the Tech 3 truck each night – and so far Motogp bosses have been good enough to look the other way while he does so. ‘I like to sleep in the paddock. First, you don’t waste time travelling to the hotel. Also, I like the feeling of the paddock in the evenings. It’s when you can spend some time in the hospitality units, talking with people from your team or from other teams.’
The highlight of Coulon’s career was winning the 250cc world championship in 2000, with countryman Jacque. The previous year Tech 3 had stunned the paddock by ending their decade-long association with HRC, swapping Honda NSR250S for Yamaha YZR250S.
‘When we decided to swap at the end of 1998 everybody said we were completely stupid. Yamaha’s target was to get the title in two years and we did it, with OJ first and Shinya Nakano second.
‘The Yamaha was a really good bike, but the engine wasn’t so fast. This was a problem in 250s, but our riders understood the situation very well and together we built a strategy around this point. The target was always to try to escape enough on the first lap, so the quicker
‘Coulon is a sevendays-a-week motorcyclist and he owns about 40 road bikes’
Hondas and Aprilias couldn’t come past on the straight. To get the best speed out of our engine we took the maximum acceptable risk with engine settings – carburettor jetting and so on – and we were able to control the whole season with this strategy.’
The title battle between Jacque and Nakano was one of the closest in GP history. Jacque went into the season finale at Phillip Island with a two-point advantage, so whoever won the race would be world champion. The pair quickly escaped from the rest of the pack to run their own race, Nakano always in front, Jacque watching and waiting. Going into the last corner the Japanese was still ahead, but Jacque drafted past his team-mate just metres before the finish line. He won the race – and therefore the championship – by 0.014 seconds.
Although Coulon is a crew chief – which means he’s now in charge of the mechanics who twirl the spanners – he still loves to get his hands dirty. For several years he designed and fabricated Tech 3’s Moto2 chassis and he likes to design and build his own engines, just for fun.
Most famously he made a 300cc six, because he wanted to recreate Honda’s spine-tingling six-cylinder 250 of the 1960s – one of the most remarkable GP bikes ever. He machined most of the inline 300 unit from aluminium and fabricated the cylinder head by welding together three sections of Honda CBR250 head, for 58 horsepower @ 18,500rpm.
After the six he designed and built an inline five-cylinder 300 and then a 1000cc V4. ‘I made the V4 just to try some ideas for Motogp. We tested it on the dyno at 217mph. I disassembled the engine a few years ago… it’s still in bits.’
Coulon never stops working on bikes because he never wants to stop working on bikes. ‘When we come back from a race or a test and we have five or six days at the workshop before we need to go to the next race then I don’t move out of the workshop.’
Even at night he doesn’t stop. ‘When you’re relaxed it’s a good time for thinking. That’s why I keep pen and paper close to my bed, because sometimes I wake up and have an idea, and if I can’t write down what I’m thinking, I think, aah, maybe I’ll have forgotten by the morning.’
The Motogp paddock is full of motorcycle enthusiasts who don’t just ride or spanner when they’re at races, but there’s no one quite like Coulon. ‘Motorcycles are my world,’ he smiles. ‘Bikes and working on bikes is my life. That’s all.’
‘The Motogp paddock is full of motorcycle enthusiasts… but there’s no one like Coulon’