The Chevallier Honda
In a time when you could get your hands on a factory GP motor fairly easily, what made the difference on track was the kit the powerplant was wrapped up in. Chassis people could find the time potential for the rider to exploit. There were some‘left-field’ ideas out there. Like this.
This just couldn’t happen today....
The plan almost sounds impossible. But it happened. If the desire to take on and defeat the factory teams from Honda andyamaha by winning GPS with motorcycles you constructed yourself was put into a film script, nobody would buy into it.
Then to do that in a small workshop attached to your house, fuelled by your wife’s home-cooking and cups of coffee brewed in the kitchen next door, only adds to the quixotic, filmic achievement even more.
This is the real-life story of the dramatic Chevallier Honda 500...
In the early 1980s, French engineer Alain Chevallier succeeded in achieving the racing fairy tale. His death from cancer in October 2016, at the age of 68, marked the loss of one of the great chassis designers of recent GP history. Sadly, Chevallier only received a fraction of the global recognition merited by his bikes’ results.
Had ‘Cheval’ been Italian, Spanish or even British, he’d have had much more acclaim than his bikes’ successive GP victories have in fact delivered. But when an observant and powerful figure such as HRC boss Youichi Oguma lent factory engines to Chevallier’s small team, it was a mark of respect for what his bikes had achieved against all the odds, and on a limited budget.
Yet while his compatriot Claude Fior pushed the bubble of convention by creating radical designs with avant-garde steering and suspension solutions, beneath an outwardly conservative façade Chevallier’s designs were equally radical, but in his choice of materials.
At a time when the Japanese manufacturers were following Antonio Cobas in building aluminium chassis, Chevallier maintained his allegiance to tubular steel frames – but using cold-drawn steel which, being 20% stronger than hot-rolled, offers an increased stiffness to weight ratio.
Ducati would follow in his tyre tracks later that decade en route to a succession of World Superbike titles with its tube-framed racers against their aluminium-chassised rivals, and eventually of course to the 2007 Motogp World title.
But Chevallier didn’t stop there. As part of his drive to save weight so as to compensate for the less powerful production engines in his bikes, he was the first person to fit carbon disc brakes to a 500GP motorcycle – yes, before ELF and the Japanese teams – as well as being the first to construct a titanium swingarm, and the first to feature ram air induction and a still air box on his GP bikes.
He was a pioneer in the development of fully adjustable suspension, too, making his own forks and modified rear
shocks, as well as in telemetry, and not only to monitor chassis and suspension behaviour via sensors, but even the flame temperature in a cylinder head, leading him to develop an electro-magnetic automatic carburation correction system, with real time adjustable jetting!
Alain Chevallier came to motorcycles quite late – he originally studied medicine, while amusing himself racing cars in hill-climbs. But his younger brother Olivier became a top bike racer, winning the 1976 350cc Yugoslavian GP at Opatija with a bike prepared by Alain, who’d assumed the role of chief mechanic for the Pernod-funded team two years earlier.
By 1980 he’d started making his own Yamaha Tz250/350-powered bikes for his younger brother to race in GPS – but that April Olivier was tragically killed in practice for the 1980 Moto Journal 200 on a stock-framed TZ750 at Paul Ricard, leaving the distraught Alain set to turn his back on racing, before his friend Eric Saul persuaded him otherwise.
Just six weeks after Olivier’s passing, Saul put a Chevallier Yamaha on the rostrum for the first time ever in the 350cc French GP at the very same circuit, repeating that third place finish at Silverstone later that year to finish sixth in the final points table, as well as finishing second in the 250cc Dutch TT at Assen on the smaller Chevallier bike.
But Saul’s exuberant personality wasn’t to Pernod’s corporate liking, so for 1981 Chevallier was told he must get rid of him in favour of Michel Rougerie and Roger Sibille, who duly raced the ‘official’ Chevallier Yamahas that season. But it was a mark of the man that Alain spent his own money running a third bike for Saul, who duly repaid him with victory in the 250cc Italian GP at Monza – the first GP win for a Chevallier-framed racer.
For 1982, Pernod decided to develop its own 250GP bike, engine and all, leaving Alain to team up with Didier de Radiguès for both 250/350 GP classes on Yamaha-engined Chevalier bikes with the support of Belgian cigarette brand Johnson, and with Saul as a second rider for the 350cc class only, in the final year of its world status.
After finishing third in Argentina on his first ride on a 350 Chevallier, Didier was leading defending world champion Toni Mang by seven seconds in the second round in Austria when his gearbox sprocket broke – leaving team-mate Saul to overtake the German Kawasaki rider to win instead! But the Belgian’s deserved first GP victory duly came at Monza, followed by another later on at Brno – despite which Mang retained his 350cc title, with de Radiguès second and Saul fourth.
“It was our best chance yet to win the world title,” Alain told me: “But we had too many crashes and breakdowns. However, it was the start of a great cooperation with Didier.” The Belgian also scored victory on his 250 Chevallier in the Yugoslavian GP at Rijeka, the race after a rostrum finish on home ground at Spa, but could only wind up sixth in the final points table.
For 1983, now also with ELF sponsorship, de Radiguès was joined in the Chevallier team for the 250GP season by Jean-françois Baldé, and the result in the first race at Kyalami was what every constructor dreams of, a 1-2 finish with victory first time out on a Chevallier for the Frenchman. But Baldé sadly broke his leg at Assen, and despite making his Johnson sponsors as happy as he must have been with victory in his home GP at Spa,
despite three other rostrums Didier could only finish third in the world championship, behind Yamaha factory riders Carlos Lavado and Christian Sarron. “We had an excellent season with lots of pole positions and fewer crashes, but we just didn’t quite have enough to win the title,” said Alain. “But for 1984 we started a new adventure.”
Going up
Indeed so – for with the demise of the 350cc class, and already accustomed to racing in two gruelling GP races in a single day, alongside his 250GP ride in 1983, Didier de Radiguès had embarked on a career in 500GP racing with a completely stock Honda RS500 supplied by ELF, one of 32 customer replicas of the bike Freddie Spencer had turned into a GP winner the previous season, and with which he’d win the world title at last for Honda in 1983. But with four DNFS out of the six races he started, and a best finish of 13th in Spain, the Honda’s flawed handling was a disappointment. So for 1984 Didier convinced Alain to move up to the 500cc class with an all-new bike using the Honda RS500 V3 engine, with sponsorship from ELF and Johnson, and a second such bike provided for Elf-backed rider Christian Le Liard.
Following the lines of his smaller capacity Yamahas, the tube-frame Chevallier Honda RS500 was completed in February 1984 and tested at a wintry Paul Ricard by Didier, who declared it to be ‘right first time’! He then proved that by leading the first four laps of the bike’s very first race the following month in the opening South African GP at Kyalami, before finishing fourth with team-mate Le Liard eighth on a similar bike!
After such an encouraging start the rest of the season was slightly anti-climatic, but
with three other top 10 finishes the Belgian finished ninth in the world championship, a satisfying result for him and Chevallier. But strangely, though, not for ELF, which pulled its sponsorship and for 1985 supported Serge Rosset instead. “The problem was that ELF wanted me to develop the ELF2 with its ridiculous ‘ rocking-horse’ pull-you push-you steering, and [André] de Cortanze who designed it was completely opposed to my doing so, because he knew I’d make too many changes to his original flawed concept in order to make it raceworthy.”
Alain said: “The joke is that they did that anyway, and in the form it finally raced it was just as I’d have made it!” However, as against that Youchi Oguma had lent Chevallier a factory NS500 engine for a couple of races, a high mark of respect which unfortunately didn’t produce the desired result. “I had to give it back to him, because we never finished a single race with it!” Alain added.
A commission by Pernod to redesign their 250GP bike’s chassis gave the Chevallier workshop something to do in 1985, while the de Radiguès 500 was lent to French privateer Thierry Espié, who at his own expense flew to South Africa for the opening GP of the season, and finished tenth, thus earning a precious world championship point that meant he got confirmed starts for the rest of the season.
But at the next round in Spain Espié crashed in practice, and had to sit out the next two months with a back problem, though on his return he finished ninth in Sweden on the Chevallier Honda, before returning it to Alain. Meantime, the other exLe Liard bike had twice been tested by none other than Randy Mamola, anxious to redress the handling issues he was experiencing with his factory NS500 triple. While expressing satisfaction with the French bike he never raced it in the end, though team-mate Takazumi Katayama was allowed to race a Bakker-framed such bike – whereupon Honda
Riding it
Get on the bike and you’re immediately aware of how ‘reet petite’ the Chevallier is when you ride it – compared to the dozen-odd NS/RS500 Honda triples I’ve been fortunate to ride down the years, this is a 350 compared to a 500. And imagine how much smaller it was compared to the V4 NSR500 Hondas it faced from 1984 onwards.
In fact, presumably since Rachel Nicotte was much shorter than me, I found the closecoupled riding position much too cramped to feel comfortable on the Chevallier – I couldn’t move around on the bike very easily, and it was impossible to tuck my head behind the screen, which was a pity, as Didier de Radiguès and I are the same height and it would have been nice to try it as he rode it. But what this meant was that I got a great sense of the bike’s flickability, the way I could so swap direction on it relatively easily witho out hanging off in Paul Ricard’s copious chicanes, all layered nowadays in gaudy paint.this was despite the Chevallier also being super stable in fast sweepers, like the fourth-gear Signes righthander at the end of the Mistral Straight, where I’m sure that longer wheelbase came into play, compensating for the tight steering geometry. It wasn’t remotely nervous-steering or twitchy, just planted with a great sense of security.
But it also braked well, with its light weight surely a factor as I found in a fascinating ‘battle’ at Ricard with someone else whose name I never did discover on a standard Honda RS500 – you know who you are, so please write in to tell us!thanks to the Chevallier’s light weight I could gain many metres on him braking into the chicanes, or the tight right-hander after Signes – but then he’d get on the gas harder than me exiting the bend and pull those metres back, where I was constrained by the 11,000rpm ceiling I’d been asked to observe while those newtech 3 pistons bedded in.
Tantalisingly, that was just when the Honda engine wanted to take off, after coming on strongly from 9500rpm upwards, even without the absent ATAC powervalves fitted to the works Honda triples, which helped smooth our power delivery so well.
So for my last four laps on the bike I decided to rev it out to 11,800rpm in the gears, and it made a huge difference to the Honda’s acceleration, as well as making it much easier to ride.that’s because it was now snicking nicely all through the gears to leave me still in the powerband as I hit each higher ratio, instead of me having to work the light-action clutch even slightly to coax it back on the pipe. Yet the greater torque didn’t upset the sense of balance from the Chevallier frame,frame and the easy way it steered. What a sweet little motorcycle – well, not so little, with 125bhp delivered at 11,500 rpm.
Call it a bike that punched above its weight.
replicated the Dutch chassis design for their 1985 Mk.2 version! It might have been a Chevalier ripoff, instead…
In 1986, the de Radiguès/chevallier/honda RS500 line-up was reformed with Rollstar sponsorship, resulting in an even more successful season with eight top 10 finishes in the 12 races, en route to seventh place in the world championship – and top Honda triple, two places ahead of Ron Haslam on the ELF3, which doubtless provided much satisfaction.
Highlight of the year was a magnificent second place for Didier on the Chevallier Honda in the pouring rain at Silverstone, just nine seconds behind winner Wayne Gardner’s NSR500 Honda, and ahead of all the other factory four-cylinder bikes, including third place finisher Eddie Lawson’s Yamaha.
For 1987 de Radiguès was hired by Cagiva in a Belgian-run team with Bastos sponsorship and Liège resident Francis Batta as team manager.
Though Didier only signed on condition that Alain came too, the result was an unhappy atmosphere in the team in a season in which the Italian bikes finally started to repay the billions of lire the Castiglioni brothers were spending on going 500GP racing, with Didier scoring the best finish yet for a Cagiva with fourth place in the penultimate GP in Brazil.
Chevallier actually attempted to fit the Italian V4 motor in one of his Honda RS500 frames – but wasn’t allowed to even test the result! At the end of the season Alain stopped GP racing, despite the offer of Honda NSR500 engines from Oguma which he was obliged to decline, since he had no team structure to run the V4 Chevallier that might have resulted. He instead began working for Sonauto Yamaha, developing their Paris-dakar bikes and working on the hubcentre Yamaha GTS road bike that debuted in 1993.
A year later, he began a new job as technical director of the newly formed Voxan motorcycle company, having been recruited by owner Jacques Gardette to design the chassis and oversee technical development of the bikes. But that’s another story….