Freddie Spencer’s double
Thirty-five years ago, ‘Fast’ Freddie Spencer did a remarkable feat – he took the 500 cc and 250 cc world crowns.
Thirty-five long years ago, Freddie Spencer and his amazing Honda team did what many thought would be impossible: the 250cc and 500cc double. Here – in his own words and that of his team – is the story of this stupendous achievement.
By 1985 Frederick Burdette Spencer was already a veteran racer and champion. When he turned 23 on December 20, 1984, he had been racing for 17 years. Aged 10 he held dirt-track titles in five US states and three years later he was competing in 100 dirt-track races a year and was winning the majority of them.
Turning pro aged 16, he met Californian tuner (and fellow legend) Erv Kanemoto. He spent a couple of years road-racing Yamaha TZ machines, when he turned 18 he was signed to the Honda factory and had a blistering debut in Europe in the Transatlantic races of 1980 at Brands Hatch.
His path to Grand Prix greatness began with a few tentative races before he was matched with the nimble Honda NS500 triple. He would win his first Grand Prix aged just 20 at Spa Francorchamps in 1982, before taking Honda’s first 500cc Grand Prix championship a year later in brilliant style against the retiring ‘king’, Kenny Roberts.
But now, in the winter of 1984, he and his brilliant Honda team were about to embark on a journey that would make ‘Fast Freddie’ a true racing legend. Looking back, does Freddie Spencer think it was all a bit too much, to try and win two world championship titles in a single year?
“Yeah, maybe,” admits Freddie. “I think with hindsight taking those two titles took all the effort I ever had. It took its toll. After that I had neck injuries and back injuries, so if I hadn’t taken the double – who knows what would have happened? But I did it for Honda and my team and I wouldn’t trade more world titles for what I did that year. But I couldn’t have done it without some great people helping.”
And what a team, greats like Stuart Shenton (later the man behind Kevin Schwantz’s 1993 500 title), George Vukmanovich, Jeremy Burgess (ex-randy Mamola, later to take Mick Doohan and Valentino Rossi to many titles), Erv Kanemoto and Satoru Horiike…
The road to the double actually started the summer before, in 1984. Freddie recalls: “We were at Assen in June 1984. There was Youichi Oguma from HRC, Erv and me and we started thinking about doing the double the following year. We had some success with the upside-down NSR500, but we knew it had issues and that it needed changing and that gave us some hope. One thing we didn’t have was an NSR250…
“At the time Honda was running an RS250. From there we had the genius of Satoru Horiike who did much of the work with Oguma-san and the massive backing of the factory and HRC. Horiike-san developed that 250 from pretty much zero, really. They didn’t have computers as we know them back then or computer modelling but they did work with some basic dimensions that they felt would work, but that was pretty much it.“
Horiike-san himself was a legend. Closelylinked with development of all the NSR500S, he would also be involved in developing road machines, such as the Honda CBR600F-X of 1999 and the 1998 VFR800.
He recalls: “We looked at things and realised we should simply cut the 500 in half: after all half a 500 is a 250! At the time we had experience with 500s but not with 250s. This was going to be our first fullfactory 250 but we really didn’t have long to build the bike. I would say from the idea to building the bike itself was three months, from there to develop it so it’s ‘ready to race’ would take a further three months… we had to begin very soon during 1984. It was stressful, but we could do it back then as I and everyone else was much younger!
“We tested many customer 250cc bikes from the other manufacturers, such as the Kawasaki and Yamaha, but development time was short, so we prepared a basic machine ourselves and made many test parts. I do recall that – as the main chassis designer – we had to work out the brakes and braking system for the 250. The 500 obviously had a twin-disc set-up, but for the 250 I felt we could get away with a single-disc layout.
“I did the calculations and worked out that we should have enough power with one disc, but – well, me being me – I also prepared a double-disc set-up just in case. We prepared so many parts and took these along with the new 250 machine to Suzuka to test. Normally we’d use the standard pit-lane at the front of the circuit, but because the track covers such a large area, we could use the smaller pit complex around the back of the circuit. We were tucked away in the smaller area and no one could see us.”
With design of the 250 finished, the resulting bike wouldn’t be an NSR, as such – but it was beautiful and very special. It was the Honda RS250R-W…
Testing was a tough time for Freddie: “I had to work so very hard. I guess you could say this 1985 season was the start of the long testing season you see in Motogp today. With so many parts and things to test on two bikes – one being effectively new – every lap had to be at 100 per cent. The thing with developing the two bikes was that they were so very different when it came to riding styles, but – to make things easier for me – I wanted both bikes to have very similar characteristics.
“We simulated everything during those tests… This meant doing back-to-back sessions on the 250 and then the 500 to replicate one practice session ending and another one beginning on a different machine. I would also ride the 500 and then ride the 250 straight after and then only debrief with the team when I was done with both bikes – just like after two practice sessions over a Grand Prix weekend itself. This made things difficult and complicated – but I trained myself to do that. This was an approach that Erv and I spent time that winter of 1984/85 developing.”
As if developing two motorcycles was not enough, then there were the tyres. This era of GP racing was one which had a new technological leap forward in it – the introduction of the radial tyre. Spencer would take the first GP victory for the radial tyre in 1983, but with a front cross-ply. In 1984 Randy Mamola was the first rider to win on both radial front and rears and while Spencer himself claimed that radials gave him greater feedback and grip and were a massive leap forward, it didn’t mean that it didn’t come at a price.
Spencer says: “Of course we had a radial rear tyre during the 1984 season, but we paired this with a cross-ply front sometimes. But radials were the way forward. This meant that not only was I developing both the 250 and 500cc Hondas, we were developing the Michelin tyres, too. Sometimes we would have something like 200 tyres to test and what we would pick would determine the direction of development. It was a busy time for us as we would also be doing a morning’s test on the 250 and an afternoon on the 500.”
Horiike-san says: “Testing was where I witnessed the real genius of Freddie. He was a brilliant test rider and a natural rider too. This meant that it was easy for us to come to the conclusion what was good on the bikes or what was not. You had to simply look at the lap-time. When he was going fast then the parts and the bike was good. It sounds obvious but with many riders they can’t keep up that 100 per cent effort towards a perfect lap, so the stopwatch can lie or the rider doesn’t know why he’s going fast or what has improved.
“So with Freddie going fast we were happy – but then he would complain about the large, single-disc on the 250 making him feel that the bike was ‘pulling to one side.’ So we did revert to those two, smaller discs up front.”
Approaching a race weekend was
“TESTING WAS HARD: WE WERE DEVELOPING TWO BIKES AND HELPING MICHELIN DEVELOP THE RADIAL TYRES. WE WOULD TEST AS WE WOULD RACE: CHANGING BIKES LIKE WE WOULD DURING THE RACE SESSIONS. EVERY LAP WAS AT 100%.”
interesting for Freddie and the team. His overall performance on both bikes and his legendary consistency weren’t the only things he and the team needed to concentrate on: it was communication. What he spoke about both bikes to his respective mechanics was important as the team were developing two bikes simultaneously, but it was also down to working hard with Michelin to develop the tyres, a vital part of both machines.
After the pre-season opener at Daytona, the 500 wasn’t handling the way Freddie wanted it at the season opener at Kyalami.
“At that race the thing chattered so hard it made my teeth hurt! This never showed up at Daytona as – to cope with the banking – we had to run stiffer construction front tyres. I did all I could to beat Eddie Lawson on the 500, but couldn’t… But I did win the 250cc race.”
So what caused the chatter? Freddie: “We had three weeks between Kyalami and the next Grand Prix at Jarama so we managed to get a test at Rijeka, in the former Yugoslavia. We tested so much stuff, we tested it real hard. This wasn’t just a test of different tyres, but engine combinations such as crank weights then steering geometries and then we examined if some sort of chassis flex would actually help us. This was our main issue with the NSR500 and we did get on top of it – we had to. You see, Honda had told us that the 500cc title was their (and therefore our) top priority over the 250 title. That meant that new parts were always coming along for the 500 but not for the 250 after about a quarter of the season gone.
“Out on track this meant that the likes of Honda’s Anton Mang was getting quicker race-by-race and so was Yamaha’s Carlos Lavado. That Yamaha was also being developed, so-much-so that I believe we were just a little behind on power by the end of the season. The big thing also was that Toni and Carlos were smaller than me, which didn’t help in some places. That said, we eventually won seven races on that 250 – but all of them were hard-won. No one let you have them. You’d have – maybe – 20-30 laps of a very hard race, but all after a physically and mentally draining 500cc race. The thing was, people like Toni and the other great 250 riders rarely made mistakes…”
Great they may have been, but that solid string of six wins from Mugello to France meant that Spencer was in control of the quarter-litre class. “My first 500 and 250cc double win came at Mugello and I have someone to thank in part for it,” reveals Freddie. “I’d just won the 500 race after a real hard battle with Eddie and it had been a long and hot race. I’d been up on the podium, but then had to rush back to my motorhome, drink as much water as I could and then rush back to the 250cc grid ready for the start.
“It was tight, but Toni Mang – perhaps the greatest 250 rider ever – held up the start by not leaving the form-up grid to give me time to get there and take part. What a man. In the race you could never afford to take time to get into a rhythm, but that race I got off the line 10th or 12th or something and it took until half-way before I was up with Toni and Carlos. Remember, braking markers, turn-in, lines and apexes would all be different on the 250 after the 500. That’s why we did lots of race simulations in testing. Eventually I would win and do a further double in Austria. A third double was also looking good until I hit a hay bale in Rijeka.”
This prompted the famous, dry humour from Eddie Lawson when the microphone went under his nose: “It was also possible to miss the bale…”
Assen was almost a disaster in the 500cc race for Freddie, when he was taken down by an errant Christian Sarron – but Lawson also aquaplaned his way to a DNF. Spa and Le Mans gave another four wins and a 4th place finish at Silverstone would secure the 250cc title, meaning that Freddie could concentrate on
the 500s – but disaster awaited – a high-side in practice left him with a broken right hand. He battled through the pain to take the 500cc win ahead of Lawson and as for the 250s…well…
“I recall those as being the hardest races,” says Freddie. “With the wet conditions anything could happen so we had to be very careful to wrap up the 250 title. The conditions were bad and I had to finish 4th which is almost harder than going all-out for the win – but we did it – meaning we didn’t have to race the 250 and concentrate on the 500. Silverstone’s results meant we could wrap up the 500 title in Sweden, where I managed to beat Eddie and take the crown.”
Freddie Spencer would be the first rider since Giacomo Agostini in 1972 to take the 500 and 250cc titles, fittingly, elevating the American to legendary status.