Moto2: ‘Now it can be a bit too intense for riders and teams’ 

Five-time MotoAmerica superbike champion Cameron Beaubier is leaving Moto2 at the end of his second season in the class to return to racing in the USA. When he explained his reasons for the move the 29-year-old Californian talked about homesickness and the intensity of Moto2, which in some ways is the world’s toughest racing category, because the majority of the bikes are exactly same: same engines, same chassis, same tyres, same electronics, same suspension and so on, so it’s very difficult to make the difference and if you can’t make that difference you can only blame yourself, so it’s psychologically very tough.

Beaubier has had a few good moments in Moto2: fifth at COTA last year, pole at COTA this year and fourth at Le Mans, just a tenth away from a first podium. After that he struggled and no doubt the psychological stress of fighting to gain tenths and hundredths every weekend took its toll.

“I used to handwrite gearing charts. I wouldn’t know where to start with that now!”

His Moto2 crew chief is Stuart Shenton, who has been working in the paddock longer than anyone else. His first GP, as a mechanic, was in 1975, when he fettled factory Kawasaki H1RW 500cc two-stroke triples.

After winning world titles with Kork Ballington at Kawasaki, Shenton became a crew chief at Honda, where he won the 1985 250cc World Championship with Freddie Spencer, later working with Wayne Gardner. In 1992 he moved to Suzuki, where he guided Kevin Schwantz to the 1993 500cc title, before working with Anthony Gobert, John Hopkins, Loris Capirossi and others.

Therefore Shenton is the perfect man to talk about how the intensity of grand prix racing has changed over the decades, not only for the rider, but for the mechanics and teams. I talked to Shenton before Beaubier made his recent announcement.

Mat Oxley: The object of racing is always the same – to win the race – but how have things changed over the decades?

Stuart Shenton: This is going to sound corny – it’s the same but different. Back in the 1980s we were chasing half a second, now we’re chasing tenths and hundredths, because it’s impossible to find half a second now. In the old days we quite often saw riders getting lapped but that never happens now, which shows how the grids have closed up.

It is quite the same but there’s been a lot of things that have changed. When I worked with Freddie in 1985, cost wasn’t an issue. Honda built that one-off 250 just for him, then later there were some big factory battles between Honda and Yamaha and then Aprilia. Lots of money was spent on riders, bikes and development.

The current Moto2 class is a financial formula, to bring down the spiralling costs, and it’s also an equalising formula.

Back in the 1970s everyone went out and bought a Yamaha TZ250, which was the same as the TZ250s that everyone else had, and the teams were very small. Then the factories got involved and were spending as much as they could. Now you have a bunch of guys using Kalex chassis and identical Triumph engines, with no factory teams and the teams are small again. So it’s gone full circle.

I suppose all those years ago the bikes were simpler but also more complicated.

Yes, getting the gearing and jetting right and a bit of suspension work were the main things.

But you were stripping the engines and changing parts all the time?

On a 250 you’d have the top end off after every session, change piston rings every day, pistons once a weekend and the crankshaft every couple of GPs.

And it was all before computers and datalogging, so you could only go off the rider’s comments. I remember at Le Mans in 1985 Freddie was having some trouble with the 250 in practice, pulling too many revs, so I asked him if he was using all six gears. He said yes but he had one of his worst grid positions that year, then in the race he cleared off, because he used sixth gear!

Our gear ratios are 100% fixed these days but back then we changed gear ratios a lot and there were a lot of permutations – at least four different ratios for some gears and half a dozen for others. I used to handwrite gearing charts, using a calculator. I wouldn’t even know where to start with that now!

There’s less to do and less money around these days, so presumably your team is smaller now?

We’re a small team, two riders, with one bike each, plus maybe nine of us actually working on the bikes. Back in 1985 Freddie had two 250s, with two or three guys working on each bike, plus a few other Japanese engineers and designers working around us. Then we had our own Michelin guy, we had access to our own Showa suspension engineer, to the NGK spark plug guy and the Keihin carburettor guy. Now there’s one Dunlop guy for all Moto2 teams and a few guys from Kalex.

How do you make the difference now?

There’s a lot less you can do to the bikes, so it’s really all about the data, trying to make the difference with grip, turning, braking.

Now we have to go deeper into how things work. Back then we’d try a tyre and say, that’s good, that’ll work here. Now it’s what temperature do we need to have the tyre at, what pressure do we have to have it at when it’s actually on the racetrack and how can the rider warm that tyre up? That’s how deep you have to go now. It’s the same with suspension, damping, throttle maps and everything else

In Moto2 sometimes you see a guy get out in front and you think, how did he do that? And it’s probably because his team has got the tyre pressures just right for the race-day conditions which you didn’t have in practice. Two degrees of track temperature make a big difference and we’re making pressure changes down to 0.1 Bar.

We chase tiny settings changes on the bike, because if you don’t chase them maybe the people in the next garage will. I can’t believe it because I’ll say to my guys, ‘OK, change the rear ride height by half a millimetre,’ and I say to myself, did I really just say that? In the old days you’d never think of making an adjustment of much less than three or four millimetres.

The biggest difference now is that we work a hell of a lot with the rider. We are very lucky with Cameron, he’s been impressive. When we sit down and talk him through stuff we can see from the data that he then goes out and puts what we’ve discussed into action.

So you say to him, “We can see on the data that you’re not doing this, so why not try this”?

For example, if you look at photos of Cameron you can see how much he’s changed his riding style since his rookie season last year – he’s hanging off a lot more than before. Now we’re working a lot on corner entry to make that safer, with lean angle and brake pressure.

So you say to him, “When you go into Turn 3 you need a couple of degrees less lean and one bar more brake pressure at that part of the corner”. It’s incredible that riders can take that kind of detail on board when they’re riding on the limit.

This is one of the things – we see some good Moto2 riders going to MotoGP and doing well very quickly because they’re used to working like that and implementing different riding techniques, but not all riders can do that.

What did you used to say to Freddie?

Nothing! This has changed because of all the data we have now and because we are so limited in what we can do to the bike, so it’s, OK, we’ve tuned the bike as much as we can, let’s tune the rider.

Which explains the huge increase in rider coaches

Yes, we have Hopper [John Hopkins, with whom Shenton worked at Suzuki] doing that and he’s applied himself to that side of it really well.

Do you like datalogging?

I was in at the very beginning, so I’m fortunate – I’ve not so much grown up with it but grown old with it!

When did you start with datalogging?

In the 1980s when we used to go testing in Australia with Freddie and Honda. He used to wear a backpack with an eight-track cassette in it which picked up information from some very basic sensors, recording things like speed, gear position and throttle opening. There was nothing like brake-pressure sensors or suspension-stroke sensors.