| Author | Message | ||
     Davegess |
There seems to be a bunch of confusion over the terms “factory team” and privateer” so I thought I would share some thoughts on these terms gleaned from 50 years of following racing. In modern motorcycle racing you can split the world in two broad categories, Factory and Privateer. Factory implies support either directly or indirectly from the manufacturer of the bike. A Privateer does not receive this kind of support. You can split the privateers into three broad categories. You get your little guy who is paying most of the bills out of his or her own pocket with small amounts of dollars coming from sponsors, folks like Joe Bob Dent Shop, Pizza Parlor and Tattoo shop. These guys run used tires and skip the cool stuff like qualifiers and the like. Usually very broke and have little hope of moving up to a real sponsored ride but love it anyway. Most folks start here and a few move up to the next level, the sponsored privateer. These guys actually have some money behind them. Perhaps a dealership provides parts and tuning support, they have a sponsor who actually pays the bills and if they do well in races might actually make a little money. Usually the rider owns the bike and the team. Lots of these guys filling grids at AMA races. The third group is really pretty small and sort of new to AMA racing; the fully professional, sponsored privateer. These guys don’t own the bike or the team and may even draw a salary or at the very least get to keep a good chunk of the prize money, they don’t need to buy tires with it. BUT the sponsor is not the bike company it is someone else. The sponsor does not get factory support. Michael Jordon’s team might be like this, I don’t know if they get any factory support or not. The Geico team is certainly in this group. These teams have budgets and buy the best stuff they can afford AND can get their hands on. Buell currently has one team just at this level and a bunch in the lower levels. EVERYTHING that you want to use on the bike is for sale to anyone. This is in marked contrast (and one of the key things that makes them factory teams) to the factory teams. Now we move to the factory teams. There are really three levels of factory support, full on factory teams, satellite teams, and national series teams. This last is often run by the importer for the country involved i.e. Honda North American has at times owned and run a team and at other times has hired it out to an independent race shop. The full on factory race teams mostly exist at only the WSBK and MotoGP levels. We will ignore MotoGP as we are interested in motorcycles that at least have the appearance of what you or I could buy. Here the riders are contracted employees and make huge salaries. The bikes are usually built in the race shops of the factories using parts that will never see the inside of a dealership and will likely never be touched by anyone except employees of the factory. Ultra trick machines. WSBK also has satellite teams that often lease bikes form the factory and get trick bits but not until the factory team has had first dibs. They never see these parts until the factory guys have moved on to better stuff. Which satellite gets what parts when is total politics. Don’t piss off the factory guy. AMA Superbike and the 600 Supersport, prior to this year was dominated by the what I call the national series teams. These guys would get the good stuff from the factories. In important markets like England or the US they would have bikes as close to WSBK spec as the rules would allow. Many, many parts were simply not available to other teams. Michael Jordon tells the story of asking the Suzuki factory guys for the trick parts Mladin had and he was told that no matter how much money he had he could not buy the stuff. In other words, you are not a factory team you will get the trick stuff and you will not be as fast as us. Period. The new regime has required that most part be able to be purchased by anyone BUT they also allow the engines to be modified to raise compression and a few other very significant items. These bikes, both the 600s and the superbikes are built from scratch buy the best mechanic money can buy. The engines and transmission are built to a spec we used to call “blueprinted”; they choose stock parts that just happen to meet the exact measurements on the homologation sheets. They are not within normal manufacturing tolerances, they are perfect. If you want to raise compression you a piston with a crown that is just as large as the maximum tolerance allowed and a cylinder head that is as thin as allowed. They do this throughout the bike. Revs equal power, the race ECMs they use allow not only much higher than stock RPM but a fuel maps that supports this. Of course you need to tear down and rebuild after every weekend but who cares, it is only money. There is a damn good reason they don’t want these bikes on a dyno, they don’t want everyone knowing what power they make. I am guessing they are pulling an easy 30% over the published stock number. The AMA rules have really restricted what can be done to the bikes BUT the factory teams can and do spend whatever is needed to make their bikes the fastest. It is money that the private team, with the exception of a really well funded one like Jordan, dos not have. You need to look no farther than the Yamaha pits at Daytona to see the evidence. After the team had done everything they could to make the bike fast they seem to have had enough money left over to build some special pit equipment. They measured the wall and then designed and built steps to speed the pit crew over the wall. Not just some plywood nailed together, no these were custom built aluminum that had to have cost several thousand dollars. These teams spend money like water. The riders make as much as all but the very top few in MotoGP. The budgets are almost unlimited. There is a story told about a new Honda engine that arrived on the GP scene 20 plus years ago. Honda expected it to win the world championship. It proved to be a dog. The word went back to the race shop to design and build a new one in 6 weeks so that Honda could still win the world championship. The race shop asked “what is the budget”. The answer was “Build a winning engine”. It is tough to compete with unlimited money. A big part of the reason for the new rules was to give the privateers a chance and to do that they had to do something unusual; by making a bunch a bikes form small factories eligible and equalizing the performance expected from a near stock bike with that of a seriously race prepped bike they hoped to not only give the private guy a chance but to attract new sponsors. The rules are not trying to match a stock 600 4 with an 1125 twin but a race prepped 600 4 that has had hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on it with an Aprilla, or Ducati or Buell that is likely going to be pretty close to stock. So far it is working well. | ||
| Sd26 |
Dave excellent post! I'll add to it. Previous to this year, you had the manufacturer teams (Yosh, American Honda) getting specially made bikes direct from the manufacturer. Honda has had a separate factory for "race bikes" for some time. When the AMA previously claimed their Daytona winning bikes in the past, the buyer of the bike from the AMA had problems getting the complete bike from them as American Honda did not have OEM street bodywork as it never came with any...only race glass. These teams have fully went over the lines in working around the rules. Yosh has used replacement parts that were not production items. Additionally, special coatings and surface treatments have been used for years. First I was aware of them being common was in 1993. Certainly might have been done before then. Next, access to preproduction machinery. Yosh, Graves, etc. have all had pre production bikes immediately at the end of one season to prepare for the next. So, after the final race in September they get the next generation model to test in October. These models aren't available to private riders or generally even "B" level teams until just prior to Daytona. I've helped build some of these bikes ten days before the Daytona 200. Obviously, there's no testing time in them for set up, spring rate, etc. Lots of B teams are looking not necessarily for the next up and coming racer but for the next up and coming rider that has cash. A few years ago, a decent Supersport/FX ride was around $50k to $70k. I think that was up to $100k for 2008. Like Dave talked about, this helps finance the rebuilds, extra motors, the price of some special coatings, and valve retainers specifically prohibited by the rules but used by factory teams and allowed by AMA tech folks...but not announced to other competitors previously. Years ago, there wasn't so much testing and electronic garb. The lap time difference wasn't so far between the real factory teams and the guys that were driving everywhere working on our own bikes doing rebuilds on the road and drilling holes in our own stuff. In the recent past, some of the backmarkers have been IT guys that graduated from trackdays to club racing, purchasing cartridge forks for their bikes rather than working with their set up and talent to be a regular winner in expert club racing before deciding to make a run at AMA competition. "I just want to make an AMA grid" is some of what I hear vs "I wanna be inside the top ten on my bike" of not so long ago. | ||
| Fresnobuell |
GREAT POSTS, DAVE & DAVE. It is all clearer now. I have been wondering how "stock" the factory 600s are and you have made it clear that the factory 600s have invested lots of money and done EVERYTHING within the rules to make the bike are raceable as possible. Our hunches (at least from us guys who are less savvy about racing) of the 600s running at significantly higher HP than stock are validated. And certainly looking at the top speeds of the 600s and overall competitiveness of the races so far, it looks to be the case. Again, thanks for connecting the dots guys. | ||
| Court |
Well done. | ||
| Gregtonn |
Great post guys. One more point. Until the practice was banned this year some factories were brewing their own fuel designed specifically for their factory spec engines. The banning of this practice is one reason Maladin is not as far ahead of the field and has his nickers in a twist. G | ||
| Sd26 |
Mladin will always be twisted. Racing is a game that has to be mastered off track too. Get far enough inside somoene's head off the track, and the only thing a competitor might be thinking of is "Mat Mladin" rather than the things that he can do to get better, take advantage of a skill, learn new stuff, etc. Spies focused on his gig, not someone else's. As for fuel, yeah, there were special brews. The rules were specific on parameters, so one could have had their own special blends made by small companies like Power Mist Racing Fuels in New Jersey. I did it. The trick is having R&D time to try different things to see what might work. Now, it's just a spec fuel. It's good in that for guys that were buying their fuel for $18 a gallon and up that they are only paying $6-$8 a gallon. But for a more established team, they now have to pay money for fuel that might have been given to them. Just like paying for tires by some teams that used to get an alotment for no cost or in return for advertising, etc. | ||
| Blake |
Great post Dave and an excellent thread! |
