Returning to HRC at the age of 26 in 1983, Shuhei Nakamoto will experience his last competition with the 2017 Dakar. The iconic Vice-President of the Honda Racing Corporation will be replaced in MotoGP by a triumvirate composed of Naoki Hattori (Marketing), Testuhiro Kawata (Drivers) and Schinichi Kokubu (Technical Manager).
Chassis engineer by training, Shuhei Nakamoto gave a very long and very interesting interview to Manuel Pecino of which here are some extracts which highlight a sometimes surprising Japanese mentality... but above all which retrace the main guidelines of the technical work carried out by the most Latin of Japanese...
“My first job was the RS 250 and RS 125, I designed the chassis for both motorcycles; later, the NSR 250 as well. I continued to do that for several years, until one day I told my manager at HRC that I wanted to do the NSR500… He asked me why. I told him it was a natural evolution after doing the 125 and the 250…
He gave me the Superbike project! The V4, the RC45 with Kocinski, Aaron Slight…
But in 2000, I once again asked to do the 500! Because the NSR 500 was the F1 of motorcycles, while the Superbike was like the touring car category…
Which is then, it is that the director of HRC is came to me and said, OK, you can do F1. (Nakamoto opens his eyes wide in surprise).
More than worried, I was surprised because I had no experience with cars. But it was an order from company and I had two choices: go to F1 or leave Honda. At that time, I had two very little boys so there was no way for me to leave Honda, so I left in F1.
I must say that I really enjoyed the years in F1. From May 1, 2000 until the end of 2008, when Honda decided to stop the F1 project… Almost nine years. Watching F1 is a bit boring, but doing F1 is, from a technical point of view, very, very exciting. The budget is very different from the racing bike budget, and the number of engineers… there is a big difference! There, the engineers cover a very narrow area but they can go deep, very deep. »
Shuhei Nakamoto finally gets MotoGP in 2009…
“At Sepang in 2009, I must say that I was very surprised by what I saw. The speed of the Hondas was very, very high. It was very easy to overtake the Yamaha on the straight, but in the corners the Yamaha could easily overtake under braking. It was unacceptable. The Honda was very fast, but the braking the Yamaha was much better! My first thought was that we could have made a mistake. So we tried different settings. We managed to improve our braking efficiency, but the Yamaha was still much more effective that we.
In 2009, I told them, “you need to improve the braking stability,” because I knew that once we improved the braking stability, the Yamahas or the Ducatis would not catch up on braking when we passed in a straight line. . Our corner speeds weren't as fast as the Yamahas, but if we were able to be ahead of the Yamahas in the corners, it wouldn't be easy for them to overtake.
La straight line speed was our strong suit at that time; cornering speed was our weak point. Sometimes people focus on improving their weaknesses, and forget about their strengths. At that time we didn't have enough knowledge or technology to make our cornering speed faster, but we knew we could achieve a higher top speed. So we had to explore these strengths as much as possible: overtaking in a straight line, staying ahead during the corner, then using our top speed again. If we were able to do that, I was sure that sooner or later the riders of the bikes faster in corners would end up giving up.
From 2010 we focused on improving braking stability using ideas from the development group. We tried several different chassis. At Qatar 2010, if you remember, Pedrosa's bike was undulating on the straight. Dani was very unhappy with her, but Dovizioso liked her because she had better passing speed. For this motorcycle, the idea was to obtain better braking stability. I wasn't happy but it was the starting point to work towards the target we had decided. Dani was happy with this concept. In fact, we still use this same concept today. Braking stability is much more important to us than engine power, which is much more important.
In 2011, the first stage of my work was completed. My second task was to improve our cornering speed, which was our weak point. We tried several things and now I am very happy because our machine is faster than the Yamaha in the corners. You can check the data on all circuits. Especially in tight corners, our machine is always faster. Overall the times are very similar, but sometimes Marc has an advantage of a few tenths and this is always due to the efficiency of our bike in the corner areas. »
So where is the Yamaha better?
" The balance…In overall balance, they are very good. Overall balance involves cornering, accelerating… ”
