Product Description

This is the story of how top-class racing motorcycles have evolved, year by year, from the beginning of the FIM World Championships in 1949 to the present. Each year s championship-winning machine is described in a short essay with an accompanying data panel, and there are 14 longer essays on the various eras of design in championship racing. The essays create a narrative that brings together the many and ever-evolving influences of engine design, materials, tires, and chassis to reveal what technology has provided to help riders win races.

Told with style and great technical insight by acclaimed author Kevin Cameron, this is the development history of 500cc and MotoGP road-racing motorcycles from 1949 to the present day. It can be read as separate chapters, or as a connected narrative of the evolution of the engines, chassis, brakes, and tires used in World Championship racing. Intense competition, rapidly changing technology, and input from the world s best riders all contributed to the important design choices that ultimately led to today s MotoGP bikes and to the closely similar modern production sportbikes.

Power, weight, and aerodynamics are critical performance areas in all forms of motorsport, but the racing motorcycle must have a unique degree of drivability and balance. Power is usable only if the rider can accurately control it. Increased tire grip is useless if it supplies no cues to let the rider know the limit is near. Above all, the bike must act as an extension of the rider s style and senses.

This interaction makes the rider an inherent part of the design and engineering of the motorcycle. The process can be seen at work in the garages after every race practice. The rider talks with the crew chief and the data technician, whose laptops are open. They discuss what can be done to be quicker at key points around the circuit. Successful solutions become the subject of engineering meetings at the factory, and may immediately return as updated parts, or be incorporated as an element of next season s machine.

Unlike Formula One cars, which have little in common with road cars, either technically or visually, MotoGP motorcycles are not greatly different from everyday production sportbikes. They use virtually all the same technologies as their production counterparts, and closely resemble them. What s learned in this year s racing season affects the design of next year s production bikes. This continual process of evolution the result of improvements born of pragmatic problem solving at the track and in the race shop has created the procession of modern motorcycles depicted in this book.

Told with style and great technical insight by acclaimed author Kevin Cameron, this is the development history of 500cc and MotoGP road-racing motorcycles from 1949 to the present day. It can be read as separate chapters, or as a connected narrative of the evolution of the engines, chassis, brakes, and tires used in World Championship racing. Intense competition, rapidly changing technology, and input from the world s best riders all contributed to the important design choices that ultimately led to today s MotoGP bikes and to the closely similar modern production sportbikes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18652 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 216 pages

About the Author
Kevin Cameron is the technical editor of Cycle World and began writing for its predecessor, Cycle, in 1973. Cameron never intended to be a writer. To hasten recovery from higher education, he began building and tuning racing motorcycles in 1964, becoming a two-stroke partisan with a 250cc Yamaha TD1-B as that revolution gathered strength. He describes writing for Cycle as an accident an experiment by an editor who wanted an insider s view on the fast-developing American 750cc racing scene. Then, as two-strokes waned in the 1980s and his family waxed Cameron s keyboard ultimately replaced his toolbox. Cameron s strength as a technical journalist lies in his ability to present apparently complex physics or engineering matters in simple terms of familiar phenomena and everyday experience.

Customer Reviews

Epochal MotoGP history and analysis
Any reader interested in road racing's evolution since 1949, which has delivered the bikes we race and ride today, must acquire, read, learn from and refer to this brilliant work. It is not just the bible of MotoGP (`official licensed product'). It is much more. It implicitly explains the sport bikes evolved from MotoGP that race in all the other classes, and the high-performance machines we ride on the road. Reading and looking at this remarkable volume is like sitting at the feet of the master (Kevin Cameron is such) and seeing where we have come from and how we have progressed.

Cameron takes the design eras phase by phase, in chunks as small as two years and as large as seven, each year illustrated by an individual race bike--you know all the marques. He cites essentially every significant engineering advance and its immediate and long-term relevance, explaining not just what happened but what it meant then and what it means today. No aspect is overlooked, from frames to suspension, brakes to tires, materials to metallurgy, and including the vital human element: the rider who can make a great designer's race bike into a winner.

Each of the 14 chapters is preceded by a `positioning' essay and a photo of a world champion of the time, from Geoff Duke to Valentino Rossi. The side-view illustrations of the bikes stripped of bodywork, by Pepe Burgaleta, many covering full spreads, deliver a clarity and power that photos, with complex `plumbing' visible, cannot convey. Those photos belong in other books. A `time-line' below the lead illustrations and bulleted technical specifications shows the racing record of each machine. All the great bikes are there.

You need not be a gearhead to enjoy this book, though the rich technical detail is riveting and covered with the author's legendary skill of exposition. It is a project to set beside the armchair or next to the bed before calling it a day, to study and enjoy, to ruminate over. As one reads it, the immense energies, wills and inventiveness of the designers, mechanics and riders wash over the mind and heart: billions of dollars and thousands of lives, racing the world's great venues, dedicated to the miracle of track dominance that is at the heart of racing, captured on the page.

Kenny Roberts Sr.'s foreword is poignant, in that the great champion invested his heart, his mind and his fortune to build a great MotoGP, only to find his ambitions thwarted in the end. As he puts it: "Racing isn't a fairytale with a happy ending--it's a stream of problems, half-answers, and coping with the rest." One might also wish that Cameron had given us a glimpse into his crystal ball and predicted the future. With his accumulated wisdom and knowledge he would probably be right.

The only criticism I would level at the book is that it is somewhat overproduced, with black print on gold pages (hard to read) and a lot of reversed (i.e. harder to read) typography. Simpler is better but David Bull went over the top. It doesn't matter in the end. This is a truly great and epochal work.

Don't let the coffee table book format fool you
Yes, it's full of excellent illustrations of key racing bikes, but the strength of this book lies in the author's ability to explain race engineering in ways that are intuitive and make immediate sense. I've actually started keeping a notebook nearby when I read "Grand Prix" in order to jot down Cameron's comments, and will recommend that our local junior college buy a copy or two for its motorcycle maintenance classes.
There is a lot of serious physics and engineering that we need to understand in order to know why our bikes behave the way they do and are designed the way they are. "Grand Prix" is an excellent place to start learning.

Good book
Very interesting book. However, I didn't find probably the first half all that interesting (except for the 'chapter excerps' or whatever they were). I guess I'm just not that interested in the old bikes, though.