The superbikes in those days were more like ‘sit up and beg’ street bikes, not like the superbikes of today, which are more like the Grand Prix bikes of those days. So it was more natural to have flatter bars. Merkel looked really cool and comfortable on his bike and I wanted to give it a go.
I tried it first in wet weather conditions at Kouvola in Finland in 1990. If you are going to fall in the wet, you usually lose the front end of the bike, and in those days I was a lot harder on the brakes coming into a corner. I wanted to be as upright as possible so that I was not pushing on the bars as well as putting pressure on them through braking. And with the RC30, which I was riding that year, you could slide the bars off, turn them upside down and slide them back on so that they were pointing slightly upwards. My mechanic, Dennis Willey, thought I was mad, but I felt as though I had loads of control in the wet, even though it looked an unnatural position. It had been dry during the practice sessions in Finland but it pissed down for the race itself – my last ever TT F1 race – so I decided to give it a try. I won the race easily and lapped everyone up to second place, although it has to be said the competition was probably not the strongest I have ever raced against. I never repeated this feat, because that style was probably more suited to street racing than the track, where you have to hang off even more.
My friend Geoff Hopkins owns a Foggy replica which he rides on the road. A couple of years ago he was complaining that his back was hurting. I suggested that he tried turning the bars upside down so that he was sitting more upright in the saddle and not hunching his back as much. My old mechanic, Slick, was staying with us, and after he had turned them over Geoff agreed that it was much more comfortable. I bet there are thousands of riders out there who would benefit from this advice.
When I signed for Honda in 1991, I told Dennis Willey that I wanted the angle of dip to be changed from 15 degrees to around 5 degrees because I felt too cramped. I could not make up my mind whether or not I liked the new position – and my results were not very good that year. I assumed it was the bars and went back to the 15 degree position for the rest of the year and for the next couple of years, but I still had this nagging feeling that the lower the bars were, the more hunched forward I was. So in 1994 I asked Slick to move them back up to a 10 degree dip on my Ducati 916 – a kind of happy medium. I felt that it made mid-corners more comfy, because the riding position is not a natural one for your body to be forced into for 25 laps. I was also that bit more upright when I was braking, and it seemed to be less painful on my knees.
At the end of my career, the angle of dip had probably crept back up to around 5 degrees, probably less than for any of the other riders, who preferred it at around 8.5 degrees. There are those who like their handlebars at around 15 degrees, and a lot of the Grand Prix riders had an even bigger angle of dip. One year in Japan, for some reason, we were using the older style bars with a bigger angle of dip. I simply came in and said, ‘I can’t ride this. I want to go back to the 5 degrees.’
The more I hung off the bike, the more it stayed upright. Somebody like Michael Doohan might have put the bike down more, perhaps losing a bit of corner speed but picking up an advantage exiting the corner.
I always wanted to be on top of the bike as much as possible so that I could throw it through chicanes, where I was always very fast. I did not feel able to do this if I was crouched down. Body strength was never one of my strong points, so that was perhaps another reason why I needed to be on top of the bike, giving myself as much chance as possible of throwing the machine effectively from side to side.
There are two other things to take into account when positioning the handlebars. The main one, as I mentioned earlier, is that as well as up and down you can change how the bars are angled into or away from the bike. And as my style was all about hanging off the bike as much as possible, I always thought that the further I was tucked in, while remaining comfortable, the more I could hang off in corners.
I think this is why people used to say that I looked big on a bike. I was often told that I looked a lot smaller in real life than I did when I was riding. The press have written things like, ‘Never has someone so small made himself look so big on a bike.’ A lot of small riders look lost on a bike, and I’m a small guy at 5 ft 8 in, but it’s because I hung off the bike and moved around the saddle so much that I appeared bigger. Again, if the bars had been angled further out from the bike, I would have been straining forward, with my weight too far over the front.
At some tracks, with a lot of right-handers, I would angle the left-hand bar a bit further into the bike than the right. As I hung off the bike, the movement of my left arm would be limited by the bike’s tank; moving that bar in a few millimetres gave me the chance to hang further off to the right without that left arm catching on the tank. I probably first did this in 1997 when I was struggling with the line of my Ducati, especially at tracks like Donington where I was having difficulty at corners such as Redgate, McLeans and Coppice. Albacete was another track where I sometimes felt the need to do this in order to maximize the contact patch of the tyre and find the best possible grip.
When I asked Slick to do this in Spain, he presumed I wanted the right-hand bar moved inwards as well, and got to work.
‘What are you doing that for?’ I said when I saw he was working on both bars.
‘Well, I presumed you wanted them both doing. You couldn’t ride to the chippy with it like that,’ he replied.
‘Just leave it with the left-hand bar,’ I insisted.
Other riders tended to prefer more of what I would call a motocross style, where the bars are sticking out more in the manner of Fred Merkel. That helps them carry more speed into the corners before braking and sliding the back end round, a bit like a speedway rider but obviously not so exaggerated. It allows them to use the strength in their arms more easily. The riders who are very good at this are Noriyuki Haga, Chris Walker and Anthony Gobert. That was never my strong point. My style was all about carrying speed at mid-corner and my position was perfect for that. One thing the angle of my bars was not perfect for, though, was storage. The mechanics could never get my bike into the transport crates because of the bar positions!
The second thing to take into account when setting the bars is the positioning on the fork-legs. Like every other rider I know, my bars were as high as possible, touching the bottom of the yoke. Again, that was just a comfort thing – I did not want to be crouching any lower than I had to.
The other things that have to be decided on when trying to get the best possible position on a bike are the location of the footrests and how much padding to have on the seat. Much of this was actually forced on me because of my injuries. I had lost a lot of flexibility in my right knee because of the two bad breaks early on in my career. Obviously, on the bigger superbikes there was not the same pressure on my knee to bend as much as there was on a smaller 250cc. But even on superbikes, I could still try to make my racing position as comfortable as possible. The key was to have my footrests a bit further forward than other riders. When Troy Bayliss first sat on my bike after I had crashed in Australia, he could not believe how far forward they were. By moving the footrests forward, though, I stopped my legs being cramped up and also stopped myself from leaning any further forward than I had to. Again, I think some riders like to have their heels as far back as possible to help them slide into corners. That was the last thing I ever wanted to do. I wanted to ride smoothly through the corners and keep the wheel turning forward, so moving the rests back was not something I was bothered about.
At the end of the 1995 season in Australia, after I had agreed to ride for Honda the following season, I asked Slick to check the height difference between the top of the seat and the footrests on the Ducati that I had been riding. I was worried that the Honda was not going to be as comfortable, and when I first sat on the Honda it turned out that the difference was about an inch less. The
