MotoGP: What’s A CRT?

Prototype chassis powered by hotted-up Superbike engines have disappeared. Why?

Whatever happened to CRTs? Where did they come from, and why have they gone?

When MotoGP began in 2002, Peter Clifford's privately sponsored team hoped to field a V-6 from Blata, a little-known East European firm. When the Blata didn't show, Clifford switched his efforts to having a warmed-over Yamaha YZF-R1 engine accepted as a "MotoGP prototype."

No. Sorry, the rules are very clear, no thinly disguised production engines. This is a class exclusively for prototypes! For class approval, the angle between cylinders and crankcase must be at least five degrees different from that of any similar production engine. If you can’t manage that, get lost.

In the initial flush of super enthusiasm for the new four-stroke class, someone proposed that just the magic words “four-stroke” would unleash the very same cascade of sponsor money that at the time nourished Formula 1. A new era was dawning!

Years passed. Aprilia dropped out when its costly F1-based "Cube" was fastest down the straights and slowest in lap time. Kenny Roberts' Proton V-5 was "de-funded." KTM built a reputed 14 special MotoGP prototype engines, but the changes requested after Roberts' team evaluated them were outside the budget. Other firms offered special engines at F1 prices—zero takers. Then Kawasaki left the class in a cloud of lawsuit-induced bitterness, vowing never to return (shades of Honda's departure from AMA Pro Road Racing!).

BMW was rumored to join with serried ranks and rows of F1-trained engineers, but the advertising it got from providing MotoGP’s safety cars was vastly more cost effective (yes, there was talk of a fantastical “Cube”-like 300-hp triple covered with advanced instrumentation but that subsided in a cacophony of whispers about sudden-death torque curves and highsided test riders).

Next up to bat was Ilmor, the successful auto-racing engine firm, with a white-fairing 800cc prototype run during the “novelty week” that always follows the season-ending round in Valencia, Spain. Wow, like the factory Suzuki, this F1-derived pneumatic-valve wonder had to be warmed up before starting by circulating its cooling water through an external heat exchanger tower. “Launch-control” techs sat at a flat-screened console, monitoring all systems before start up. Is this the future? Was MotoGP about to enter The Zone? Result? More highsides due to a powerband made for the grip of 18-inch-wide F1 tires. Hmm, could F1 and MotoGP be different?

Gradually the awful facts emerged, like secrets long concealed beneath the still waters of a pond slowly draining: Don’t even try MotoGP unless you are a motorcycle manufacturer. And even if you are one, remember what Ducati’s Claudio Domenicali said in 2003: It will cost $32 million to get in, plus another annual $10 million for operations.

When Dorna managers extrapolated the grim trend of grid shrinkage into the future, they blanched. Soon there would be just two or four bikes each from Honda, Yamaha, and Ducati, with no guarantee that any of them would stay. Eek!

The CRT (Claiming Rule Teams, so called because of an early but soon-discarded proposal that their bikes could be claimed if too successful) was the result. A CRT was a Superbike kit engine in a prototype chassis. All the exclusivist rhetoric about a “prototype class” went silent. Pack that grid! Don’t let our great sport turn into a pumpkin just because it’s too expensive for almost the entire industry that supports it!

CRTs have now been chased off the grid by Honda’s “production racer” (a beautifully finished but no-acceleration steel-valve-spring clone of the factory RC213V), older-model factory Yamahas that had not yet been sent to the crusher, and a blizzard of rules paperwork that permitted some Ducatis to use a softer tire or get a larger fuel allowance—subject to remaining uncompetitive, mind you. Become too successful and you’ll be lumped back in with the factory boys on their hard tires, only five engines per season per rider, and just 20 liters of fuel per race.

With these new options, the obsolete clunker Superbike CRTs vanished. Meanwhile, any management hopes that “grass-roots builders” would rise up to smite the factories were killed dead by the persistent embarrassing slowness of the CRTs. They were awful. They reminded me of the AMA’s “Instant Experts” program of the early 1980s, which issued Expert licenses to clubmen. Never mind his lap time, fill those shrinking grids!

There were even negativists who rumored that poverty-stricken Moto2 teams were cramming misfiring Superbike engines into cast-off chassis, with reject suspension and brakes dragged out of dark store rooms just to collect the “bounty” reportedly offered to anyone who rolled out such a grid packer.

Will calm return now? Crisis averted? No, because Dorna’s Carmelo Ezpeleta feels bound to level the presently highly unequal playing field with a rev limit and required spec software, while Honda is equally bound to insist on rules allowing them to find advantage in its wonderful R&D resources. No real reason to race otherwise. Nothing personal either way, just business.

Stay tuned for the continuing collision between the Unstoppable Force and the Immovable Object. And don’t for one minute forget that Ezpeleta and Honda’s Shuhei Nakamoto are supposed to be best buds. Everything solved over a friendly game of golf.

Something will happen.

Attack Performance Racing Steve Rapp.

NGM Forward Racing Colin Edwards.

GP Tech Aaron Yates.

Aspar Honda RCV1000R.

Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta.

Motegi 2012.

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