SuperBike Magazine September 2020

69
More gripping racing
yarns from Stuart Shenton,
the man who helped
Kork Ballington, Freddie
Spencer, Wayne Gardner
and Kevin Schwantz to world
title glory. And he might’ve done the
same with Anthony Gobert…
In 1984 Stuart Shenton had been
with Honda for 18 months when HRC
engineer (and later HRC president)
Satoru Horiike wandered up and
asked a question.
“He said, if Honda were to build
a 250, what should it be like?” says
Shenton, who had already played a
crucial role in Kawasaki’s domination
of the 250 and 350 classes during
the late 1970s and early 1980s. “So I
asked him straight: are you building
a 250? No, no, he said, this is just a
casual question. Going back to my
experience with Kawasaki, I told
him a 250 must be on the minimum
weight limit, it will need this much
horsepower and it will need twin
front discs. So at the end of 1984 I
went to Japan and there was this
250, a fabulous piece of kit.”
Having lost the 500 title to Yamaha
in 1984, HRC boss Youichi Oguma
wanted to make amends to Soichiro
Honda. So he asked Freddie Spencer
to do something that had never been
done before: win the 250/500 world
title double.
“Oguma never took the easy
path,” Shenton adds. “So I can imagine
him saying to Mr Honda: sorry,
we’ve messed up, so next year we
will win both world championships.
“We did some winter testing with
Freddie and we knew the 250 would
be competitive. The first event of
1985 was Daytona, where the race
was run under AMA rules, so the
bikes had to be five kilos heavier
than in GPs, and you weren’t allowed
to obtain that weight with ballast.
The AMA scrutineers knew our 250
would be at the GP limit, so they
knew we must have some weight
hidden on the bike. After every practice
they took off the seat, the tank,
the airbox, everything, trying to find
the ballast, but they didn’t find any.”
Spencer duly won the 100-mile
250 race, but still the scrutineers
weren’t happy.
“After the race they said they
wanted to look inside the forks.
The forks had magnesium bottoms,
carbon-fibre fork legs and all that
stuff. So I opened the forks, took out
the spacers, held them in my hand
and shone a torch so they could see
inside. They couldn’t see anything
and the bike was passed. What they
never knew was that the fork spacers
weighed about three kilos …”
Shenton’s job during 1985 was to
look after Spencer’s NSR250s, while
team leader Erv Kanemoto focused
on his NSR500s.
“Freddie was amazing and we
had a good little team: JB [Jeremy
Burgess] and George working on the
500 and me and Giles [Duides] on the
250. Erv was the overseer but there
were times when he was battling
to keep Freddie on the straight and
narrow, to keep him focused, because
obviously the important thing
was always the 500.”
Although Spencer did win the
250/500 title double there were times
when he was running at the very
limit of his capabilities, swapping
back and forth between very different
bikes, trying to give his engineers
useful feedback.
“By 1985 the bikes were getting
complicated but there was no
data-recording. Freddie was having
a bad time in 250 qualifying at Le
Mans. I was damn sure he wasn’t
using sixth gear, so I asked him if he
was sure he was using sixth. ‘Yeah,
yeah’, he said. Then I worked everything
out again and I was damn sure
he was only using the first five gears,
so I changed the gearbox for the
race according to what I thought and
Le Mans was one of his double race
wins. That was the kind of thing you
were battling with.”
The NSRs may have been the
trickest bikes on the planet, but that
didn’t mean HRC were above a bit of
bodging.
“The 250 came from the factory
with 34mm carburettors, while the
500 ran 36mm carbs. Keihin built
these fabulous sets of four magnesium
and titanium carburettors
for the 500 that were hundreds of
thousands of dollars a go. Oguma’s
sidekick, an old boy called [Kiyoshi]
Abe, said we should try some 36mm
carbs on the 250. I said we haven’t
got any. He just laughed, gave me a
bank of four-cylinder carburettors
and told me to cut them in half. I
thought he was joking, but he wasn’t,
so I used a hacksaw to convert this
100k set of four carburettors into two