SuperBike Magazine September 2020

70 SuperBike
sets of two carburettors and they stayed
on the 250 for most of the year.”
Shenton enjoyed working with
Spencer, the clean-living youngster who
stood out like a nun in a lap-dancing
club during an era of wild, hard-drinking
racers.
“Freddie had a very different outlook
on life from your average motorbike racer,
maybe it was because of where he
came from. He was a brilliant rider, but
he wouldn’t really say what was going
on with the bike. Perhaps it was because
he hadn’t had a lot of time to mature
and learn. He’d say stuff like there’s
something going on with the back, so
you’d ask him is it the tyre or is it the
shock? And he’d just say there’s something
wrong with the back. He was one
of those guys who would ride the wheels
off the thing on the day.
“He was a bit of an enigma to work
with. There was no social interaction,
but he was always polite and well-spoken
and he was fine. The unfortunate
thing about Freddie was his naivety.
Business-wise he got ripped off horrendously
by all the managers and lawyers
he had doing stuff for him.”
Shenton later worked with Wayne
Gardner during 1987, his title-winning
season, and 1988. Gardner might have
retained the 500 crown if HRC hadn’t
assigned a new engineering group who
got everything wrong.
“The 1988 bike was horrendous. HRC
had talked to Erv about flat trackers
and grip. For some unknown reason
they worked out that most flat trackers
have flat swinging-arm angles, so they
built the ’88 bike with a swingarm pivot
18mm lower than the ’87 bike. When we
got to the first race we realised there
was a quite a serious problem.”
In 1992 Shenton accepted an offer
to join Suzuki, working with Kevin
Schwantz. The Texan won the title the
following year – at his sixth attempt –
and attributes much of that success to
Shenton’s input.
“I inherited quite a low-engineered
bike and we messed our through 1992,”
says Shenton. “I pretty much lived in
Australia the next winter – we were testing
at Eastern Creek every week – and a
good bike came out of that.
“There are two types of riders. There
are the guys who tell you what they’re
feeling and leave it up to you and the
other engineers to interpret that. Then
there are the others who try to engineer
their bike, which in my experience isn’t
Celebrating Wayne Gardner’s 1987 world title. From left:
mechanics Wilf Needham and Shenton, crew chief Jeremy
Burgess and WG’s manager Harris Barnett
always the best way. I guess there’s
a happy medium. Kevin was good,
he was very descriptive and could
pin stuff down.
“We did a test the week before
the Japanese GP, trying out the
latest chassis from the factory and
it was by far the best chassis we’d
had. We were going straight from
Australia to Suzuka and we didn’t
have time to ship the bikes, so I
hand carried the chassis to Japan
with my luggage. I’m near the top of
a 60-metre escalator in Tokyo train
station with the chassis strapped
to my back when the strap breaks.
The chassis flies down the escalator,
wiping out all these Japanese
people on the way down, then lands
with a bloody great clunk at the bottom.
Oh my God, the chassis we’re
going to use for the Suzuka race is
bent!”
But the chassis wasn’t bent and
Schwantz took second in the race,
a fraction behind Yamaha’s Wayne
Rainey, and went on to win the title.
Everyone knows how that season
ended: with Rainey crashing at Misano
and breaking his back. Shenton
and Schwantz still feel guilt for
what happened that day.
“That weekend we were having
problems, we didn’t have a suitable
front tyre. The soft tyre wouldn’t
go the distance and the hard one
wouldn’t give us the grip or the lap
time. So we decided to go with the
soft because we wanted to push
Wayne into a mistake, obviously not
having any idea of the consequences.
It’s something in the back of our
minds with Kevin and me to this day.
We’ve talked to Wayne about it and
he’s very gracious about it. He said,
‘Hey, I would’ve raced Kevin how I
raced him anyway’.”
Shenton enjoyed working with
Schwantz. “Kevin was a fantastic
team player. He’d sweep the floor