BEST OF JODY’S BOX: “I CAN’T USE WHAT I’VE GOT… DON’T NEED MORE!”

By Jody Weisel 

It should come as no surprise that I love technology. Why wouldn’t I? My whole life has been spent testing motocross bikes, finding flaws, applying fixes and suggesting settings to other riders. I’m well suited to the job because I started racing back in 1968 when bikes were simple, a little agricultural and could be worked on with tools as simple as a nut cracker and a butter knife. Thus, the modern motocross bike and I progressed on the same time line. I was lucky enough to test all the latest and greatest innovations and, paradoxically, all of the ill-conceived ideas that the manufacturers embraced.

“MY FIRST RACE BIKE HAD 30mm FORK LEGS. I USED TO BEND THEM BACKWARDS OVER JUMPS, AND BETWEEN MOTOS I WOULD SPIN THEM AROUND SO THAT THEY WERE BENT FORWARDS.”

With each passing year, in the name of improvement, the factory engineers began to offer new technology, like the Suzuki Full Floater suspension system, and then then replacing it with a system that worked poorly. As for forks, for decades the main improvement was to make the fork legs bigger. My first race bike had 30mm fork legs. I used to bend them backwards over jumps, and between motos I would spin them around so that they were bent forwards. I lived through  30mm fork tubes, leading link forks, 32mm forks, 36mm forks, 38mm fork, 42mm fork, 48mm forks, 49mm forks, 50mm forks, 52mm forks and a potpourri of internal valving concepts. And, guess what? The 18-year-old Kayaba SSS forks are the only forks that actually work right out of the crate.  

One day I complained to Bruce Burness, one of the most respected suspension gurus of the 1980s about how the hop-up shops were doing wonders for motorcycle engines, but that the suspension settings always lagged behind. Bruce told me something that I remember to this day, he said, “An engine tuner has an easier job than a suspension tuner because eventually, the motocross engine will reach the limit of how much horsepower the human body can manage and, at that point, the rider will want it slowed down. Not so for a suspension tuner. He can never reach that kind of end point because the better he makes the suspension, the faster the racer can go and the faster he goes the harder he hits the jumps and bumps and the more he complains about his suspension.” 

Yamaha’s 1976 “Speedo and Tach” forks were the height of technological advancement in 1976, but that didn’t mean they were any good. The only electronic thing on this bike was the spark plug. 

Need proof? Back in 2004 Mitch Payton built me an exact copy of Chad Reed’s Supercross winning Yamaha YZ250. Of course, Mitch knew all of the inside secrets of Chad’s YZ250 two-stroke because he had worked with the Yamaha race team on it. He ported my cylinder, milled my head, got some special engine parts from Team Yamaha and, finally, handed me one of a handfull of special Pro Circuit exhaust pipes that he had made especially for Chad Reed. 

I took it to a race the next day and pulled a blistering holeshot in the first moto. It was awesome, but in the second corner it almost wheelied over backwards when I snapped the throttle on, this continued all the way around the track. It could light up the tire in the deepest loam, clear every jump like it had a JATO rocket on the rear fender and about five laps into the first moto I was whipped. I decided to slow down and take it easy, but Chad’s YZ250 engine didn’t like that idea and started to feel boggy. I had to pull the clutch in and rev the engine to keep it from fouling the plug. It was, too fast and I was irrefutably too slow. 

Shortly after that race, I went by Pro Circuit with my YZ250 in the back of my truck. When Mitch saw it, he said, “How come it has a stock pipe on it? Did you smash the one I gave you. I have another one in the race shop that you can have.” I told him the whole sordid tale about how Chad Reed’s YZ250 engine was too fast for me and I had been detuning it so that I could race it at my speed not Chad’s. He laughed and had me unload the bike so he could convert it back to his normal customer spec mods. I kept Chad Reed’s pipe though, it is still hanging on a rafter in my barn. 

“GUESS WHAT I FOUND TO BE THE BEST FEATURE OF MY SMART PHONE? IT MADE PHONE CALLS AND RECEIVED THEM. THE REST OF THE STUFF I DIDN’T NEED, DIDN’T WANT AND COULDN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO USE.”

I learned a valuable lesson about the advances of technology with that experience, I don’t need as as much of it as the engineers are capable of providing. I used to have a smart phone. It did everything. It was like an electronic Swiss Army Knife. It surfed the internet, was a navigation system, could be used as a tape measure, made me look pretty in photos, was capable of shooting a Hollywood movie, let me transfer copy off of a photo into type that I could insert into a word document and, as luck would have it, could rewrite virtually every function of my bike’s ECU. Cool sounding, but not for me. 

Guess what I found to be the best feature of my smart phone? It made phone calls and received them. The rest of the stuff I didn’t need, didn’t want and couldn’t figure out how to use. So, I got rid of my smart phone and bought an old-fashioned flip phone. True, I can’t reprogram my bike’s fuel and ignition maps with my flip phone, but I’m perfectly happy with the two maps that most modern bikes come with and, in most cases, I can’t tell the difference between the two. As long as I have a throttle, shift lever, clutch lever and front and rear brakes, I’m good to go!. All that extra stuff is just foof. I’m not looking for the next big thing—I’m happy with what I’ve got.