A Suzuka corner’s hidden history

‘Spoon’, ‘130R’, ‘Hairpin’, ‘S Curves’. The nook names at Suzuka have prescriptive, unembellished high quality. Apart from… Degner.

For a quick time within the Nineteen Sixties Ernst Degner was a proverbial thorn in Honda’s facet, serving to Suzuki develop a collection of 50cc racing motorbike engines able to screaming past 17,000rpm, and enabling Mitsuo Itoh to turn out to be the primary (and thus far solely) Japanese rider to win the Isle of Man TT. Bettering these pocket rockets was a matter of delight for Honda, an organization whose rising industrial would possibly sprung from its founder’s fascination with motorbikes.

The 50cc two-stroke racing bikes of the Nineteen Sixties weighed lower than 60kg and have been good for nicely over 100mph, however delivered all their energy inside a 500rpm band, requiring the rider to Riverdance on the gearshifter, keep tucked in behind the display and protect as a lot nook velocity as attainable. Within the first race after Suzuka opened in 1962 it’s stated {that a} random gust of wind blew Degner’s entrance wheel out from underneath him as he took the sweeping right-hander after the esses (now formally the ‘S’ Curves).

That nook was subsequently named after him and reprofiled into two discrete radii. However the story of how Degner got here to be there as 50cc world champion, with a producer which had been nowhere in racing up till that season, is extra fascinating.

Degner was born in what’s now Poland in 1931, and grew up in what was formally recognized, with the sometimes mendacious nomenclature most well-liked by despotic regimes, because the German Democratic Republic. He labored as a motorbike mechanic earlier than discovering he had a flair for racing them.

By the mid-Fifties he had attained a measure of fame and was co-opted into the MZ motorbike firm’s worldwide racing programme – unlikely as such a factor could sound to trendy readers, MZ gross sales outdoors East Germany have been a profitable supply of overseas foreign money. However Degner earned a normal wage and was underneath common surveillance by the East German secret police drive, the Stasi. He started to hanker for the existence loved by the folks he raced in opposition to.

MZ was an unlikely standard-bearer for superior expertise but it surely was doing so within the retro subject of two-stroke engines, which most producers had already deserted for racing purposes. Answerable for the programme was Walter Kaaden, an engineer stated to have labored on the Peenemunde Military Analysis Centre the place the Nazi regime’s V1 and V2 rockets had been developed throughout World Conflict 2.

Sources differ over Kaaden’s function there, but it surely’s additionally claimed that Wernher von Braun later invited him to depart for the US as a part of ‘Operation Paperclip’, the key op by which American intelligence companies swooped for the cream of German engineering expertise to affix its army and house rocket programmes. At MZ, Kaaden would deploy the harmonic evaluation methods as soon as used to finesse the V1 and V2 increase ports and exhaust growth chambers – and use them, together with different pre-war applied sciences within the MZ device chest, such because the rotary valve idea, to wrangle ridiculous portions of energy from 125cc motorbike engines.

By 1961 Kaaden was extracting 200bhp per litre from MZ’s 125cc engine and Degner was difficult Honda’s Tom Phillis for the world championship. Think about the distinction between the screaming single-cylinder MZ and the thudding four-stroke parallel twin powering the RC143.

1961 was Suzuki’s second yr of competitors within the 125cc class and it wasn’t going nicely. It’s claimed that Degner minimize his cope with the corporate’s representatives that summer time, in a lodge the MZ crew occurred to be sharing with Suzuki’s – however the principal problem was getting his household out of East Germany, the place they have been successfully hostages whereas he was racing overseas.

An preliminary plan to spirit them out of East Berlin by prepare whereas Degner was competing within the Ulster Grand Prix fell by means of: 13 August, the day after the TT, was the infamous ‘Barbed Wire Sunday’ when the East German authorities closed the border to West Berlin and started erecting barricades within the streets. Inside days the Berlin Wall was underneath development.

Come spherical 10 of 11, the Swedish Grand Prix in mid-September, Degner was on the cusp of successful the championship. He might need received it over the road that weekend had his engine not blown; that evening he was smuggled into Denmark with technical paperwork and engine components, moderately than garments and a washbag, in a suitcase. In the meantime in East Germany, a pal was smuggling Degner’s household out in a secret compartment within the boot of a automotive.

That pal would later say he slept with a gun underneath his pillow for the following 30 years, fearing Stasi reprisals.

Suzuki used the liberated expertise to speed up its personal programme, ensuing within the new RM62 race bike which Degner then rode to the inaugural 50cc world title in 1962 – earlier than taking his spill at Suzuka. Whether or not this was scarier than spending the yr trying over his shoulder for putative Stasi assassins was recognized solely to him.

Lance Stroll exits the Degners in his Williams days

Picture by: Sutton Photographs

Naturally, sources working for the corporate on the time dispute this account.

Degner earned a considerable money bonus for his labours, which additionally led to the event of the RT62 125cc machine and its successors, together with the RT67 on which a younger Barry Sheene made his identify. Given the sources at its disposal, Suzuki would probably have gotten there anyway, however the inner nuances (similar to Mahle’s cast alloy pistons) would have been harder to repeat with out technical documentation than exterior options such because the exhaust pipes.

An arms race developed because the likes of Honda and Yamaha raced to catch up, and two-stroke engines would stay the de facto formulation of grand prix motorcycling till the flip of the millennium. By then, although, Degner was lengthy useless: hustling to make up floor after a poor begin in a 250cc race at Suzuka in 1963, he dropped it at Flip 2 and the contents of the gas tank caught fireplace as he tried to choose the bike up.

Degner required 50 pores and skin grafts and later developed an dependancy to painkillers which introduced his racing profession to a untimely finish. He died of a coronary heart assault in Tenerife in 1981 – though, as with anybody who has incurred the wrath of a totalitarian regime, unsubstantiated rumours circulated that he had been assassinated…

Degner contributed to the Suzuki on which Barry Sheene made his identify. Not this precise one, clearly…

Picture by: Sutton Photographs