when the French team , headed by its rider / manager Jean-Bernard Peyre and his co-rider , Fabien Gibol , were second out of 51 bikes in the non-championship Le Mans race . The team was strong throughout the series , taking sixth at Assen , fifth at the Nurburgring and sixth at Suzuka . On the minus side of the ledger , the bikes failed to finish at Barcelona , where cauldron-like conditions exposed another XR69 weak point : overheating . Special heat dissipating coatings had been applied to the engines , but they were at the limit of what was possible with air cooling . Suzuki handed the World Championship to Honda when it withdrew from Misano after Peyre was killed in a road bike accident , but came back strongly to dominate the season ’ s final race , the Bol d ’ Or , in front of 120,000 howling spectators . For Crosby , the timing of his XR69 ’ s arrival in the UK had been less than ideal , with three rounds of the British TT F1 championships already completed , and the brakes and suspension not fully dialled in under race conditions . But unleashed on his new Suzuki , Croz proved he was a serious force , with his debut ride at the Isle of Man described as a “ record-breaking performance of ultra-fast riding .” “ It worked really well ,” he says . “ It was perfect for the Isle of Man . It had good power to weight , and really good balance with no bad traits . But I had to be gentle , because it was very easy to miss a shift and bend the valves . A lot of riders suffered this problem . I clipped a valve fairly early in the piece and after that I was particularly careful to under-rev the bike . I ’ d use 9400 instead of 9500 .” Crosby ’ s team reviewed the power charts and torque curves they got from Yoshimura and realised there was no point in revving the bike any harder because at 9500 , it was already falling off the torque curve maximum of 72ft-lb at 8000rpm . The carburretion was also tricky and needed plenty of work to get it right . “ We had lots of charts covering everything – jetting , gearing , suspension and damping . Suzuki had plenty of experience with all that ,” he says . The 1980 Isle of Man TT was the first of Crosby ’ s bizarre controversies with the Honda team . The Honda ridden by Mick Grant managed to win the race by making just a single fuel stop when the Suzuki needed two , despite the tank size being limited to a universal 24 litres . After he finished , Crosby noticed Grant bashing the Honda ’ s tank , which he surmised was to dent it to decrease the volume to the legal limit . Honda later admitted the tank was 28 litres , but maintained that air filled bottles placed inside had reduced its capacity – leaving the faint stench of corruption about their win . It was even worse the following year , when a dispute with Crosby over start positions ended with Honda painting their bikes black and the riders wearing black leathers , but instead of making some sort of point ,
Honda ’ s actions simply made the team look like a joke . Crosby was awarded the win . That 1980 week was a successful one for Croz : he won the Senior TT on his Suzuki 500cc GP bike , was second in TT F1 on the XR69 , and then increased the 69 ’ s capacity to 1084 for the Classic . But it was all over on the third lap of the demanding
KIWI RIDER 59