Classic Rider by Olivier RIETSCH

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Words: Alan Cathcart Photographs: Kel Edge

This just couldn't happen today.... The plan almost sounds impossible. But it happened. If the desire to take on and defeat the factory teams from Honda andYamaha by winning GPs with motorcycles you constructed yourself was put into a film script, nobody would buy into it. Then to do that in a small workshop attached to your house, fuelled by your wife's home-cooking and cups of coffee brewed in the kitchen next door, only adds to the quixotic, filmic achievement even mone. Tlris is the real-life story of the dramatic Chevallier Honda 500...

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n the early 1980s, French engineerAlain Chevallier succeeded in achieving the racing fairy tale. His death from cancer in October 201 6, at the age of 68, marked the loss of

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one of the great chassis designers of recent GP history. Sadly, Chevallier only received a fraction of the global recognition merited by his bikes' results. Had 'Cheval' been ltalian, Spanish or even British, heU have had much more acclaim than his bikes' successive GP victories have in fact delivered. But when an observant and powerful figure such as HRC bossYouichi Oguma lent factory engines to Chevallier s small team, it was a mark of respect for what his bikes had achieved against all the odds, and on a limited budget. Yet while his compatriot Claude Fior pushed the bubble of convention by creating radical designs wlth avant-garde steering and suspension solutions, beneath an outwardty conservative faqade Chevallier's designs were equally radical, but in his choice of materials. At a time when the Japanese mgnufacturers were following Antonio Cobas in building aluminium chassis, Chevallier maintained his allegiance to tubular steel frames - but using cold-drawn steel which, being20o/o stronger than hot-rolled, offers an increased stiffness to weight ratio. Ducati would follow in his tyre tracks later that decade en route to a succession of World Superbike titles with its tube-framed racers against their aluminium-chassised rivals, and eventually of course to the 2007 MotoGP World title. But Chevallier didn't stop there. As part of his drive to save welght so as to compensate for the less powerful production engines in his bikes, he was the first person to fit carbon disc brakes to a 500GP motorcycle - yes, before ELF and the Japanese teams - as well as being the first to construct a titanium swingarm, and the first to feature ram air induction and a still air box on his GP bikes. He was a p;oneer'n t^e oevelopn'e1t o+ fu y aojusiab e srspe^sion, too, making his own forks and modified rear

CLASSIC RACER CHEVALLIER HONDA RSsOO shocks, as well as in telemetry, and not only to monitor chassis and suspension behaviour via sensors, but even the flame temperature in a cylinder head, leading him to develop an electro-magnetic automatic carburation correction system, with real time adjustable jettingl Alain Chevallier came to motorcycles quite late - he originally studied medicine, while amusing himself racing cars in hill-climbs. But his younger brother Olivier became a top bike racer, winning the 1976 350ccYugoslavian GP at Opatija with a bike prepared by Alain, who'd assumed the role of chief mechanic for the Pernod-funded team two years earlier. By 1980 he'd started making his own YamahafZ2Sl 1350-powered bikes f or his younger brother to race in GPs - but that Aprii Olivier was tragically killed in practice for the 1980 Moto Journal 200 on a stock-framed 12150 aI Paul Ricard, leaving the distraught Alain set to turn his back on raclng, before his friend Eric Saul persuaded him otherwise. Just six weeks after Olivier's passing, Saul put a ChevallierYamaha on the rostrum for the first time ever in the 350cc French GP at the very same circuit, repeating that third place finish at Silverstone later that year to finish sixth in the final points table, as well as finishing second in the 250cc DutchTT at Assen on the smaller Chevallier bike. But Saul's exuberant personality wasn't to Pernod's corporate liking, so for 198'1 Chevallier was told he must get rid of him in favour of Michel Rougerie and Roger Sibille, who duly raced the 'official' ChevallierYamahas that season. But it was a mark of the man that Alain spent his own money running a third bike for Saul, who duly repaid him wlth victory in the 250cc ltalian GP at Monza - the flrst GP win for a Chevallier-framed racer.

For 1982, Pernod decided to deve op Lts own 250GP bike, engine and all, leaving A ain to team up with Didier de Radiguds for both 250/350 GP classes on Yamaha-engined Chevalier bikes with the support of Belgian cigarette brand Johnson, and with Sau as a second rider for the 350cc c ass on y, in the f ina year of its wor d status. After finishing third n Argentina on his f rst rlde on a 350 Chevallier, Didier was leading defending world champion Toni Mang by seven seconds in the second round in Austria when his gearbox sprocket broke - leav ng team-mate Saul to overtake the German Kawasaki rider to w n nsteadl But the Belgian's deserved f irst GP victory duly came at Monza, fo lowed by another ater on at Brno - despite wh ch Mang retained his 350cc t tle, with de Radiguds second and Saul fourth.

" lt was our best chance yet to win the world t tlei' Ala n to d me. " But we had too many crashes and breakdowns. However, it v,,as the start of a great cooperation wlth D ciier." The Belg an also scored victory on his 250 Chevall er in theYugoslavian GP at Rijeka, the race after a rostrum f in sh on home ground at Spa, but could on y wind up sixth in the final po nts tab e. For 1983, now also with ELF sponsorship, de Radigues was joined in the Chevallier team for the 250GP season by Jean-Franqois Ba de. a'd rhe resrrt .r^ the f.rst 'ace at Kya amr was what every constructor dreams o' a ' -2 ".s1' w th v cro'y f 'st tip'e our on a Chevail er for the Frenchman. But Bald6 sadly broke hrs leg at Assen, and despite making h s Johnson sponsors as happy as he must have been with victory in his home GP at Spa,

You get a good idea of iust how narrow and purposelul the frame is

It looks so right in Bachel's colours

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despite three other rostrums Didier could only finish third in the world championship, behindYamaha factory riders Carlos Lavado and Christian Sarron. "We had an excellent season with lots of pole positions and fewer crashes, but we just didn't quite have enough to win the title j' said Alain. " But for 1984 we started a new adventurel'

Going up lndeed so - for with the demise of the 350cc class, and already accustomed to racing in two gruelling GP races in a single day, alongside his 250GP ride in 1983, Didier de Radiguds had embarked on a career in 500GP racing with a completely stock Honda RS500 supplied by ELE one o{ 32 customer replicas of the bike Freddie Spencer had turned into a GP winner the previous season, and with which he'd wrn the world title at last for Honda in '1983. But with four DNFs out of the six races he started, and a best finish of 13th in Spain, the Honda's flawed handling was a disappointment, So for '1984 Didier convinced Alain to move up to the 500cc class with an all-new bike using the Honda RS500 V3 engine, with sponsorship from ELF and Johnson, and a second such bike provided for ELF-backed rider Christian Le Liard.

Chevallier workshop. Spacious

Following the lines of his smaller capacity Yamahas, the tube-f rame Chevallier Honda RS500 was completed in February 1984 and tested at a wintry Paul Ricard by Didier, who declared it to be 'right f irst time'l He then proved that by eading the first four laps of

the bike's very first race the following month in the opening South African GP at Kyalami,

be{ore finishing fourth with team-mate Le Liard eighth on a similar bikel After such an encouraging start the rest of the season was slightly anti-climatic, but

Left to right is Olivier'Gull' Rietsch,Yves Kerlo who restored it for the Ricard outing, Emmanuel Laurentz who rebuilt the engine and Christian Ouinquenel andYouri Chalumeau who are both friends of Gull's who were iust helping out at Paul Ricard for this meeting.

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:flnished ntnth:in,ihe,iaierld #ernpjo S-hj61 6,,,t satisfying result for him and Cherraliler. But strangely, though, nor for ELF. which pulled jts'$Forlsoishipritnd.fer,l$85,'$uppbrted r'r:, :,': Siligje:Rosset inuraud' l'1he Frobleml*as .' , that ELF wanted mato develop the ELF2 with its ridiculous'rocking-horse' pull:you push-you steering. and lAndr6l de Cortanze who designed it was completely opposed to my doing so, because he knew lU make too many changes to his original flawed concept in order to make it raceworthyl' Alain said: "The joke is that they did that anyway, and in the form it finally raced it was just as lb have made it!" However, as aga;nst thatYouchi Ogu.na had lent Chevallier a factory N5500 engine for a coupre of races, a high mark of respect which unfortunately didn't produce the desired result. "l had to give it back to him, because we never finished a single race with itl" Alain added. A commission by Pernod to redesign their 250GP bike's chassis gave the Chevallier workshop something to do in 1985, while the de Radiguds 500 was lent to French privateer Thierry Espi6, who at his own expense f lew to South Africa for the opening GP of the season, a"d {inished tenth, thus ear^ing a precious world championship point that meant he got confirmed starts for the rest of the season. But at the next round in Spain Espi6 crashed in practice, and had to sit out the next two months with a back problem, though on his return he f inished ninth in Sweden on the Chevallier Honda, before returning it to Alain. Meantime, the other exLe Liard bike had twice been tested by none other than Randy Mamola, anxious to redress the handling issues he was experiencing with his factory N5500 triple. While expressing satisfaction with the French bike he never raced it in the end, though team-mate Takazumi Katayama was allowed to race a Bakker-f ramed such bike - whereupon Honda

From the

basement...

The coordinator of Nicotte's small three-man

Chevallier Honda GP team (mechanic Fabrice Petit was the third musketeer) had been his neighbour in Plaisir, the town he lived in 30km to the west of Paris -'Gull' Rietsch. Gull owns the ex-de Radiguds, ex-Espi6, ex-Nicotte bike today, still painted in the Ville de Plaisir colours in whictr Nicotte ran it in 1989/90, sponsored by his home town, whose mayor must have been a bike fan! "l gave up my job as a maintenance supervisor to go racing with Rachel (Nicotte)

in 1988i' recalls Gull, today living in French Guyana with occasional returns to France to drink rum with his racing friends! "l did everything that didn't involve working on the bike or riding it - so that included driving the truck, keeping us fed, sourcing fuel. parts, supplies and tyres, and especially repairing bodywork - Bachel used to crash a lot. I mean - a LOT!!

We ran it literally on a shoestring, because

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we had no money for parts. We made friends with one of the Honda medranics, and he would tell us'at exactly 9pm, I am going to throw our worn out parts in that bin over therei so we made sure to be waiting around the corner when he did so.Their idea of worn out was simply nicely run in for us!" After Nicotte stopped racing the Chevallier. he entrusted it to Gull for safe keeping. "l kept it

in our cellar first, until my wife told me to bring it upstairs to our living roomj' he says. "She complained that she never saw me because l'd disappear down the cellar with my friends to drink wine, and look at the bike. She was right!" ln 2002 Nicotte moved to SW France, so Gull bought the bike from him. "lt had been part of my youth - lU lived three whole years centred around that bike, so it wasn't going anywhere elsel' Nicotte's passing in 2004 inspired Gull to have the bike rebuilt to run again in the hands of friends in the increasingly numerous historic events like the Coupes Moto Legende at Dijon, or Bikers Classic at Spa.

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The Johnson Chevallier (let's call it thatl) features Alain's distinctive cold-drawn

The bike as it is today weighs 118k9 dry, rather than the 111 kg it scaled in 1984.

chrome-moly tubular steel twin-loop frame,

with massive strengthening around the

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steering head, despite which it still weighs little more than 5kg minus the fabricated chrome-moly tubular steel swingarm.

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The fully adjustable 40mm Chevallier upside down fork - complete with one set of internals stamped'Chevy' (go figure!) and the other'CAG 500'! - is set at a steeper 23" rake than the stock Honda's 24.5"

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WHTEI.BASI: At 1420mm the wheelbase is much longer that the RS500's 1375mm - presumably for added stability.

FfiONT BRAKES: lnstead of the single carbon front disc which de Radiguds raced with in 1984, there's a pair of 31Omm AP-Lockheed steel discs fitted today, with four-piston calipers.That's becauseThieny Espi6 fitted these when he borrowed the bike for the 1985 season - he couldn't afford to replace them regularly when they wore out, as they inevitably did - and they've been there ever sincel

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replicated the Dutch chassis design for their 1985 Mk.2 versionl lt might have been a Chevalier ripoff, instead... ln 1986, the de Radiguds/Chevallier/Honda RS500 line-up was reformed with Rollstar sponsorship, resulting in an even more successful season with eight top 10 finishes in the 12 races, en route to seventh place in the world championship - and top Honda triple, two places ahead of Ron Haslam on the ELF3, which doubtless provided much satisfaction. Highlight of the year was a magnificent second place for Didier on the Chevallier Honda in the pouring rain at Silverstone, just nine seconds behind winnerWayne Gardner's NSR500 Honda, and ahead of all the other factory four-cylinder bikes, including third place finisher Eddie Lawson'sYamaha. For 1987 de Radiguds was hired by Cagiva in a Belgian-run team with Bastos sponsorship and Lidge resident Francis Batta as team manager.

Though Didier only signed on condition that Alain came too, the result was an unhappy atmosphere in the team in a season in

which the ltalian bikes finally started to repay the billions of lire the Castiglioni brothers were spending on going 500GP racing, with Didier scoring the best finish yet for a Cagiva with fourth place in the penultimate GP in Brazil. Chevallier actually attempted to fit the Italian V4 motor in one of his Honda RS500 frames - but wasn't allowed to even test the result! At the end of the season Alain stopped GP racing, despite the offer of Honda NSR500 engines from Oguma which he was obliged to decline, since he had no team structure to run theV4 Chevallier that might have resulted. He instead began working for SonautoYamaha, developing their Paris-Dakar bikes and working on the hubcentreYamaha GTS road bike that debuted in 1993. A year later, he began a new job as technical director of the newly formed Voxan motorcycle company, having been recruited by owner Jacques Gardette to design the chassis and oversee technioal development of the bikes. But that's another story. . ..

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