MICK DOOHAN DEVELOPING THE HONDA NSR500
Mick Doohan and the Honda NSR500 formed the most formidable and successful partnership of the 500cc era of Grand Prix racing that ran from 1949 until 2001.
The NSR scored a total of 133 GP wins between its introduction in 1984 and Valentino Rossi’s last win on the bike in Rio in 2001, after which the four-stroke MotoGP missiles replaced the 500 two-strokes. Doohan was responsible for more than half of those wins, proving that he was the key player in the development of the bike that became the most successful GP racer of all time.
Doohan raced at a time when GP bikes were at their most ferocious and when the level of competition was astronomically high. While having to fight off the talents of Wayne Rainey, Eddie Lawson, Kevin Schwantz and Wayne Gardner, Doohan and the NSR managed to rack up five consecutive world championships between 1994 and 1998, and 54 race wins between 1990 and 1998.
But that was only part of the story; it was the way in which Doohan and the Honda dominated the competition that really marked them out as the original ‘aliens’. The pairing held the record for most wins in a season (12), most pole positions in a season (12), most successive pole positions (12), and most points ever racked up in a season (340).
All these records were set during the 1997 season when mighty Mick and the NSR were at their most dominant, but it wasn’t always like that.
Doohan first threw a leg over an NSR500 Honda in January 1989, at Honda’s Suzuka racetrack in Japan.
