AGAINST ALL ODDS: THE CHEVALLIER HONDA RS500
In the early 1980s, French engineer Alain Chevallier succeeded in achieving the racing fairy tale. His death from cancer in October 2016, at the age of 68, marked the loss of 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 Italian, Spanish or even British, he’d 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 boss Youichi 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 with avant-garde steering and suspension solutions, beneath an outwardly conservative façade Chevallier’s designs were equally radical, but in his choice of materials.
At a time when the Japanese manufacturers were following Antonio Cobas in building aluminium chassis, Chevallier maintained his allegiance to tubular steel frames – but using cold-drawn steel which, being 20% 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 weight so
