GALLIC Great!
In the late 1980s there was a widening gap between 500GP racing’s haves, and have-nots – which is to say, between the works V4s, including the fledgling Italian Cagiva team, and the mostly Honda or Yamaha-mounted privateers.
The only way to avoid also-ran status was to come up with the massive sponsorship necessary to lease an NSR500 Honda or YZR500 Yamaha. If your budget wasn't big enough, forget it. Actually, there was an alternative: build your own engine, a path trod with a little success by the Italian Paton team and by Frenchman Claude Fior, whose inline across-the-frame four debuted at the Japanese GP in March 1988.
After inevitable teething troubles, the Fior gradually advanced up the list of finishers until it equalled the best of the three-cylinder privateers. It was the first 100% French four-cylinder GP bike since the four-cylinder mid-1950s Nougier, complete with the trademark wishbone front suspension created by Claude Fior, and nowadays found on the BMW K1600 family of bikes under the Duolever tag.
But building and developing your own engine is a different matter, as Fior (universally known by his 'Pif' nickname), found out the hard way, after early success with the RS500-powered Fior-Honda triples.
“We'd got as far as we could with the RS500 in GP racing,” he told me back in 1988 when I rode the Fior four. “We usually finished as first privateers in 1987, but to improve any further we had to have a four-cylinder engine. Without the money to lease one from the Japanese, who anyway wouldn’t have let us use my own chassis design, we had no choice but to build our own. In
