Greg Albertyn...Moto History

ICONS OF MOTOCROSS: ALBEE'S MADE TO MEASURE WINNER

Greg Albertyn signed off in world championship motocross with his third title in a row in 1994. This is the bike he did it on

 

 

TAKEN FROM MOTO ISSUE 82, AUGUST 2012

Words Gez Kane, photos by Adam Duckworth

Greg Albertyn is a motocross legend. He’s one of very few riders to have won on the world stage – a 125 world title in 1992, followed up with back to back 250 championships in 1993 and 1994 – and gone on to beat the best American riders in their own back yard.

With those three world crowns in his pocket, South African Albertyn headed for the States in 1995. He raced Supercross and outdoors, finally claiming the AMA National title in 1999 – beating a host of established stars including Jeff Emig, Doug Henry, Mike LaRocco and Sebastien Tortelli along the way. It gave Suzuki its first US title in almost 20 years which was a fantastic achievement and lifted Al- bertyn into the superstar category at a stroke.

But to get a ride with Roger DeCoster’s US Suzuki team in the first place, Albertyn had to impress on the GP circuit – and to do that, he needed world class bikes. This is one of them.

Albertyn had been riding for Honda in his 250 GP debut year. He’d beaten the best in Europe in what had become the premier class in GPs in his first year. So you’d have expected him to stay with Honda to defend his title. But in fact, Alber- tyn already had an eye on moving to the States with Honda in 1994 and had agreed terms in principle to do just that. But at the last minute, Honda decided not to fund the move and Albertyn was left without a ride in the Jan DeGroot GP squad. Believing Albertyn was heading to America,DeGroot already had Ste- fan Everts to replace him. Sylvain Geboers came up with a Suzuki deal and Albertyn signed to campaign what was, in essence, the bike that Everts had ridden in 1993.

Albertyn immediately set about developing the bike to suit himself and this is the result of his hard work. It might look like a production RM250 at first glance, but it’s a real one-off factory effort and virtually nothing remains of Everts’ old bike. It’s an RH250, Suzuki’s designation for works 250s. RN was the 500 designation and RA for 125s.

The whole package is tailored to suit Albertyn. Having signed the reigning world champion, Suzuki obviously decided to throw the kitchen sink at the bike he was to defend his title on and the first thing to go was the old frame. This one is hand-fabricated to Albertyn’s specification and is lighter than the ’93 design, it has a steeper steering geometry to make it turn quicker too. Similarly, the works swingarm is an im- mensely strong fabrication – again all hand welded – and every component in the rear suspension linkage is hand machined, too. During his winning season in 1994, Albertyn used four or five different sets of linkages to suit different tracks and conditions – and all were just as meticulously hand crafted as this set.

Suzuki’s works 250s were probably the horsepower kings of the heap in 1994 and with good reason. There are no production parts in Albertyn’s

RH250 engine – it’s a full factory build, with works crank, gearbox and barrel. The crankcases and outer engine covers are all magnesium, while all fasteners are titanium to save a few more vital grammes. In fact, the 1994 RH250 engine was so good Suzuki modified some of its 1995 and 1996 works frames to take the old 1994 engine while it was trying to squeeze a bit more power out of the disap- pointing replacement for it.

The obvious centrepiece of the bike is the titanium exhaust. It’s fab- ricated from individually rolled strips of titanium sheet and hand welded. To get the inside diameter of each seg- ment exactly right at each end, sheet titanium had to be cut into radiused strips with a complex calculation used to determine the exact radius of the arc. Bearing that in mind, it’s no surprise that each pipe used on Alber- tyn’s RH250 is reported to have cost around £7500 – and that’s without the hand built carbon fibre silencer.

Factory Showa upside down forks are housed in hand-machined factory yokes and the steerer tube is titanium. Naturally, there’s a full works Showa shock absorber at the rear too.

But just take a closer look at those yokes. They are a marvel of minimal- ist engineering. There’s precious little alloy wrapped round the top of the fork slider – just enough to do the job without carrying any excess weight. But looking at the yokes, it’s also easy to understand why just about every component on the bike had a strictly defined lifespan in terms of motos raced or hours run.

Details everywhere reveal Suzuki’s no expense spared attitude to prepar- ing a bike fit for a world champion. The fuel tank is a one-off alloy fabrication, the brakes are full factory Nissin units developed specifically for this bike and there are countless details you don’t fully appreciate until you spend a bit of time just looking at the bike. There’s the graceful arc of the rear brake pedal, the sand-cast magne- sium hubs, one-off hand crafted rear sub-frame and the custom plastics.

And then there’s the kick start lever – a short 125-type item. Albertyn wore knee braces and the reduced flex- ibility they afforded made it easier for him to use the shorter lever.

Despite all the effort that has clearly gone into making this bike, Albertyn was, apparently, less than impressed with it back in 1994. Three DNFs due to mechanical failures dur- ing the season probably didn’t help, but Albertyn is on record as describing the 1994 season as the worst cham- pionship he won and saying that the bike was “terrible”. That may be so, but then Albertyn is a multi-world and AMA champion. To mere mortals like us, his 1994 RH250 still looks pretty special. And the results prove that – at least with Greg Albertyn aboard – this 1994 RH250 was the best in the world.