Erv Kanemoto

Erv Kanemoto

Erv Kanemoto (born May 7, 1943 in Utah ) is a former technician and team owner in the motorcycle world championship .

Life

As the son of a farmer, Kanemoto came into contact with technology early on through the maintenance of his machines. As a teenager, he tinkered with karts that his sister raced in. He started working with motorcycles when he was in his early twenties, when the company he worked for was on strike and he was helping out in a friend's workshop. He showed talent and was used to improve the performance of racing motorcycles. Kanemoto quickly made a name for himself as a tuner on the racing scene. In 1968 he was hired by Kawasaki as a racing mechanic.

American racing

In the early 1970s, Kanemoto founded his own racing team and used Kawasakis in national championships. From 1973 to 1979 Kanemoto and driver Gary Nixon formed a successful team with a title in the US National Road Racing Championship .

After Gary Nixon's resignation in 1979, Kanemoto switched to the up-and-coming Freddie Spencer as a technician , who had won the AMA Grand Prix Championship in the up to 250 cc class in 1978 with a Yamaha built by Kanemoto .

Motorcycle World Championship

Freddie Spencer's 1983 Honda

While Spencer competed for Honda in the US Superbike Championship in 1981, Kanemoto was drawn to the motorcycle world championship , where he initially worked as a mechanic for former world champion Barry Sheene in the Yamaha works team. When Spencer moved to the World Cup in 1982 , Honda brought Kanemoto into the team. Kanemoto won three world titles as head of technology with Spencer (500 cm³ 1983 , 250 cm³ and 500 cm³ 1985 ).

Kanemoto was with Honda's works team HRC until 1988 before he founded his own team - Kanemoto Racing - and won other titles with Eddie Lawson (500 cm³ 1989 ), Luca Cadalora (250 cm³ 1991 and 1992 ) and Max Biaggi (250 cm³ 1997 ). He has also worked with drivers such as Wayne Gardner and Alex Barros, among others .

The search for sponsors became more and more difficult at the end of the 1990s. After the 1999 season , in which Kanemoto could not find a sponsor for his driver John Kocinski , he moved to Bridgestone to help develop a Grand Prix tire. In 2002 he used a Bridgestone-tyred machine with driver Jürgen van den Goorbergh . After this season he retired from his work on the race track and worked as a consultant first for Suzuki and later for Honda.

Honors

• In 2001 Kanemoto was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame .

Web links

• Motorcycle Hall of Fame - Erv Kanemoto ( Memento from March 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (English)