Data collection and development are becoming more and more important in the pits. With the bikes coming stock with different ignition maps and re-programmers, the advent of fuel injection has opened up a cornucopia of options for the teams. With it becoming so important in our sport and at the local track, I thought I’d call up EFI and data specialist Theo Lockwood of the Monster Energy Kawasaki team to talk about his job, data, and dirt bike programming.
Racer X: Give us a little bit on your background and what you came through and when you moved over to the motocross team.
Theo Lockwood: Basically I was in road race forever, doing various things. Started out kind of doing engine stuff and then went to Europe and was doing World Superbike stuff for Kawi there. I ended up being kind of a crew chief for Chris Walker and started doing data. I had done data here before that, but that was kind of the first introduction to 2D data stuff, which is a German company. They were kind of sponsoring the team, so I got to meet them and have a lot of interaction with them. That was kind of my first official learning time of data stuff with road racing. Then I got offered a job at Kawi and moved back to the States and doing data on the road race side.
In 2008, when the fuel injection started coming on Kawasaki dirt bikes, I got trained on that because I’d been doing fuel injection stuff for road race. So I went to Japan and learned about that. I guess one of the road race teams folded in probably 2009 and I moved over directly to motocross doing fuel injection stuff originally and then as it evolved into more and more data and that kind of stuff.
There’s more than a few road race data guys around the pits, and I guess the road race guys like you are ahead of the curve of us here in motocross.
Yeah, for sure. I enjoy that, being at the pointy end of the spear. For sure it has its ups and downs. Sometimes you struggle. There’s a big difference between coming from road race where the rider maybe makes 40 percent of the difference and the performance of those vehicles, whereas in motocross it’s probably 70 percent, or 80 percent rider. That was a big learning curve for me for sure. It took me a long time to figure out. And I don’t know why, maybe just because I’m dumb—I just couldn’t get my head around how much input the rider had into making the bike go faster.
They’re complaining about something and you give them a little more fuel somewhere and you’re like, “Okay, there you go—go win now.”
And in road race it made a big difference. A little change that I could make would make a big difference. Sometimes in motocross a little change that I make they don’t even notice or it doesn’t make any difference. That’s one thing that I’ve had to kind of re-learn. Which part do we need to work on to make a difference? That’s always a question that I have. I think, for me anyway, it’s been difficult because the rider makes so much more difference than I can make.
How are these riders adapting to the changes that you can make? Is it sort of a learning curve on their end too?
Even when I was leaving road race, those last two years that I was there was kind of a big evolution for us because we were starting to the bike to have different power levels at different corners, basically a torque level if you want to call it that. So you would go and do wheelie control and that kind of stuff. They didn’t know what we could do, so it was a big experiment on both our parts. Of course, you had to be a little bit careful because you were dealing with a live person. You’re not dealing with a theoretical solution. So if you made a mistake it had a big consequence.
That was something, and is still something, that I try and be aware of, if it’s something that I’m a little bit worried about affecting the bike in a way that makes the rider crash or make it do something that he doesn’t want it to do. I’m always a little bit conservative when it comes to that.
There’s probably not as many parameters on a motocross bike as there is in road race, right? Or is it the same amount?
From the last time I worked on a superbike, for sure we had more stuff going on, like front travel, and now we’re just getting to the point where we’re going to be able to see front travel. There’s other things that we could see before on a superbike that we can’t really see now. For instance, we don’t have wheel speed sensors on there. RCH Suzuki has wheel speed sensors but we don’t. That’s something that we don’t get to see in racing.
Is there a point where maybe some of this stuff is a little overkill for the sport of supercross?
I don’t have the answer to that. I don’t know if anybody else has the answer to it, but I don’t. I think the only way that we really find out is just to try it. You go through a learning curve and you go, “Yup, I’m not getting any useful information off that,” or you go, “Wow, that made a huge difference. Now I understand what they’re talking about in this area or that area.” I think that interpretation is the biggest deal.
We did some work with data when I was at Yamaha, and although it was a bit elementary to what’s going on now, I remember a rider coming in and telling he’s wide open in this section. We’d look at the data and the rider’s at quarter-throttle or a half-throttle at most. How do you sort of tiptoe around that? Are you the guy that just says, look, you’re not?
I don’t, because I don’t think that does any good for anybody. It doesn’t do any good for the rider. Different riders need different ways of approaching it. It’s just like in a social situation when you’re talking to somebody. You may come about it in some other way and they’re like, “You’re right.” And everybody accepts it in the way that you intended to do it. I think that’s something that is important in the field that I’m in, is to understand: one, how the person wants it, because you can’t give the same information the same way to everybody
The bike comes off the track and you download what? What are you looking at each time you’re downloading what the bike has just done in a main event or whatever?
One of the main things that I don’t think is any secret I think everybody that has data stuff is doing, I look at starts. I think starts are important obviously in supercross. So I look at starts, whether that be clutch action or how much wheel spin they have, etc. And trying to get that a little bit better. But of course that’s something that changes throughout the night a little bit. It’s not really a science. It’s only something that we can look at week in and week out and try and make some decisions based upon the information that we’ve gathered along the way. Hopefully then make a better difference.
Now of course we don’t want to go too far one way or the other and make the start worse than it would be if we didn’t do anything. We’ve got to be a little bit careful about that. I’ll look at rear suspension movement and just see how much movement the thing has and where it’s having trouble. Maybe for instance Davi [Millsaps] might say it’s a little bit fast in the rear at some place or it feels a little soft. That might give us an indication of what the speeds are when it’s doing that or what we can do to try and help the situation that he’s in. But I couldn’t just put that data system on any bike, some other bike, and not have any information about the ridercand be able to tell him whether it’s good or bad, or whether they should adjust this area or that area. It’s something that the data’s acquired over a long period of time and you try and look for patterns. If you can find a pattern then maybe you can apply that information to our stipulation.
You can see where the guy finished and how the bike worked and look at it from that race.
Exactly. As you gather more and more information from testing, then you have an idea of what it’s doing in each situation. Obviously you’re trying springs or you’re trying different settings in the shock or the forks.. Maybe you can translate that into the race.
But again, like I said before, in road racing it’s very easy to pinpoint those things. It would be easy to say, this is the speed that he likes the shock to move in, and no worries, we just go to the racetrack and use it. But here that’s not the case. I haven’t found it to be the case. Maybe I’m not clever enough to figure it out.
The track changes every lap.
It’s difficult to try and figure out for me.
Is there anything that you can relate or tell us a story where your direct input, you looking at the data, talking to the rider, and changing a parameter advancing, retarding, more fuel, less fuel, something you did directly helped a rider either win a race or clear an obstacle or do anything like that?
I think it’s hard to say that something I’ve seen and talked with RV about—or Davi or Jake [Weimer] or anybody about—has directly affected their either getting a good start or clearing an obstacle or getting better traction or whatever. RV has done it a few times; he comes in and he goes, “I’ve got no grip right here. You need to help me with an engine setting.” Maybe not grip, but maybe it’s just too powerful, or maybe it’s, “I’d like to make it have a little bit more.” I think this helps us identify a smaller area, so in other words we can say that it’s within a ten degrees part of the throttle, a ten-degree bandwidth of throttle where he’s having an issue, instead of saying it’s either under half-throttle or over half-throttle. We can say it’s actually between 30 percent and 40 percent, or 50 percent and 60 percent as opposed to making a huge change to affect the same thing. But I think the changes would have been made even prior to this. They would have been made and they would have worked. I think it just allows us to narrow that area down to something maybe we can understand a little bit better and make a finer adjustment.
What’s coming next data-acquisition-wise or EFI-wise? Is it maybe throttle by wire? What do you think is coming down the pike?
I think the throttle wire stuff is coming. I don’t know when it’s coming, but I think it is coming. A lot of people say, they get on 450s, the normal average Joe gets on a 450 and goes, “This thing has a lot of power.” Sometimes it’s difficult to ride. So I think that might be one way to help control that type of stuff. We’re starting to see it now, this electronic suspension, like really high-end road bike stuff. Road bikes have electronic suspension. So it’s possible that something like that’s coming. Obviously KTM’s been messing around with this air shock thing, and I think air springs are coming. Right now there’s a big controversy about spring and air forks, and people just in general don’t seem, only from the outside, don’t seem super excited about having an air fork, but there are some advantages. I think that it’s early days for those technologies and I think they’re on their way. Just in general I think it’s going to be a constant illusion. If we look at the KTM it’s super light and has electric start. I think, electric start, hopefully see that coming for a lot of people. I think that’s a huge innovation. Everybody loves it. Obviously they managed to get the weight down, so that’s pretty cool.
The over-the-counter ignition stuff that’s out there now, how good is that compared to what you guys run? It looks like it does everything that you could possibly want.
It’s a difficult area because the manufacturers spend a lot of money and a lot of time making sure that their ECUs are mapped correctly for their bikes and making sure that they operate at all times and they don’t ever have any kind of glitches or stumbles. Of course nobody wants that. I think that GET has done a great job of making an ECU that kind of works on almost everything. Sometimes they have some issues, but I think that’s one thing that’s difficult for them is that they have to cover so many motorcycles, or so many different types of systems and engine configurations and different ways people ride and all that stuff. And yet the stuff seems to work, for the most part, pretty well. Of course there’s an instance here and there, but I think they’ve done a pretty damn good job to be honest.
I agree. They’ve got to make it work for a 55-year-old vet rider and a 17-year-old pro rider.
And for a KTM all the way through a Kawasaki and a Suzuki and a Honda and everything else. I don’t think it’s super easy. I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes at all. I’m in a relatively easy position compared to what they have.
Don’t the MotoGP guys flip a button or a switch where they like electrolyze their suspension? They have electric suspension that changes the viscosity of the oil for corners?
Öhlins is obviously kind of a leader of that system, having either a valving that changes electrically, either with a switch or that kind of stuff. But I don’t think that it’s legal yet. I don’t think that they’ve allowed it onto a motorcycle. I could be wrong because I don’t keep up with that 100 percent, but I don’t think that that’s quite there. But that’s what I was talking about, some kind of a suspension that has that.
Maybe one day a rider can come out of a turn before the whoops and flip a switch to immediately stiffen his shock a tad for a set of whoops.
I don’t think you’re going to flip a button; I think it’s going to have to be something like the suspension’s going to have to react relatively quickly to changes and the dampening floor it’s based upon, maybe the speed at which the shock is moving. I think it’d be difficult for a rider to sort it out. It’s going to have to be more of an automatic thing than a manual type of deal.
Did you notice a difference from say, Ryan Villopoto, in 2009 to RV in 2014 as opposed to how much he embraced what you were doing?
Yeah, for sure. [At first] he didn’t know. If you don’t know, then you don’t know. Plus, I think the transition between the 250 and the 450s is pretty darn big. [Justin] Barcia revved up his 250, and then when he comes to 450 he tries to rev it up, and I don’t think it’s working that well for him. It’s the same with RV. When he first started riding, he’d ride the thing around in first all the time and it never worked. It worked enough obviously to get him some championships, but it wasn’t the best way to ride the bike. I think that that’s a lot of our responsibility as a team to inform the riders, “Listen, this is how the bike works the best. It might behoove you to work in this direction a little bit.”
That’s a personnel issue where you have to decide how you’re going to approach that with certain people, and there’s a good time and there’s a bad time for that. Obviously, if the guy’s willing to race it’s difficult to go and tell him that he’s doing it all wrong and he’s got to change it. You have to sell it to them just like you’d sell a car. You have to sell it to them in a way that they are willing to accept. I think that’s a big part of it.