Some inventions, tools, and techniques have advanced the sport of motocross significantly since their inception. The Racer X staff explains some of those advancements in this feature, called “Next Level."
Just about every bike behind the gate, from amateur to pro, is equipped with a holeshot device these days. But that wasn’t always the case, and when it was first spotted on a factory Yamaha roughly two decades ago, the concept was revolutionary.
“The concept goes way back,” says Eric Phipps of Works Connection, the Northern California aftermarket company that created the first off-the-shelf holeshot device. “The very first one was made by a guy named Arlo England back in the late ‘70s. He was on conventional forks and there was just now easy way of doing it. Fast-forward and upside down forks have been around forever. Chad Reed actually brought a hook-style one over from Europe in 2002. Yamaha had a rag covering up the fork guard in the pits. You couldn’t see it and nobody knew what was going on. They were hiding it well, but three races into the season Honda started watching videos and discovered Yamaha was using something to hold the front end down. They started developing their own, and at the time Mike Gosselaar was there. I’m friends with Mike and he mentioned it to me and said, ‘Hey you guys might want to look at this, this could be a good thing.’”
When you get a tip from “Goose,” you don’t sleep on it, and Works Connection did indeed get to work on developing their own holeshot device, throwing everything the company had into making the device a reality.
“We started making prototypes right away and we brought one out in I believe May of that year,” Phipps recalls. “They’ve come a really long way from the first one we made. You learn a lot over the years, and we’re still massaging ours even though we’ve had it for twenty years. We’re still learning. I believe we heard about it in late January in 2002, and we came to market in May. It was probably the fastest we’ve ever made something. We threw all of our efforts at it because we could see the future of it, that it was going to be a good product. It was approximately four-and-a-half months. Starting from nothing and working on a concept was challenging. We saw what Honda was doing, we saw what Yamaha was doing, and we did our own style. We went through about three different types before we found one that worked really well. You learn by failure. The first one we made worked pretty well, but we bent a pin. It was just a normal process of trial and error.”
As they say, the rest is history, and the device has proved so prolific in racing that you’re no longer at an advantage with one, you’re at a disadvantage without one, which is a true testament to just how effective this product proved to be.
