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The 2005 MotoGP World Championship was actually supposed to be revived by a six-cylinder engine from the Czech Republic. But the Blata prototype was never completed. The story of a dream shattered.
The Red Bull Yamaha WCM 500 team of the American real estate entrepreneur Bob MacLean and his British team partner Peter Clifford won five Grands Prix in the last years of the 500 cc two-stroke world championship from 1998 to 2000 with Garry McCoy (3 wins), Simon Crafar (one win) and Régis Laconi (one win).
However, the racing team was unable to find a supplier for a 990 cc four-stroke engine for 2002 in the new MotoGP four-stroke era as a private team. In the transition year mentioned, the inferior 500 cc machines of the privateer teams were still allowed to race against the 990 cc four-stroke engines. In the fight against the new four-stroke rockets, the Red Bull Yamaha WCM riders John Hopkins and McCoy slumped to 15th and 20th place in the 2002 Riders' World Championship.
The following year, the WCM team (WCM stood for World Championship Motorsport) made do with four-stroke engines based on the R1 Superbike World Championship engines from Yamaha. But after a protest from Superbike World Championship promoter Flammini, they were not allowed to use them because they were not sufficiently different from the near-production SBK engines. The homologation of the SBK racing machines had been so deceitful and fraudulent for years that the walls were shaking.
According to the Bimota Owners Club, only eight of the Bimota V2 Suzuki existed with which Anthony Gobert won the Superbike World Championship race in Phillip Island; 150 would have been required for homologation.
The necessary 150 of the 900 cc Petronas three-cylinder were never produced either. The Fogarty SBK team still was granted homologation for this model. An example of this motorcycle never actually went on sale at a dealer, as required by FIM law according to the motto: Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.
Benelli also never built the required bike numbers for SBK approval. At the time, 1,000 units were required; Benelli only built 100 series bikes a year.
After the debacle of 2002, WCM with team manager Peter Clifford actually wanted to compete in 2003 with Honda 990 cc V5 customer engines and Moriwaki chassis. But Red Bull boss Didi Mateschitz was not convinced by this home-built project. After the disappointing results in 2002, he withdrew as main sponsor and instead supported KTM in its entry into the 125cc World Championship.
Yamaha also stopped supporting the former winning WCM team.
The once so successful WCM team was left with next to nothing and therefore allied itself with the British chassis manufacturer Harris Performance Products. The team was renamed Harris WCM. The team quickly built its own engine based on the Yamaha YZF-R1 superbike engine. Clifford had no understanding for the subsequent ban of this in-line engine from the 2003 MotoGP World Championship. "Our engine had almost nothing left of the original R1 Yamaha engine when the FIM banned it," remembers Peter Clifford. "We had rebuilt everything. In order for Harris Performance Products to build a rolling chassis, they had to build it around a lump or a dummy that they were familiar with. They couldn't wait for us to have a prototype engine ready before they started on the chassis. Otherwise we would never have made it to the start of the season. That’s why we had to take a shortcut and used the R1 engine as a basis. But there was hardly anything left of the original engine when we first raced our conversion."
WCM: No permission to start at the 2003 Suzuka GP
"When we went to Japan for the start of the 2003 season, we used the original housing, but the internals had all been changed. All the valves, all the springs, all the connecting rods, the entire gearbox internals, as well as the crankshaft and the pistons – because we had a different bore-stroke ratio. Ours was 76 x 54.5, the original was 74 x 58 mm. We also had different electronics and so on."
WCM negotiated with the riders Regis Laconi, Steve Hislop, José Luis Cardano and Jay Vincent for 2003, but finally presented Chris Burns and David de Gea as the rider duo.
The WCM team was eventually faced with a turbulent start to the season and had to sit out the opening race in Suzuka/Japan because the engines did not comply with the rules. At the request of SBK promoter Flammini, the FIM vetoed the plan and banned these four-cylinder engines.
The WCM team lodged an appeal with the International Disciplinary Court, but was unsuccessful. The Court of Arbitration for Sport, as the highest authority, also confirmed the disqualification of the converted R1 engine.
WCM then competed in the British, German and Czech Grand Prix in 2003 with Yamaha 500 two-strokes and continued to develop the four-stroke in-line engine in parallel. The Harris WCM four-stroke motorcycle only complied with the rules at the Portugal GP on September 8th.
In 2004, the new rider pairing was Chris Burns and Michel Fabrizio. Due to an injury, Burns was replaced by James Ellison in the middle of the season, and Youichi Ui stood in for Fabrizio in Portugal, who was exceptionally allowed to ride the three-cylinder Cube for Aprilia.
In mid-2004, WCM announced its collaboration with the Czech minibike manufacturer Pavel Blata at the Brno GP. By that time Aprilia used the three-cylinder engines, Yamaha and Ducati had built four-cylinder engines, and Honda the superior RC211V five-cylinder. WCM and Blata planned to use V6 machines for 2005, although the opposing engineers questioned whether such a concept would not be too thirsty given the existing fuel tank limits.
Once again, a new team name was chosen, but the Blata WCM racing team never really got going. James Ellison and Franco Battaini were signed as riders, but there was no sign of the V6 motorcycle at the start of the 2005 season, so the Harris WCM bike from 2003 and 2004 was still used.
"Looking back, I'm still proud of what we achieved back then," Peter Clifford sums up today. "We competed in two full seasons in 2004 and 2005 as a small private team with our own engine. We collected World Championship points and didn't have a single technical failure in 2004. Not even all the factory teams managed that."
Blata: The 125 cc project became a V6 plan
It was repeatedly trumpeted that the V6 Blata would make its World Championship debut at the Brno GP on August 28, 2005. But the motorcycle continued to be conspicuous by its absence.
Pavel Blata, once an active motorcycle racer himself and who took part in the 1977 International Enduro Six Days, originally only wanted to build a 125cc two-stroke GP machine. Clifford persuaded him and partner Steve Lichtag to do something proper straight away - and enter the MotoGP World Championship.
The 40cc two stroke Blata minibikes were successful in the European Championship at the time; in 2004, Michael Duchacek narrowly missed out on the brand's third European title. But Blata, who is just under 160 cm tall, aspired to greater heights. The MotoGP project was exactly what the former car mechanic wanted. "He suffers from short man syndrome," said Blata partner Lichtag.
Blata started his company in 1990, but had long since slipped into financial turmoil due to the many cheap Chinese minibike copies. This meant that his grandiose business plans were dashed: in 2004 he sold 15,000 minibikes, and by 2009 production was to have increased to 100,000 units. But nothing came of these visions.
The WCM owners assumed that they had found a strong technology partner in Blata, with whose help they would have a better chance against the factory-supported teams.
Blata dreamed of reviving the magic of the renowned Czech motorcycle brands Jawa and CZ in the premier class.
However, the V6 engine was never developed to racing readiness, even though company boss Blata repeatedly emphasized that the motorcycle would be completed soon.
Coen Baijens was responsible for the design of the V6 engine, but he never really appeared in public.
Blata V6: Too thirsty, but fuel cooling was banned
The opposing designers complained that the V6 Blata was doomed to failure because the six-cylinder bikes had to weigh 155 kg, the four and five-cylinder 145 kg, and the three-cylinder from Aprilia only 135 kg. And it was also assumed that the thirsty V6 would not survive a race distance with the prescribed tank capacity.
Peter Clifford therefore planned to cool the racing fuel. "But that was banned again a short time later," he recalls.
After that, the Blata project went quiet, and the WCM team also didn't speak much about the V6 – because of an ongoing court case, as it later turned out.
It was not until 2009 that Peter Clifford, WCM team boss and former journalist, reported that Blata had only produced a lump or a dummy of a single prototype; the engine (cylinder angle 90 degrees) had never been run on a test bench.
It was also no longer a secret that WCM had filed a lawsuit against the Czech blowhard Pavel Blata for non-fulfillment of contractual obligations, demanding compensation.
In 2007, the MotoGP displacement fell from 990 to 800 cc, but first of all WCM needed an engine for 2006. WCM was turned down by KTM. The Austrian 990 cc V4 engines had been given to Kenny Roberts' Proton KR team in 2005 – at least until the Brno GP.
At the end of the 2005 season, WCM team director Peter Clifford announced that they would be competing with KTM's V4 engines in 2006, with Jeremy McWilliams and Alex Hofmann as the rider candidates.
But the KTM plans could never be put into action. The engines from Upper Austria were not fully developed, there was no money for competitive electronics, and the small WCM private team could not make a significant financial contribution to further development. KTM therefore concentrated on the 125cc and 250cc World Championships.
On the provisional MotoGP entry list for 2006, WCM was still presented as a Bimota partner, with Jeremy McWilliams and Jason Perez under consideration as riders. "We wanted to have Bimota build the chassis for the KTM engines. But KTM withdrew the offer for the engines, so we would have had to use our old WCM in-line engine again in 2006," Clifford recalls.
Finally Harris WCM was missing from the final list of participants for 2006. The team withdrew from the MotoGP World Championship: no sponsors, no competitive material, no top riders. A debacle was looming.
In June 2006, WCM and Winona Racing entered into a strategic partnership for the 250cc World Championship. WCM planned to return to MotoGP in 2007, but when the main sponsor never paid the agreed sum, the end of WCM was sealed forever.
WCM was subsequently involved in a legal dispute with Blata for years. MacLean and Clifford sued the minibike manufacturer in the Czech Republic. "We took legal action against Blata because they never completed and produced the promised MotoGP motorcycles," Clifford explained to GPone.com. "We lost because the judge said it was not clear which WCM company had concluded the agreement with Blata. We had two separate racing companies, one based in the USA, one in Ireland.“
Blata had built up a small, modest racing department, but grossly underestimated the costs of MotoGP development and the manpower required.
Unfortunate, because the six-cylinder sound would certainly have been music to the ears of many MotoGP fans.
