Chemistry of Fire Read online

  “We are an outpost of the magic kingdom,” said Ray Blank. The magic kingdom to which he refers is not the one in Disney World but Honda in Japan. An intense, compact, bearded man who smoked filtered cigarettes as he walked between buildings on the Torrance campus (because there was no smoking inside), Blank spoke of his work in spiritual, even mystical, terms. “We have a lot of magicians in the race shop,” he said, referring to the tidy garages where the motorcycles were prepared for racing. “Sorcerers in training, fabricators who are alchemists.”

  He’s talking about people such as Tom Jobe. He had a drag racing team in the sixties called the Surfers. They had no sponsorship and so had to do everything themselves. Tom built an engine that could run almost pure nitro-methane when all other drag racing engines could run only about 70 percent without blowing up. He wound up in the Drag Racing Hall of Fame, which to most people might be an honor equivalent to having a pool ball named after you but is impressive to the members of another racing team. Tom is the fabricator for Honda Racing. Ray Blank calls him a magician. Ray Plumb, the crew chief for Superbikes, raves about Tom Jobe. Tom, a big man with a broad Germanic face, has a special deal with Honda Racing. His contract says that he comes in when he feels like it or when they need him and they pay him a lot of money. The rest of the time he can do whatever he wants. He has a dozen computers in his house and spends a lot of time with them, like someone obsessed with gerbils. When the computer department at the Torrance campus can’t solve a problem in the system, they call Tom, and he solves it. The word is that Tom can build anything out of anything. I saw a swing arm he had built that was considered a revolutionary design. I asked him if he used a computer to do the calculations. “No,” he said. “I just looked at it for a couple of weeks, and it came to me. It’s kind of like baking a cake.”

  Among his many other assignments, Blank was in charge of motorcycle racing at Honda of America at the time when I got to know him. He oversaw the expenditure of $10 million every year, which is what it cost each of the Big Four (Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki, and Suzuki) to try to solve the technical and spiritual puzzles of moving a two-wheeled vehicle around a curved track faster than anyone else. (It sounds like a lot of money, but Honda spent ten times that to race a car at the Indianapolis 500.)

  It would be easy to dismiss Blank’s spiritual interpretation of his work, but it can be traced to Soichiro Honda at the time of World War II. The philosophy of which he spoke permeates and defines the company from top to bottom. Anyone who spends time at Honda will hear the workers refer to the Honda Way. It may be someone busing tables in the corporate cafeteria, or it may be the head of the company.

  “The Japanese place a great value on the founder’s words and philosophy,” Blank said. He referred to Honda as a dojo, which is a training camp for martial arts. “The dō is the way,” Blank said. “The system. The founder’s way. In a sense he is viewed as a holy man.” And in the same sense, that philosophy permitted Ray Blank to regard Dirk as the holy man’s disciple. It permitted Dirk to work with no net. Honda had no plan B, no one to replace Dirk like a spare part if he broke. In that way, a whole corporation was, like those who ride its motorcycles, living on the edge of traction. The fragile life of one man was defining the experience of riding Honda motorcycles in the real world. And he might, at any moment, fly off into space.

  Dirk, like Soichiro, seemed bent on consuming the vast landscape in huge gulps. Honda sponsored a ride for journalists in the area around Temecula, halfway between Long Beach and San Diego. The company had rented the Rancho Valencia villa in Rancho Santa Fe for our comfort. A Miami Herald photographer, Candace Barbot, sat backward on Dirk’s bike, her feet propped precariously on the foot pegs, holding on to nothing, gorgeous blond hair flying from under her helmet, so that she could take photographs of us all coming toward her in a gang, up the hills and around the curves. Candace was demonstrating the way. She and Dirk almost immediately fell in love, in a purely spiritual sense, of course. They had found in each other kindred spirits. As Dirk fled past us at riot speed, he and Candace would laugh and shout, “Responsible riding!” mimicking the war cry of the new motorcyclist that Honda was trying to create.

  Ours were no random meanderings through Julian and Rainbow Canyon. No one at Honda went off half-cocked. Dirk had gone out the week before and made a detailed “trip book,” which showed each turn (with mileage and road diagrams), including notations that might help us to avoid a crash (“sand in road”) or appreciate a point of interest (“Jim’s Nut Farm”).

  I followed Dirk through an avocado plantation that covered land that had once been Mexico. Here and there a stream broke across the road, and we splashed through it in sun-glinting rooster tails. At one ford, a white German shepherd lay in the shade of a spreading tree on the edge of a ranch. He feinted at Dirk and then chased me lazily. I had the impression that if I had stopped, he would have licked my hand.

  A quarter mile later we climbed a cockeyed, off-camber road that angled up at a dizzying twenty-seven degrees—Dirk had measured it. Leaning into the turns was a trick since the road banked the wrong way. At the top we all stopped, perhaps ten of us, to take in the view, while Dirk went back down. Dark palisades of mountains fled in ranks that made a monster mandible beneath the sky. The valleys in between the teeth had filled with a buttermilk mist all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

  We heard his motor first and looked down the wicked incline. Then came Dirk, roaring uphill, ascending the whole way in a continuous wheelie, Dirk’s trademark.

  Tim shook his head, saying, “Man. Dirk-san is the king.”

  Dirk liked to wear a North Face vest. North Face has nothing to do with motorcycles. It’s more the kind of gear a backpacker would wear. When we asked him about it, Dirk explained, “When I crash, I tell the emergency room doctors that I was hiking or bird-watching.” Why? we all wanted to know. “In order to skew the statistics about the danger of various sports,” he said. The month before he died, I was walking through the Torrance campus with Dirk and Ray Blank. We were crossing a parking lot, heading toward the race shops, when we passed a white Honda van parked among the other vehicles—motorcycles, trucks, cars, huge red semis. The van caught my attention because it was completely smashed from the front end back to about the second seat. It had also been defaced with graffiti written in Magic Marker. The inscriptions read like the ones people put on a cast when someone breaks a leg. Most of them were addressed to Dangerous Dirk. One said, “Don’t tell my wife.” A month earlier, I had been riding dirt bikes in Baja California, staying at Mike’s Sky Rancho up in the mountains south of Ensenada, and everyone had been talking about some guy who had driven a Kawasaki into the swimming pool a few days earlier. It turned out that it had been Dirk.

  When I asked Dirk about the wrecked van in the parking lot, he said, “Oh, that . . .” and went on to say, “No, honest, it wasn’t my fault,” as if I had assumed it would be. He had been streaking down the 405 in the van at about seventy-five when the car in front of him did a 360. Dirk plowed into it broadside. “The airbag wrapped my glasses around my face,” he said. Other than a long bruise from the seat belt, though, he hadn’t been hurt. But the inscriptions clearly suggested that everyone had assumed that the crash was Dirk’s fault. Dirk, who had once sawed the cast off his broken arm so that he could surf. Dirk, who had learned to juggle and to ride a unicycle.

  When someone crashed (they always do on these rides), Dirk would be the first on the scene. He took charge with a calm, gentle wisdom. He’d been there. He knew he’d be lying there again. Most people get hurt pretty badly in those falls. The country we ride in is beautiful, so it’s all cliffs and ravines. The beauty and danger are the two sides of the same coin. Dirk would get the injured party to lie still, to stay calm, while someone else called an ambulance and others put out flags to warn away the oncoming cars. No matter how many crashes he witnessed, including his own, Dirk never slowed down. He certainly never entertained the idea of stopping. When
we saw him ride, it appeared almost a foregone conclusion that he would die horribly, though exactly how horribly we could not have predicted.

  The Honda Way combines equal parts of audacity and humility. Dirk’s character and work formed its perfect expression in the same way Soichiro Honda’s had. I never met Mr. Honda. So I can’t know nearly as much about his character. But his deeds are revealing. Honda was the son of a blacksmith. The biographies have it that the first time Honda saw a motorcar, he ran down the street after it. He found a puddle of oil it had left, plunged his hands into it, and wiped it all over his arms in sheer joy. He dropped out of school to become an auto mechanic’s apprentice. In time, he opened his own shop, and from it he raced cars until he crashed and had to spend a year recovering from his injuries. (That is a fairly typical story. Ray Blank, just to give one example, had to give up motorcycle racing because of a crash.)

  At the age of thirty-one, Honda returned to school to study metallurgy so that he could manufacture better piston rings. He manufactured piston rings until the end of World War II and then began selling bicycles that were fitted with small war-surplus engines. He began development of an original motorcycle right after the war and in 1948 founded the Honda Motor Company. The next year he introduced the first Honda motorcycle, the Model D, known as the Dream. The name was not a marketing ploy. It was Soichiro Honda’s dream. But it was also a dream to ride, because it had an electric starter and was quiet.

  Soichiro Honda personally held 470 patents by the end of his life, none of them trivial. Each contributed substantially not only to Honda’s seemingly boundless profits but also to the technical development of motorcycles and the cultural development of those who rode them—even to the way they viewed their world. If Mr. Honda (and Dirk for the last two decades of the twentieth century) formed one leg of the tripod, and his engineers formed the second, then the third leg has always been racing. Honda’s emergence into racing began the long, sweeping shift in the culture of motorcycling away from the image of the Hells Angels and toward what it is today.

  In 1954 Mr. Honda announced to the world that his company intended to win the world’s most prestigious motorcycle race, the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy. The established forces in motorcycle racing, British and American manufacturers, greeted that declaration with grave skepticism and a certain sense of hilarity. At that time, when a Chevrolet could still be expected to last twenty years, “cheap” and “Japanese” were considered synonymous. Japan was known for transistor radios and bad copies of American engineering. Suggesting that a Japanese motorcycle could win at the Isle of Man was like suggesting that Mexico was going to put a man on the moon.

  But Soichiro Honda gave no sign that he was discouraged by being the object of ridicule. A modest and self-deprecating man, he traveled to the Isle of Man that same year to see what he was up against. He found competitors whose racing machines developed three times the horsepower of anything Honda had.

  Mr. Honda went back to Japan and began systematically developing a new motorcycle for the race. Never one to go off half-cocked, he spent almost five more years in the process of development and testing. To this day, Honda engineers frustrate the people in marketing and sales and even in racing because of their obsessive attention to detail, their adamant refusal to let go of anything until it is perfect. It can make the wait for a new motorcycle seem interminable to someone who wants to win a race with it or sell it on the showroom floor.

  When Mr. Honda left the Isle of Man and vanished for five years into what was then the terra obscura of Japan, people on the American and British racing teams reasonably assumed that he’d seen the folly of his bold declaration and had retired to making silly (if profitable) little scooters. Five years is a long time. Certainly no winning team was trembling in fear of Soichiro’s “rice burners,” as they called them.

  Then in 1959, Honda finished sixth in the ultra-lightweight 125cc class and won the manufacturer’s trophy in that class. But 1961 was the year that changed everything. Honda showed up with new bikes in both the 250cc and 125cc categories and won first, second, third, fourth, and fifth places. The world of motorcycle racing was devastated. In the course of a single event, Mr. Honda had brought to an end the decades of unchallenged dominance the British and Germans and Americans had enjoyed both on the street and on the track. It was a defeat from which they never recovered. It was the beginning of the end for British motorcycle manufacturers, and the Americans (i.e., Harley-Davidson) never again held a dominant position on the track. In the years immediately after that, the mid to late sixties, my friends and I rode British bikes, Triumphs and BSAs. In 1969 when Honda introduced its in-line four, the CB750, it was a revolutionary act. Engineers around the world were trembling in their labs, knowing what it meant, but we on our Triumphs laughed at the guys on Hondas. We said they sounded like sewing machines. They sounded alien to us because we’d never heard the sound of a motorcycle running properly. While we were stuck at the side of the road, kicking and kicking our starters, trying to get a dead BSA going, the Honda guys zoomed silently past us, waving and smiling. Mr. Honda had not yet concerned himself with what we called “soul,” the sound of a poorly designed engine, on which Harley-Davidson believed it held a patent. That would come later. At that time, Honda had one thing in mind: the irrefutable act of going faster than anyone else—forever.

  Our motorcycles, when they ran, sounded like thunder. Even in our youth, we were the old guard. We were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. We were blind to the future and to the significance of Honda’s engineering perfection. Decades later, Honda would have to engineer great, lobed crankshafts that would mimic in a well-designed engine the vibrations—the thunder—that took place naturally in a poorly designed one. They literally stole Harley’s thunder. The bike was called the Shadow, perhaps as a nod to the old Vincent Black Shadow.

  During the seventies, Honda spread its influence throughout all categories of motorcycle racing. It wasn’t just because of good work, perfectionism, hiring the best riders. It was official company policy to win. It was a spiritual mandate. It was the Honda Way. And Honda didn’t merely win. He destroyed his opponents. When he announced that he would win at the Indianapolis 500, it sent a shock wave of fear through the automobile industry. By then people understood what such a declaration from Soichiro meant, and as in a B-grade horror movie, they could see the dark shadow lengthening as Honda returned to Japan to spend another six years developing a racing engine and a chassis that would blow away the British Cosworths and the American engines, which had held a lock on car racing until then. When Honda took an interest in your sport, it was a death sentence. You knew he’d catch you. You even knew approximately how long you had to live.

  But racing was never an end in itself, not any more than meditation in a Zendo is an end. Sitting in silence is a means to the goal of enlightenment. Koichi Amemiya, who held several top positions at Honda over the years, says that the “racing spirit” is the driving force within the company.

  “Racing is the crucible of development,” Ray Blank told me. “Racing is the only way to develop anything. Engineering excellence comes from a basis of competitive elements that are found only in racing. There is no thought at Honda of ever getting out of racing.”

  Honda not only competes with the world. It competes with itself. Blank showed me Tom Jobe’s work in the race shop one day. We marveled at the ingenuity of the device, a finely machined ellipse within another ellipse, used for tightening the drive chain. “Japan has already thought of this, I’m sure,” Blank said matter-of-factly. “But they won’t tell us. That’s part of the discipline. We are their children.” The Honda Racing Corporation in Japan does not give Blank motorcycles to race. American Honda must purchase them, develop them, and support itself on its own. “We are a gempo,” Blank said, “a distributor responsible for our own development and marketing.” Each year American Honda purchases two Superbike race packages, each for around $600,000, from Japan. The package
is essentially a motorcycle (some assembly required) and spare parts, including a spare engine. It’s like receiving a model in a box. More than that, it’s like receiving a puzzle. The mechanics and motorcycle “tuners,” as they are called, then must take the parts “and bring this bike to life,” as Blank put it. “What they do in the shop dramatically changes it. Development of the bike never stops.” The Superbike that Honda raced at the time I was visiting carried the designation RC45. “It’s eight years old and still evolving,” Blank told me. Perhaps most frightening to its competitors at Suzuki, Yamaha, and Kawasaki (Harley-Davidson was no longer a serious competitor, and the British didn’t even enter the big races by then) was the fact that the RC45 was an antique by Superbike standards. Yet it continued to win against motorcycles that had been introduced that same year. At one event at the Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey, California, race officials wanted to inspect the RC45 for possible violations of the rules, because they couldn’t explain how it could keep going faster and faster every year.

  Despite what people say, winning is everything, and Honda’s sweeping victory at the Isle of Man in 1961 was the defining moment in the history of motorcycling. The romanticized American tradition of grease and gumption were shown to be no longer sufficient to the task. A strong scientific method, along with the Japanese way of addressing a job with fierce dedication and Zen patience of oceanic depth, had proved to be the only formula for winning both on the track and in the marketplace. And the world of motorcycling began its gradual turn away from the image of the Ugly American Biker. When the cultural compass had finished its swing, it pointed due east. American motorcycle culture turned to the perfectionism of the Zendo. (Harley-Davidson remains nothing more than a fashion statement.) There are even those who argue that our very consciousness of the term “Zen” can be traced to Japan’s motorized vehicle industry. It appears now even in the way the racers talk about themselves and their work.