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The role of Crew Chief has grown way beyond what people used to think of as being any particular rider’s top mechanic. In a more complicated racing world than ever before a Crew Chief needs to be psychologist/father confessor/tech guru/staff sergeant and Group Welfare Officer. Simultaneously. We look at a few of the people who try to mould their metal and men into winning shapes each Saturday and Sunday at WorldSBK races. Crew Chief is one job even the most casual of race fans understands. The person who talks to the rider in the garage and looks after the team of mechanics, surely? It’s more complicated than that nowadays… There is the technical side, culminating in the final machine set-up for sessions and races. Then there is the human side of any potential race-winning equation. The Hard Machine and the Soft Machine, you could say.

Alvaro Bautista’s Crew Chief, Giulio Nava, at Aruba.it Racing – Ducati, as well as working with the Spanish rider at Team HRC, explained his role as a Crew Chief. The list of who he has worked for and alongside is dazzling and wide-ranging, usually specialising in data and electronics but lately as a Crew Chief. Ben Spies. Casey Stoner. Marc Marquez. Nicky Hayden (As Crew Chief). Yamaha, Honda MotoGP™, Aprilia MotoGP™, Ducati WorldSBK. And now for three WorldSBK seasons as Bautista’s Crew Chief. When he transitioned to Crew Chief, after all of those other technical roles, what was the biggest adaptation for Nava? “When I was doing the electronics or when I was doing the data analysis, it’s an engineer’s point of view. One plus one is two, always. You look at the data. If the bike is spinning too much, it’s spinning too much, no matter what. But then when you move to this position, you need to learn that not automatically one plus one is two. Maybe it’s 1.5…? You need to manage the bike from a pure technical point of view, but you need to manage the situation because there are moments where you need to be able to help the rider from a, let’s say, more human being point of view. There is a moment where you need to push, and there is a moment where you need to pull. So, this is something you need to discover, you need to learn.”

Another pure engineer turned Crew Chief is Kawasaki Racing Team WorldSBK’s Dutch Master, Marcel Duinker, who is Alex Lowes’ Crew Chief. His path to Crew Chief was laid out in his own heart and mind early on and Duinker has been at KRT for a number of years now including with 2013 Champion Tom Sykes. Duinker worked with Kawasaki in MotoGP™ before moving to Provec Racing and the WorldSBK outfit. He said: “I was one of the two lucky guys to get moved to Kawasaki’s World Superbike project. It was run by a different team from now, and at the end of 2011 Kawasaki put Danilo Casonato and I with Tom Sykes. At that point I became a Crew Chief. The target was to transform the Ninja ZX-10R into a winning machine. This requires quite some performance from a number of people. You need to have a rider who knows how to find the limit and explain where these limitations are. You need to have this click, this chemistry with the rider, and you need to have a good amount of engineering experience to translate all the info you generate over the weekend into structural changes on the bike.”

Someone who got into being a Crew Chief in WorldSBK from the other side of the pit wall from Duinker, so to speak, is Pere Riba. Proof that you can be a successful Crew Chief from either background comes from the fact that both Duinker and Riba have been WorldSBK Championship-winning Crew Chiefs. A WorldSSP race winner as a pro racer, he has been Crew Chief at Kawasaki for many years but before that he was a test rider, development rider, for both road and race bikes for Kawasaki.

“One of the most important things of course, because it is the top of the pyramid, is that if you want to develop a bike, it’s the rider,” stated Pere. “This is the most important thing. Then another very important thing is that the bike has been ridden for a feeling that this is something that many engineers and people forget. Of course, you have to link 100% the feeling of the rider, because every single rider request something different in terms of feeling, because this is many, many points for the rider that make them this kind of feeling  Of course, you have to put then in technical numbers, in a technical way of course. But a rider without understanding the limit, understanding the feeling of the bike, it’s impossible to be fast. This is the key point from my philosophy of a Crew Chief. Always when I was a rider, this is in my opinion, there are two or three keys. The first one is to understand the feelings of the rider, what you have to make in the bike to give this kind of feeling the rider requests. The second one is to keep mainly the brain of the rider in a very good shape. You have to understand each rider is different. Some riders like a warm feeling. Some riders are colder, and they don’t care. But you need to understand what the rider needs.”

The last Crew Chief we spoke to came through to WorldSBK from a less direct route than some, but it was a very connected, hands-on one. Marron has been Toprak Razgatlioglu’s Crew Chief since his Kawasaki Puccetti Racing days, with Razgatlioglu insisting that Marron go with him from Kawasaki Puccetti to Pata Yamaha with Brixx WorldSBK, as he understood Toprak so well. Marron follows his own workplace philosophy inside the garage. The rest of the tech Crew could - and sometimes should - also speak with the rider in debriefs and meetings. For some other Crew Chiefs, it all goes through them first. “When I worked with other electronic engineers, in other teams, they wanted to go through me. That was fine. But it took time. Everyone I sit beside now, I say, ‘you speak directly to the rider. I’m beside you. I can listen. If you’ve got a question, you ask the rider. You don’t have to tip-toe around me.’ I prefer to shorten the process. The clock is ticking, so it needs to be fast.”

Story courtesy of the WorldSBK Official Programme.

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