A challenging Suzuka corner’s hidden history

‘Spoon’, ‘130R’, ‘Hairpin’, ‘S Curves’. The corner names at Suzuka have prescriptive, unembellished quality. Except for… Degner.

For a brief time in the 1960s, Ernst Degner was a proverbial thorn in Honda’s side, helping Suzuki develop a series of 50cc racing motorcycle engines capable of screaming beyond 17,000rpm, and enabling Mitsuo Itoh to become the first (and so far only) Japanese rider to win the Isle of Man TT. Bettering these pocket rockets was a matter of pride for Honda, a company whose growing industrial might sprung from its founder’s fascination with motorbikes.

The 50cc two-stroke racing bikes of the 1960s weighed less than 60kg and were good for well over 100mph, but delivered all their power within a 500rpm band, requiring the rider to Riverdance on the gearshifter, stay tucked in behind the screen and preserve as much corner speed as possible. In the first race after Suzuka opened in 1962 it’s said that a random gust of wind blew Degner’s front wheel out from under him as he took the sweeping right-hander after the esses (now officially the ‘S’ Curves).

That corner was subsequently named after him and reprofiled into two discrete radii. But the story of how Degner came to be there as 50cc world champion, with a manufacturer which had been nowhere in racing up until that season, is more fascinating.

Degner was born in what is now Poland in 1931, and grew up in what was officially known, with the typically mendacious nomenclature preferred by despotic regimes, as the German Democratic Republic. He worked as a motorcycle mechanic before discovering he had an aptitude for racing them.

By the mid-1950s he had attained a measure of fame and was co-opted into the MZ motorcycle company’s international racing programme – unlikely as such a thing may sound to modern readers, MZ sales outside East Germany were a lucrative source of foreign currency. But Degner earned a standard wage and was under regular surveillance by the East German secret police force, the Stasi. He began to hanker for the lifestyles enjoyed by the people he raced against.

MZ was an unlikely standard-bearer for advanced technology but it was doing so in the unfashionable field of two-stroke engines, which most manufacturers had already abandoned for racing applications. In charge of the programme was Walter Kaaden, an engineer said to have worked at the Peenemuende Army Research Centre where the Nazi regime’s V1 and V2 rockets had been developed during World War 2.

Sources differ over Kaaden’s role there, but it’s also claimed that Wernher von Braun later invited him to leave for the US as part of ‘Operation Paperclip’, the secret op in which American intelligence services swooped for the cream of German engineering talent to join its military and space rocket programmes. At MZ, Kaaden would deploy the harmonic analysis techniques once used to finesse the V1 and V2 boost ports and exhaust expansion chambers – and use them, along with other pre-war technologies in the MZ tool chest such as the rotary valve concept, to wrangle ridiculous quantities of power from 125cc motorcycle engines.

By 1961 Kaaden was extracting 200bhp per litre from MZ’s 125cc engine and Degner was challenging Honda’s Tom Phillis for the world championship. Imagine the contrast between the screaming single-cylinder MZ and the thudding four-stroke parallel twin powering the RC143.

1961 was Suzuki’s second year of competition in the 125cc class and it wasn’t going well. It is claimed that Degner cut his deal with the company’s representatives that summer, in a hotel the MZ team happened to be sharing with Suzuki’s – but the principal challenge was getting his family out of East Germany, where they were effectively hostages while he was racing abroad.

An initial plan to spirit them out of East Berlin by train while Degner was competing in the Ulster Grand Prix fell through: 13 August, the day after the TT, was the notorious ‘Barbed Wire Sunday’ when the East German government closed the border to West Berlin and began erecting barricades in the streets. Within days the Berlin Wall was under construction.

Come round 10 of 11, the Swedish Grand Prix in mid-September, Degner was on the cusp of winning the championship. He might have got it over the line that weekend had his engine not blown; that night he was smuggled into Denmark with technical documents and engine parts, rather than clothes and a washbag, in a suitcase. Meanwhile in East Germany, a friend was smuggling Degner’s family out in a secret compartment in the boot of a car.

That friend would later say he slept with a gun under his pillow for the next 30 years, fearing Stasi reprisals.

Suzuki used the liberated technology to accelerate its own programme, resulting in the new RM62 race bike which Degner then rode to the inaugural 50cc world title in 1962 – before taking his spill at Suzuka. Whether this was scarier than spending the year looking over his shoulder for putative Stasi assassins was known only to him.

Lance Stroll exits the Degners in his Williams days

Photo by: Sutton Images

Naturally, sources working for the company at the time dispute this account.

Degner earned a substantial cash bonus for his labours, which also led to the development of the RT62 125cc machine and its successors, including the RT67 on which a young Barry Sheene made his name. Given the resources at its disposal, Suzuki would likely have got there anyway, but the internal nuances (such as Mahle’s forged alloy pistons) would have been more difficult to copy without technical documentation than external features such as the exhaust pipes.

An arms race developed as the likes of Honda and Yamaha raced to catch up, and two-stroke engines would remain the de facto formula of grand prix motorcycling until the turn of the millennium. By then, though, Degner was long dead: hustling to make up ground after a poor start in a 250cc race at Suzuka in 1963, he dropped it at Turn 2 and the contents of the fuel tank caught fire as he tried to pick the bike up.

Degner required 50 skin grafts and later developed an addiction to painkillers which brought his racing career to a premature end. He died of a heart attack in Tenerife in 1981 – although, as with anyone who has incurred the wrath of a totalitarian regime, unsubstantiated rumours circulated that he had been assassinated…

Degner contributed to the Suzuki on which Barry Sheene made his name. Not this exact one, obviously…

Photo by: Sutton Images