We understand that much of your time at Yamaha has been as a race mechanic, so how did your career as a mechanic begin?

I was crazy about motorcycle road racing when I was a kid. One time when I was in 8th grade, I wanted to see Freddie Spencer race at the last round of the All Japan Road Race Championship, so I spent all night riding my bicycle from Ichinomiya in Aichi Prefecture to Suzuka Circuit over in Mie Prefecture just to watch the race. Then in high school, one of my friends who rode motorcycles started racing, and because I was always good at tinkering and working on machines, I started going along to help him with maintenance stuff. That was my first experience as a “motorcycle mechanic.“

Where did you really start learning the skills of a mechanic?

I was always hanging around our local track, so I gradually got to know more and more people in the pits and one of them introduced me to a race team. I was actually planning to go to college and was attending a prep school at the time, but I started thinking that I’d rather find a job that lets me work on motorcycles, so I joined that team as an apprentice mechanic when I was 20. Because I was still very inexperienced at first and couldn’t be of much help, I wasn’t getting paid, so while I learned the trade during the day, I worked part time at night to earn my living expenses. I spent three years working for that first team and then bounced around from team to team while polishing my skills. But it wasn’t until I was 26 that I could finally earn a living as a mechanic. That’s when I signed a contract with the Kawasaki factory team and the first signing bonus I ever got finally signaled farewell to my days of working part time! [laughs]

When did you start working for Yamaha as a professional mechanic?

That was in 1998 when I signed a contract with OKABE Toshihiko. He managed Yamaha’s factory team in the Superbike class of the All Japan Road Race Championship. For the three years until 2000 I worked for them as a mechanic. After that, I wanted to build my career in the Superbike World Championship, but that was unfortunately the year that Yamaha pulled out of the series. Nevertheless, I couldn’t give up on my dream of working overseas, so I asked some of my superiors for advice and they told me that one of Yamaha’s 500cc Grand Prix teams was looking for a parts controller, someone who orders and manages parts for the bikes. It’s a job where you calculate the approximate mileage the bike is expected to run throughout a race weekend at each round, guesstimate the level of parts consumption, and order the necessary parts while accounting for delivery times to manage the team’s parts stock. It was a job known to few people in Japan back then. It wasn’t the mechanic job I was hoping for, but I wanted to get experience in an international racing paddock, so in 2001 I started working for Antena 3 Yamaha d’Antin, a Yamaha satellite team in the premier 500cc class.

So, what was it like finally working in that international racing paddock?

The days were harder than I thought they would be. Among the Yamaha riders at the time were the late Norick Abe, who was on my team, MAKANO Shinya with Gauloises Yamaha Tech3, and HAGA Noriyuki with Red Bull Yamaha WCM. It was an era in GP when Yamaha and Japanese riders were really drawing attention. I belonged to the Spanish team and five or six of us were living in public housing as roommates, so as you can imagine, that kind of living situation had its fair share of struggles! [laughs] It was all so hectic and confusing that some of the staff left mid-season, and I ended up working as the parts controller as well as a mechanic. It was around then that the September 11 terrorist attacks happened, so with the international community suddenly on high alert, security measures at every airport became incredibly strict and it became a massive challenge just to get the team to different countries for each race. My teammates and I often talked about how it felt like traveling between the different racetracks was harder than actually working at the races themselves.

Of all the riders you’ve worked with, who would you say
left the greatest impression on you?

I’d have to say HAGA Noriyuki. I signed up with the Yamaha Motor Italia WSB Team he was on in 2005 and we spent four years together racing in the Superbike World Championship. Me and the other race mechanics all firmly believe it’s our duty to do everything in our power to bring the bike as close as possible to the ideal machine for our rider, so that they can ride to the fullest of their abilities. Haga would always take wins in a really exciting way. Just when you’d think it was all over, he’d pull off some miracle. And this happened again and again! Those kinds of wins are what race mechanics live for. Once you’ve tasted that Kando, you can’t help but want more! During my entire career as a mechanic, Haga was the rider who made the deepest impression on me. He was like a comrade in arms. Thereafter, when he would decide to switch teams, he often asked for me to be his mechanic and we worked together for a long time.

From 2014, you were assigned to the MotoGP Group at Yamaha’s Motor Sports Development Division. What were your duties there?

Yamaha was developing a machine based on the new YZF-R1 for its return to the Superbike World Championship and they asked me to be the mechanic for the testing team. It gave me the opportunity to share the knowledge and experience I’d gained over the years as a race mechanic directly with the engineers and developers, and that made the job really rewarding for me. I had a mountain of things I wanted to tell them, like, “If you can make this part like this, it’ll be easier to see inside” or “If this part of the bike’s easier to work on, mechanics can concentrate more on setting the bike up to win.”

Then in 2015 when Yamaha decided to return to the Suzuka 8 Hours with a factory team, I started also helping to develop a racebike for endurance racing. The development window was really short and that made the work pretty hectic, but that bike went on to win the race four years in a row, so I was really happy to see those results. But Yamaha withdrew its factory team for the 8 Hours following the 2019 race and when the pandemic hit in 2020, all development of factory bikes and overseas testing stopped. As a result, I was assigned to developing racing kit parts for production bikes and wasn’t able to work as a mechanic anymore. Also, I was getting older and I began wondering what path the rest of my career should take.

In 2023, you joined the restoration team and your current task is maintaining the bikes. How did that transfer come about? Also, what’s it like comparing your current job to working as a race mechanic?

Well, since I’m a mechanic, I like to work with my hands and if I can’t do that, I wondered if the only choice I had is to resign. It was right around then that KITAGAWA Shigeto contacted me. He had previously been the restoration team’s man in charge of restoring Yamaha’s old racing machines. “If you join us here, you can work on restoring racebikes,” he said. His invitation is what led me to where I work now. It’s only been about three months (at the time of the interview) since I started working here, so a lot is still taking me by surprise and there are struggles aplenty. My career as a race mechanic was always to get the bike into the best condition possible within the limited timespans of a race weekend, so whenever something wasn’t working properly, you just replaced parts with new ones to get through the race and always left finding out the cause for later. But in the restoration workshop, you have to ascertain the individual causes of every breakdown or defect before moving ahead. That’s something I never really did in the past, so I’m learning a great deal here.

Are there some areas where your skills and experience are especially valuable?

Well, I have a lot of experience with R1 and R6 maintenance, so I’m confident in what I know there. But because I’ve only ever worked on racebikes, I honestly don’t know anything about bikes for the street! And it’s not just about “this or that model.” Things like turn signals and sidestands are obviously required for road-going production motorcycles, but they’re never fitted to racebikes, so I’m completely unfamiliar with them. Just the other day, the turn signals on a bike stopped blinking and I was sitting there baffled about what to do when Hosoya-san said, “It’s just a broken relay switch...” with a bewildered look on his face. Although today’s supersport bikes look like racebikes, they’re still production machines and their serviceability is a completely different animal from an actual racebike. A couple of days ago when I went to remove the bodywork from a production bike, there were so many bolts and fasteners to remove that I ended up getting drenched in sweat. I’m used to working on racebikes with quick-detach fasteners for bodywork, so I had no idea how hard it can be to work on production bikes! [laughs] What’s even more embarrassing is that I can’t really tell the difference between a trials bike and a motocross bike...they all look the same to me. I’ve got a lot to learn.

Is there something in particular you’d like to try doing as
a member of the restoration team?

Well, racebikes are my specialty so I’d like to restore one of those. The Communication Plaza has many old racebikes stored away and I thought I’d never get the chance to work on a classic 2-stroke racebike again. But after getting more experience here, I’d like to restore and maintain one of those someday.