EXCLUSIVE: Chris Pike (Jonathan Rea's crew chief) Q&A

The career of Jonathan Rea's crew chief, Chris Pike, spans the length of the World Superbike series itself. He was watching from pit lane at the inaugural meeting at Donington Park in 1988, working alongside Andy McGladdery, as he powered his Suzuki to ninth overall in a field that boasted 39 starters.

Skip forward to 2014 and Rea and Pike are coming to the end of another season, one which has yielded four wins and eight podiums - a marked improvement on the previous year's form. Qatar will also mark the end of their successful working relationship in Pata colours as Pike prepares to move across to MotoGP, where he will align with Scott Redding for the 21-year old's assault on the 2015 season.

Although unable to comment on his MotoGP deal just yet, Crash.net caught up with Chris to talk about his career with Honda, the 2014 World Superbike season, and that burning issue of team orders...

Crash.net:
Jonathan is currently fourth in the overall standings. 2014 has been a big improvement compared with the year before. Do you classify this as a good year?

Chris Pike:
Yeah, definitely. We've been making big changes to the bike over the past couple of years, mainly in steps with the electronics. The electronics have advanced a lot, which has meant that we were starting from scratch for the last 2 years. We have been on the back foot a little but after all the hard work the bike is now in a pretty good place.

Crash.net:
Carl Fogarty has said that he believes Jonathan is the most talented guy on the World Superbike grid. What is he like to work with?

Chris Pike:
He's very easy to work with. The thing is with Jonathan, you know when he throws his leg over that bike and goes out onto the track he's giving it one hundred percent. When you know that as a crew chief it makes setting up the bike so much easier, you don't doubt his comments when you know that. His feedback is very good; it's accurate and easy to work of. One of his very strong points is that he is very good at adapting to the bike to get the best performance out of it. Obviously every bike has its limitations - Jonathan understands this and will adapt his style and technique to overcome them as much as possible.

Crash.net:
The CBR1000RR was unstoppable at some tracks, namely Assen and Imola, yet struggled at others. Is that just down to its characteristics?

Chris Pike:
The chassis is very good on it. The engine, well, we have to get everything we can out of the engine, so maybe the delivery isn't as nice as it could be. We need the ultimate performance and therefore we're trying to achieve a virtual smoother delivery with complicated electronics. A delivery that isn't smooth will have a potentially negative effect on deceleration as well as acceleration. You can mask this to a certain degree with the electronics but it's not easy. The basic character of the engine will always be there to a certain degree.

The reason for our dip in performance this year was almost certainly our own doing. We were pursuing a direction that we believed to be correct with the electronics but this was causing the rider some inconsistencies on the track. We sat down before Portimao and made the correct decision to change our approach.

Crash.net:
Massimo Neri came into the team over the off-season as the electronics guy. Just looking at his CV shows his pedigree. What has he brought to the team?

Chris Pike:
Massimo has brought a very good way of working to the team, particularly on our side of the box. In WSB all the top teams run dual control throttle bodies, meaning that you have separate control over a set amount of cylinders and effectively run the bike as two separate engines. I think it took BMW just over a year to develop the dual throttle body system on their bike. With Massimo's expertise coupled with lot of hard work from the team and their suppliers we actually got it up and running in three months. That was only possible because of Massimo's experience and input on the electronic side.

He is definitely one of the good guys when it comes to electronics. He has a good understanding of what the rider wants and is aware of how important it is to keep the rider's confidence. While it is obviously very easy for him to understand all the information on his computer, he's aware that the changes that he can make might not be quite so easy for a rider to understand on track. He is careful and considered with his changes and he explains them well. There are all sorts of things going on with a modern superbike, a lot of it is induced by machine behavior rather than rider input, so you have to be very careful how you apply these strategies, you have to keep the feel otherwise you will lose your rider very quickly.

Crash.net:
Back in the Castrol Honda World Superbike days you were working as a data logger. I guess that's invaluable experience now that you're a crew chief.

Chris Pike:
I think every crew chief needs to have a reasonable understanding of the data, otherwise you are just a passenger to other people's interpretation of the information. We have a dedicated data person in the team, Ronnie [Schagen]. The things that people like Ronnie can pick up from the data compared to what I can pick up are on another level. Ronnie is there solely to analyze the data, he will produce small reports on changes made during the session and he'll always offer an opinion on areas we need to improve from a data point of view.

His information goes a long way to influencing the decisions on set up changes. Sometimes if Jonathan isn't 100% sure on the positives or negatives of a change then Ronnie's interpretation of the data can give us the direction we need.

Crash.net:
I spoke to Leon Haslam at Jerez and he said his Suzuka 8-hour bike had less power but was more consistent and he could push it to its limits more. Is that a feature of current the WSBK machines, that if electronics aren't 100%, the rider finds it more difficult to ride around the problems?

Chris Pike:
I'm not surprised to hear that. The Suzuka bike has a lot less power than the WSB bike and runs in a class where there is open tyre competition. I have no doubt that if HRC put MotoGP electronics on it that it would be a good bit quicker again. Electronics in superbike are of a very high level, if you struggle to set them up or they don't work as you would like then you will be having a hard time. When the electronics are set correctly it's free time over a lap, you more or less just have to concentrate on pointing it where you want it to go.

[If] You don't have to touch the clutch, you're shifts are all nice and smooth, the braking is good and the traction control is too then your confidence builds and you've got nothing to worry about. All teams have good electronics these days so if yours aren't correct you are going to have a hard time keeping up. Good electronics build confidence, which in turn builds speed.

Crash.net:
Can you tell us a little about your role in the garage over the weekend.

Chris Pike:
Well, it's simple while not being simple! My job is coordinating all the information I get from Massimo - the ECU guy -, Ronnie - the data guy -, Mark [Harrison-Ross], the Ohlins technician and Jonathan. I will get all the comments and information from them and drive the set up in a direction from there. Some of it's self-explanatory and some of it isn't. The key thing is to take all the information given to you and decide what is going to benefit the lap time the most. You have to build a bike that's predictable and easy for the rider to understand the limits on.

Crash.net:
I have to ask you about team orders. Do you see Marco Melandri's actions in Magny-Cours as good for the sport or an opportunity wasted for Aprillia?

Chris Pike:
I think Marco disobeying team orders is great for the sport - everybody talks about it so it raises our profile! Whether it's good for Aprilia or not, I would suggest not. In reality Aprilia probably have only one focus and that's winning the championship. The reality of the situation is that Marco has been asked to concede his position in two races but has chosen to obey the order in only one. There will come a point where the public will turn on Sylvain if he doesn't start winning races without assistance from Marco. He needs to go out and try to win these final two races for the public not to question whether he is a worthy world champion or not.

Crash.net:
Would orders have been given in the Pata team had Leon been outpacing Jonathan while Jonathan was in the thick of a title fight, or vice-versa?

Chris Pike:
I wouldn't have a clue! It depends on how the riders are feeling. I mean our two riders get on fairly well but when you're on the track it's a different situation. I think they probably would, whichever rider was in the title fight. But I'm not the team manager so I can't really answer that one.

Crash.net:
There were several rumours in the paddock earlier this year regarding frames in the class and the extent of their legality. Has Honda been a victim of this and do you feel the right measures are being taken to police this correctly for 2015?

Chris Pike:
At the Donington Park round the FIM checked all the superbike frames. We were consequently lead to believe that the only one that had completely standard dimensions was the Honda. At this point you feel like you should be marching down to the office and getting everyone thrown out for blatant cheating! The fact is though, that as manufacturers, they have taken the homologated documents to their tolerance limit. So for instance, you send your homologated frame drawings to the FIM with all the machining tolerances stated and on the face of it that is the dimensions that you work with.

The reality of the situation is that, as well as manufacturers stating some quite generous tolerances, the FIM has their own generous tolerance limit. The FIM tolerance limit is normally what you would apply when you're building a house, so when you add the two together, as is your right, it opens up another level of tolerance again. So at the end of the day the factories were clever enough to realise this and take advantage of the situation, so no one has broken the rules. Obviously Scott Smart is onto this and is tightening the loophole for 2015 but as of 2014 no one is outside of the chassis regulations, as I understand it.

Crash.net:
Do you think the World Superbike organisers have found a good balance with the upcoming rule changes with regard to making the class more even?

Chris Pike:
The short answer is yes, I think they have done a good job of allowing for all the different base levels of the standard bikes. But it hasn't saved the teams one cent in budget and is open to abuse in my opinion. As I understand it there is a price cap on what you can sell your electronics package to another team for but no price limit on what you can buy it for. It doesn't take too many brain cells to work out what is going to happen next does it? Time will ultimately tell if it's a good long-term solution though. I think Scott [Smart] had a massive task sorting this out. He came in with the right approach but probably had to concede too many things in the end to keep everyone happy.

My personal feeling is that they could have done more to make it more affordable by going down the road of a control ECU, but I can also understand why a manufacturer is not interested in racing with an ECU that has less functions than their standard road machine. I would look at BSB as a good Superbike series model. Once the teams have bought all the necessary equipment it's a relatively fixed cost. If you were to implement this rule in WSB, whichever manufacturer you chose to supply the control ECU would have a fairly high level of strategies available, it's just up to the organizing body to then decide which ones the teams are allowed to use. If I was making the rules it would be a control ECU...but I'm not.

Crash.net:
Just to look back through your career you worked on the JPS Norton in the early nineties and spent subsequent years with Honda in WSBK and BSB. Can you give an overview of where you've been in that time?

Chris Pike:
I started out with Andy McGladdery who was recently killed in a road bike accident. His idea of a good race was one which was as far away from the UK as possible. He did all the early World Superbike rounds and [TT] Formula One races. My first paid job was with the JPS Norton team which was managed by Barry Symmons. I was working on the rotary engines [and] I stayed there for three years.

Norton pulled the plug on their racing effort very late so for 1993 I did a year out of road racing and worked at Edmondson Racing, working on MX and enduro bikes in Derrick's shop. From there I was into Castrol Honda and the RC45 days. I started off with Doug Polen, then [I worked with] Aaron Slight, Simon Crafar, Tady Okada and helped out with Colin Edwards' team as well when he was winning as a single rider towards the end [2002].

From there I did BSB. We used the old VTR factory bikes in BSB. I headed up the BSB rookies squad when we ran 125s and a 600 with Steven Neate, Eugene Laverty and Jonathan Rea. Jonathan moved up a class, into Superbike while I think Eugene did another year on 125s. We built our own Superbike in that time so it was all on our own electronics, swinging arm and air box. I then moved onto the factory HRC bike with Jonathan. In 2008 a new model came out and I've been working on that ever since. I moved to Ten Kate three years ago [for 2012].

I've done a bit of TT work as well. On a couple of occasions I was lucky enough to be working with John [McGuinness]. If you want to be working with anyone at the TT it's John.

Crash.net:
Did you ever have any aspirations of competing yourself?

Chris Pike:
No, not really, not only did a severe lack of funds hold me back it turned out I was a bit short in the talent department as well. I did a bit of motocross when I was younger but I didn't handle the thought of losing particularly well! My first - and only - race was an AMCA Junior race. Thanks to my connections at Edmondson racing I had a virtually factory spec RM125, I practiced most weekends for a year before I was brave enough to race and still only finished third I think!

Crash.net:
You've worked with some incredible riders but were there any that you shared a garage with that were difficult to get along with?

Chris Pike:
Not really. I think I've been fairly lucky. Even back in the day people always said John Kocinski was hard work but when he was in the Castrol Honda team he was great. I think we took the time to understand him better than perhaps other teams had. We had a bit of fun with him. He'd take the mick out of us and we'd take the mick out of him right back - and it worked! We got the results. He would be one of the [riders] that people would think he was more difficult but actually he wasn't. John had his issues...he had his OCD issues that are well documented. It's an illness. You can't blame him for that. A lot of his problems stemmed from how teams dealt with that.

In the Castrol Honda team - and kudos to Neil Tuxworth and Chris Herring for this - they understood how to deal with him and how to get the best out of him. If you look back, he got the results with our team, so whatever they did worked.

I can't think of anyone where I've thought, 'god, I'm not looking forward to going to work this weekend.' I've always managed to get on pretty well with people.

Crash.net:
You made a fleeting appearance in the recent Road movie, while wearing your JPS Norton colours. How was it working with Robert Dunlop?

Chris Pike:
Robert was a really nice guy, focused and determined. I mean Steve Hislop won the Senior TT race in '92 on the Norton and people tend to forget that Robert finished third in that race, not too far behind the big battle with Carl [Fogarty] and Steve. He was a really good rider and getting better and better. It was a real shame that the wheel broke on him at the Isle of Man. It obviously had a massive effect on what he would have been able to achieve in his career otherwise. Until then I had him down as really going places - not just as a road rider but as a short circuit rider. He was putting in the work and getting the results. He was a good lad.

Crash.net:
After the Suzuka 8-Hour Kevin Schwantz said if Suzuki had been watching the race then they'd throw Michael van der Mark on their MotoGP bike. That's high praise. Do you see him as the next big thing in Superbike racing?

Chris Pike:
Mikey is definitely one to watch. It's going to happen for him. He's levelheaded. He's talented. And he's focused. I'm not sure an unproven factory MotoGP bike would be the right thing for him though, his motivation at the moment is winning and the Suzuki is an unknown quantity.

Crash.net:
You must feel confident that you can finish the season on a high in Qatar.

Chris Pike:
We have been at the last couple of events and I don't see that changing. It's never easy but we'll be at the pointy end one way or another.

Crash.net:
It was recently announced that you'll be going into MotoGP in 2015 working alongside Scott Redding. That's an exciting prospect...

Chris Pike:
I'm happy to be moving there and that's all I can say at the moment!

Crash.net:
Thanks for your time Chris.

Chris Pike:
No worries. Thanks very much.