Larry Lawrence | January 31, 2018
Kenny Roberts had perhaps the most impressive background in the history of Motorcycle Grand Prix racing. Not only had he won three world championships as a rider, he then won three more as a team owner! What does a person do to top all of that? Accomplished by the way, by the time he was 40! Roberts decided to leave the Yamaha fold after more than 25 years with the company and strike out on his own to build a completely new GP motorcycle from the ground up and have his team contest that machine in the 500cc Grand Prix World Championship. Thus, the Modenas KR3 was born in 1997.
Forming a new team, utilizing a completely newly-designed motorcycle against the established factories and going up against their millions in racing budgets, was a monumental task to say the least, but one that no one was overly surprised that Roberts tackled. He was after all, used to overcoming what had previously seemed insurmountable barriers.
When Roberts first went to compete in the world championships in 1978, the pundits said he would need at least a full season to learn the circuits and the ins and outs of GP racing. Of course, Roberts won the 500cc Grand Prix World Championship that first season, not only shattering expectations, but creating a whole new way to ride a GP machine. A way in which the rest of the world would gradually evolve, with knee planted, turning the machine by throttling up and sliding with the rear wheel, flat track style.
Then after winning three world championships as a rider Roberts took on the challenge of becoming a team owner in 1984 when he was just 32. By 1990, with Marlboro backing, Team Marlboro Roberts became Yamaha’s official factory entry in Grand Prix racing. Wayne Rainey would win three consecutive GP Championships with the team starting that year, not to mention John Kocinski won the 250cc Grand Prix world title with the team as well, making Kenny Roberts the most successful team owner of his era.
While Roberts enjoyed the benefits of running a factory team, he’d also long been an advocate of larger grids and the factories making their best machinery more widely available to private teams. Sometimes being an advocate of helping smaller teams compete head to head with the factories didn’t win Roberts friends among some of the top racing brass at Yamaha. Roberts became ever more frustrated trying to provide Marlboro a winning formula with Yamaha, so in 1996 he began exploring the possibility of forming his own team, fielding his own motorcycles.
Roberts wanted to win the world championship back and Honda was absolutely dominant at that point. Roberts said he felt he could not get the kind of commitment from Yamaha, to put in the resources needed to win, so efforts began in early 1996 to build a new motorcycle.
“One thing I was proud of was Marlboro decided to go with us into such a scary project,” Roberts said in a 1997 Cycle News interview. It was quite amazing how quickly the new team went from concept to working team.
Warren Willing, who worked on the Roberts Yamaha team, had a concept for a bike he’d been drawing on his computer over several years. Most people didn’t know that a couple of years before the Modenas KR3 was introduced, that the team actually built a V-twin 250cc test motor a couple of years before in America.
“It was a concept that we wanted to do for our motor,” Roberts explained. “Part of our three is that twin. So we’d been toiling with the thing for quite a while.”
Roberts based his new Kenny Robert Group squad in Banbury, England, a small town about 70 miles northwest of London. Banbury was the heart of Formula One racing. Nearly 60 percent of all Formula One teams were based there, so the knowledge base and technical expertise was at hand for Roberts.
Formula One concern Tom Walkinshaw Racing actually built the original KR3 V-3 motor. That company had been milling around building a motorcycle racing motor at the time and then through a mutual friend Walkinshaw found that Roberts was also interested in building a GP bike, the two met just a couple of times before they decided to work together.
The financing of the Roberts team was made possible by Malaysian company Modenas. Roberts had talked to Harley-Davidson and Aprilia about partnering with his GP team and actually came close to working out a deal with Aprilia. Roberts said the problem was the pace at which Roberts was putting together his team. “It made them nervous that we were putting this together so quickly,” Roberts explained.
The Modenas relationship turned out to be the perfect fit. The giant industrial company, which produced motorcycles for the Asia market among many other things, was large enough to provide the financing Roberts needed. Modenas initially signed a three-year deal to finance Roberts’s GP efforts.
The thought of going with a three-cylinder, two-stroke was to allow the KR3 to be lighter than the four-cylinder GP bikes and theoretically be easier on tires, more nimble handling and more fuel efficient. Willing said by the time a prototype was made the engineers had something like 800-900 drawings.
Willing spent a lot of time at Walkinshaw where the KR3 engines were assembled and tested on the dyno. The first completed engine ran in mid-December of 1996. In January of 1997 the first prototype was fired up for the first time.
“It was nice to see it start up as a motorcycle,” Willing told Cycle News in 1997. Kenny Senior was the first to have the honor of riding the prototype on a nearby airport runway. Then Kenny Jr. and Jean-Michel Bayle. “Kenny Jr. did wheelies and Jean-Michel created imaginary chicanes to test the handling.”
While there were the inevitable teething problems for the Modenas KR3, in the amazingly short amount of time it went from concept to racetrack, the motorcycle showed flashes of brilliance in its inaugural 1997 season. Roberts Jr. had four top-10 finishes on the KR3, while Bayle scored three top-10s. Bayle actually managed to qualify the bike on the front row on a wet Brno, in perhaps the highlight of the season for the KR3.
The Modenas KR3 will go down in history as one of the most unique motorcycles ever raced in GP. It opened the way for an independent effort of unique GP Modenas and later Proton machines through several generations all the way through to the Proton KR5 in the four-stroke MotoGP era.