Checkpoint Öhlins

The Öhlins racing technician team is already at work when you wake up in the morning and when you spend some well deserved time off on a Saturday morning with a nice breakfast with your family they probably just landed on a remote circuit on the other side of the globe with state-of-the-art suspension for an impatient team.

To become a technical partner in the premiere racing league is not just hard… it’s almost impossible. First of all you need a kick ass product and second of all you need dedicated staff ready to travel to the other side of the world just to solve a problem.

To get a job at Öhlins Racing department you need to be a speed freak, most probably a former racer yourself and you’re not the kind of guy that switch of your computer at 5 pm sharp and rush home to pick up your kids at day care. Toss in an engineering degree and you have a really good chance at getting the job.

But first you have to pass the interview with Mats Larsson, Racing Manager at Öhlins Racing.

How it all started
16th of February 1984 a young man entered the Öhlins Racing factory full of ideas and visions. He was a pretty well established motocross rider from the northern part of Sweden that wanted to get closer to all the races that were held in the area around Stockholm some 1300 km from his hometown– it was a “make it or break it” career move.
To work with Öhlins suspension was a great way of spending time on the MX track and at the same time having a job at a growing company with high-end suspension products.
It didn’t take long before Öhlins Racing pulled the longest straw and Mats soon paid his full attention on helping others to win.

Mats Larsson is one of the old school employees that worked his way up inside the company walls and today Mats is in charge of 25 race technicians with prestigious contracts with Yamaha Factory Racing, Ducati Corse and Suzuki Rizzla in the MotoGP along with almost the entire line-up in 250cc and 125cc MotoGP as well.
AMA and World Superbike teams are also on the list of paying customers that are in a constant quest to be on top of the podium.
Nowadays most of time is spent to oversee that all customers get their tricky parts in time and to control that the future development is going in the right direction. As much as 75% of all racing technology eventually finds its way to the aftermarket and Mats is a vital link between the departments.
But at the end of the day, Mats still finds the most thrilling and amusing chore is to sit in front of the CAD, thinking of a technical problem that needs to be fixed. 

To get the full insight in Öhlins total racing commitment you just have to spend some time with Mats, and PERFORMANCE Magazine took the opportunity to make a visit to the R&D Department in the heart of operation outside Stockholm.

Mats, why does Öhlins Racing have such a crystal clear focus on high-end racing services?

Think of it as the ultimate challenge for our products. If our stuff works well under these conditions you just know that it is good enough for all of our aftermarket customers around the world.
On this level of racing everything is “no compromise” and when you take the prominent step into the world of racing you soon find out that everything is very undemocratic. Everybody thinks alike – can we use this or not? Can we cut a second or not? Either you’re in or you’re out.

Second of all we cherish the fact that we can work side by side with the most professional team technicians in the world and a lot of development is actually made together with our customers. A serious racing team always strives to find the ultimate performance and they are all used to develop new things.
As a bonus we can use all the vast amount of high-end technical equipment from the teams such as telemetric data that helps us in our search for the perfect suspension setup.

Why us – a tiny manufacturer in the cold north?

I actually got the exact same question like 15 years ago when I sat in a Kawasaki top executive meeting in Japan, surrounded by the top brass racing directors. One man stood up and said to me:

- Mr Larsson, one thing… why is Ohlins so good? A far away country long way from Japan… making very good suspension. Many Japanese manufacturers try to copy, but now one have managed”

And the very simple explanation is the fact that my team of technicians is no regular 9 to 5 workers. To be honest Öhlins Racing is just a small molecule in the big perspective in the world of suspension manufactures and it is nothing but a true miracle that we can host a premium racing department.

Every single guy in my team has a colossal passion for racing, they all love to ride fast on their time of and during all these years they have built up an amazing understanding of how a bike works. We do not have any freshly baked engineers straight from prestigious universities with an academic approach.
The working morale is sky high and all my team members are former riders which of course mean a bunch of individualist. To be honest it is a bunch of bloody troublemakers and it is my duty to herd the flock in the same direction, Mats laughs.
They are all sulkers that do not accept a second position. If, for some reason, their team does not win they go straight home and ponder on how to win the next race.

A part from our very special working spirit I think that teams such as Yamaha, Ducati and Suzuki appreciate us because we never ever sit down. We are not the kind of people that falls down in our favourite couch back home the day after we have handed over a new product.
You just cant fly over to a customer and just drop a new product in their lap and go home. We continue our commitment with a 365 days per year service and we are just a phone call away 24/7 and they all get our complete and full attention.
There are of course serious teams that do not work with us but at the end of the day when these guys stand on the other side of the globe in a hot, humid garage in Malaysia or Phillip Island there is not that many suppliers in sight. This is the moment when you separate the sheep from the goat. Öhlins is ALWAYS there and this of course affects the decision process when teams decide what brand to supply parts.

We actually put a price tag on our service and support which is very rare in a world where every manufacturer on earth are willing to give away stuff for free along with a decent chunk of money.
To us it is very important to be an actual cost for the team because this means that we have a serious commitment and you can not behave inappropriate towards a paying customer – an entirely different set up of morale and ethics is interlaced with such a contract. When you put a price on your product the customer feels that a certain value is added.
The companies that give away their products for free just have a different attitude towards the teams they support and the follow up after races and quick support is not the same. It is as simple as this.

Is it just technicians in your team?

All of my guys are very technical to start with but not all have engineering degrees. You actually have to have a mixture of personalities and backgrounds to form an elite racing department.
My personal recipe is to have a spoon full of “goers” that pushes the department to move fast forward, then you need to have pinch of really cool and laidback characters that need to think and calculate on an idea so that we can concretize our crazy ideas and to top of the dish you just need to have some inventors that wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning, writing down a marvellous idea on the backside of a telephone catalogue.
It is really tricky to get all these different kinds of people to work in consensus and it doesn’t take long before things get really dopey if no one is in charge.
But at the end of the day we all have something in common, we all want to dazzle the world with the most advanced suspension products on the planet every time we hand over a new gadget to our teams.

Are all contracts set for a period of 12 months?

I am sure that almost all of our teams want us to stay for a longer period of time. I honestly think that it is solely a question of juridical and budgeting principals.
We prefer working straight towards the factories because we have a much better cooperation, they tend to have a stronger economy and they have always a long-term focus.
Private teams tend to live on a day-to-day basis and very often there is a lack of strategy. There is of course a gentlemen’s agreement that you stay together in good times and bad times but from time to time you bump into teams that threats to shred a contract every time things go bad. This is really bad for business because we spend a lot of time with all teams and to be kicked out or getting negative impulses all the time is really bad for the morale.

Do you really have to come up with brilliant ideas all the time?

In the MotoGP there are actually two divisions. One division has access to all of our tricky, “standard” top-of-the-line material and they are quite happy with this. The other division has much higher demands. We support these teams on an almost weekly basis and there is a never ending flow of refinements.
The teams that choose our “light” version comes along on all of our major new technological developments but they miss out on all of our very small but extremely crucial micro changes that pops up in-between the major technical shifts. These small changes are actually very important and all together they just might be the different between winning and loosing.

Isn’t it hard to get any consistency when new stuff pops up all the time?

10 years ago we were all hotheads, coming up with all sorts of crazy inventions that we packed down in our bags and flew of to remote testing grounds. Sometimes we had made something really great, but we had some really crappy things as well.
Today we are very often a very small part of a huge testing line-up. A myriad of tyre combinations are tested, different engine mappings must be reviewed and at the end of the day the riders tend to be very grumpy. That is definitely not the moment to bring out all sort of funky stuff for the riders to test. We need to be dead certain that our new developed feature works and we need to convince the rider and team that we can cut lap time. The riders must come back after less than 30 minutes with a big smile on their face is we are to make the change or not.

This is why we do the majority of testing back home with our own test riders in Sweden. We have a Superbike specification R1 and a really good test rider that can really bend the bones on all crazy stuff that we invent. Often we have six or seven different prototypes that we want to test but at the end of the day we might have one or two pieces at the most that we might consider to test with our teams.

We need to hurry in a very controlled manor and be able to sort out what is good and what is bad. As time goes by we have become much better at finding new technologies and we tend to know what our teams in search of. We actually have MotoGP teams that order for the next season before they have actually tested the components. That is a definite proof of our reputation.
We are always present at the last MotoGP race of the year with completely new front forks and rear suspension ready to do some serious testing with the riders.

 

How big is the difference between your racing stuff and Öhlins aftermarket assortment?

To be honest there are not that many differences between regular street products and racing stuff. Our FGR800 and TTX36 are actually spin offs from the MotoGP techniques so you can really buy state-of-the-art technology for your personal bike back home.
Most of our MotoGP products are handcrafted but that is often because the bikes are one-of-the-kind. The teams have all sorts of chassis and you can never use a racing product straight onto an aftermarket bike because they do not look alike.
Sometimes we tend to use other light-weight materials but these materials are not to be used on aftermarket products just because the safety features must be much higher on vehicles to be used in ordinary traffic. We do not have to consider problems such as corrosion and long-run tests.
Our parts come of after every race and a dedicated service technician is never more than a couple of meters from our racing products – ready to serve it to perfection.

Thank you Mats for the interview, good luck with the rest of the season!

No problem!