How a motorcycle company you probably don't know changed the 2 stroke world, or, escaping the iron curtain with MZ tech (Thanks Tony!)

Fifty five years ago Suzuki won its first world championship with the rinkiest-dinkiest little 50cc Grand Prix bike that Ernst Degner rode to the inaugural 50cc title in October 1962. It made 8 horsepower and was good for 90mph.

It's success was as much a historic moment for the sport as it was for Suzuki, because this was also the first world title won by a two-stroke, which would go on to utterly dominate GP racing, that after 1975 not a single world title was won by a four-stroke until the rules were changed and the MotoGP era began in 2001.

After all, Yamaha, Suzuki, and Kawasaki legends would never have happened if it wasn’t for the two-stroke’s domination in GPs.

It all started with a genius East German engineer called Walter Kaaden who did ground-breaking work on the two-stroke at the struggling MZ factory.

As a direct result, Suzuki and the other Japanese factories only built winning two-strokes after Suzuki paid star MZ rider Degner a king’s ransom to defect from East to West and sell Kaaden’s hard-earned secrets.


During WW2 Kaaden worked at Hitler’s secret weapons base in Peenemunde where the so-called Vengeance Weapons – the V-1 and V-2 – were developed. After the war he started tuning and racing little MZ two-strokes.  Eventually MZ turned up at the Nurburgring for its GP debut in a scruffy little van containing a pair of medieval-looking 125 race bikes.

What the more smartly attired westerners didn’t know was that Kaaden had used the knowhow he gained at Peenemunde to transform the MZ into a real threat to the all-conquering four-strokes.

By uniting three key technologies for the first time – the expansion chamber, the disc valve and the boost port – the MZ 125 became the world’s first normally aspirated engine to make 200 horsepower per litre.

Despite the paucity of its resources, MZ fought Honda for the 125 world title throughout the summer of 1961 – Degner aboard the single-cylinder MZ, Aussie Tom Phillis on Honda’s four-stroke twin.

During the summer of ’61 Degner sneaked away from his Stasi minders to have secret meetings with Suzuki personnel.

Company president Shunzo Suzuki realised the only way he was going to prevent his company from becoming a paddock joke was by getting hold of Kaaden’s top-secret formula. Degner was their man; he wanted out of East Germany and he had exactly what Suzuki wanted.

A deal was struck – Degner would help Suzuki build competitive two-strokes and then he would ride them.
Degner had to spirit himself and his family into the west, but, when he raced abroad his family had to stay in East Germany, to make sure he always came home.

Degner devised a new plan with his West German sidekick Paul Petry, who bought a Lincoln with a secret compartment inside the trunk.

During the weekend of the Swedish GP Petry drugged Degner’s children, placed them in the Lincoln’s boot, then drugged Gerda Degner who climbed in with them.

Petry drove the car through the border, and Degner made his escape by getting a Suzuki staffer to drive him and a suitcase full of vital MZ engine parts and drawings into Denmark.

Degner travelled to Japan where he spent six months toiling in Suzuki’s race department – an engineer’s paradise compared to MZ’s rotten little workshop.

His main task was to help create a new 125 that had to make at least 22 horsepower if he was to receive his £10,000 reward (£200,000 in today’s money) and he succeeded in making a mirror-image copy of the MZ single with 24 horsepower, and the season was a triumph for Suzuki.

The little 50 scored Suzuki’s first-ever World Championship point at Barcelona in May 1962, then won the company’s first World Championship race at the Isle of Man, where Degner averaged a dizzying 71mph – faster than the factory’s 125 had managed just two years earlier.

Once Kaaden’s genie was out the bottle an extraordinary race developed between two-stroke and four-stroke. In an effort to keep the Suzuki and Yamaha two-strokes at bay Honda built fabulous multi-cylinder four-strokes that were capable of sky-high engine speeds.

Honda’s twin-cylinder 50 and five-cylinder 125 both revved beyond 20,000rpm which gave them power-per-litre outputs of over 270bhp.

Suzuki and Yamaha responded with two-stroke multis capable of similarly outrageous performance. Yamaha built 125 and 250 V4s while Suzuki built a 150mph 250 square-four.


The Kawasaki KR250 and 350 that won eight world titles was a straight rip-off of the MZ 250 that Kaaden had created in 1969: same tandem twin layout, same bore and stroke, same porting arrangement, same geared-together crankshafts. Likewise Suzuki’s RG500 square-four that took Barry Sheene to the 1976 and 1977 500 world titles.


Kaaden forgave Degner for betraying him and was philosophical about how the Japanese used his life’s work to build an industry that helped make the country a global economic power.

“Every time you build something good, someone steals it,” he said a few years before his death in 1997. “I have to accept it. I cannot change it.”

Abridged from the article by Matt Oxley
http://www.motorcyclenews.com/news/2012/december/de1712-the-ernst-degner-story/