One season ends, the next begins one day later. Yesterday’s race results aren’t even fish’n’chips wrapping, in these days of the download.
The difference this time was the introduction of one-make control tyres. Supposed to even it all up a bit. So what happened, in the final test at Jerez? Rossi was fastest, Pedrosa a fraction slower. In other words, not much changed at all.
Few in racing believe that control tyres will make the racing much closer. Racing’s not like that. The fastest riders always go fastest, no matter what regulations you throw at them.
Dorna, however, seems hell bent on a path of increasingly restrictive rule changes, all introduced with unseemly haste. Who can doubt there will be more? A curb electronics next? Then maybe fixed engine design. All following F1.
But until they pass a rule tying all the motorbikes together, nothing much will change. Dorna has its own business interests at heart. It must make the most of the show.
Pit Bull doesn’t believe that limiting the technology is the way to go about it. Especially when it merely slows everybody down by an equal amount.
Here’s a couple of ideas. Weight penalties. Qualify on pole, you get an extra five kg. Win two races in a row, another five. And so on. That way, you set a challenge for the designers, engineers and riders to overcome.
Better still, use the technology that the most modern test circuits already have – irrigation systems, for wet testing. We all know that wet races are the most exciting and unpredictable. Climate control allows rain to be introduced at the ringmaster’s discretion, just in case any dry race threatens to get too dull.
In the end, we will have to rely on riding talent. MotoGP is especially blessed at the moment, with Rossi and Stoner, Lorenzo and Dovizioso, and a couple more. Racers not rules make for good racing.
In 2008, because Rossi and Lorenzo were using different tyres (Bridgestone and Michelin respectively), protocol and secrecy required a physical barrier down the middle of the pit. This was quite a novelty.
The idea caught on. By the last races the factory Honda team had a similar divide, between Pedrosa (now on Bridgies) and Hayden.
In 2009, with the new mono-tyre rule, this will no longer apply. But at Yamaha, the barrier will remain. They discovered it was actually a better way to work.
This brings to an end years of mealie-mouthed nonsense about team-mates being friendly rivals, working together for the greater good.
More usually, they hate each other. And quite often they let it show.
Rossi has always favoured a one-rider team, though he was happy enough sharing the factory Yamaha pit with Colin Edwards. He knew the Tornado wouldn’t ever be a threat. But he made no secret of his disapproval when Lorenzo was recruited. And he was right: Gorgeous Jorge gave him on-track trouble right from the off.
Even Nicky ‘Mr Nice’ Hayden admits you have to have a bit of hatred for the other riders. “Even when I’m racing with my brothers, I have to find something to hate,” he told me.
Better box them off from one another, like greyhounds, giving them only the odd scent of their rivals. That way, they’re already primed when they’re out on track.
Chummy team-mates, Part Two: There’ll be ice in the Tech 3 pit, after James Toseland stole teammate Edwards’s favourite crew chief away from under his nose at the end of the season.
JT spent his first year working with team stalwart Guy Coulon, a very French paddock eccentric who has been around forever, his wild curly blond mane receding over the decades. He’s an engineer and, long ago, endurance racing hero, but our Sheffield lad found neither every really knew what the other was talking about. (This is not a unique experience, when dealing with the very French.) So behind the scenes he engineered a swap for next year. Much to Edwards’s dismay, when he found out about it.
JT is strikingly polite and mild-mannered, giving a very false impression. If you look at his ruthless streak on the track (he even had the cheek to re-pass Rossi more than once in Australia), you get a clearer measure of the man. He’s a tough competitor, and bears watching for next year.
Sete Gibernau is back, along with many memories of how he earned a reputation as a paddock poser when he was last racing. Sleeves torn off all his T-shirts, designer shades, tragic hair-styles and so on.
So it was unfortunate, when his team was launched in Spain, that the English-language information pack had been translated directly. In Spanish, if you talk about ‘the queen class’ of racing, it quite clearly means MotoGP. Put it in English, however, and it means something quite different. Making Sete Gibernau queen of the grid even before he’d even climbed off the bike to flounce back to his pit.
