Well bob, you've raised some points, so I feel it's worth answering them rather than writing something stupid.
The Ducati, as the results show, only worked if Stoner rode it at 105% all the time, for the entire race. And occasionally, because he was riding it so hard, he crashed. I dont blame Casey for that, I blame Ducati for not looking to engineer those issues out of the bike. No one else could ride it and that's because no one else dared or had the riding style of casey to take it that far. I do however think one of the major engineering challenges with that bike was getting the CF to work with the Bridgestone tyres that were introduced across the series. If each team could still specify requirements, it would have possibly worked, but as it stands it doesn't work.
The fact that the bike won races was an indication (that we all seen once casey jumped onto a honda) of how hard he was riding, not how good the bike was if setup correctly. The bike was poor, casey just made the best of it and then some.
As for winning/insulting loosers - that's wrong, but were looking at the front here. I think frankly anyone that races a GP bike and is ~2-5 seconds off the front is a damn amazing rider. I worked out that at Donnington, James Toseland was loosing ~000.80th of a second per corner to Rossi, however he was still quite down on the timesheets. The difference between success and failure, when looked at, in detail on each and every corner only shows someone much further down loosing a tiny bit each corner. I respect all riders that compete in GP, and other series - I actively follow BSB and WSBK.
Your sentence - 'between team members to quantify rider skill' and 'still haven't noticed how difficult that last tenth of a second is to achieve' - Exactly, that last tenth is extremely hard to achieve, which is why when you put two guys on the same machine, one floats to the top and is clearly better than the others. Casey generally beats Dani on the Honda, Jorge nearly always beats Ben on the Yamaha, however IMO Dani is still better than Ben. Times can be used as a gauge, because the guys are on the same machine, but only a gauge, it's only all know when it comes down to race day.
And as for the factory loosing faith, it'd appear to be anything but. Ducati are about 75-80% the way through a plan, they've put a bike fresh out the doors that is a second down on a HRC that's had in excess of a years development and came off the back of a very well developed 800cc. I think once they refine that bike and learn more about it - they got ~500 laps from Jerez (about 1300 miles) - then I think we'll quickly see it close gaps.
But thats just my opinion and you're free to fire it down. For the record, I'm English, I am a Rossi fan but have nothing but admiration for Casey along with the other riders. I don't actively 'hate' any rider.
Either way, I want the Ducati working, Having Vale/Casey/Jorge all fighting at the top with Nicky, Dani and Ben also in the scrap is a damn sight more interesting than last year was to watch.
Posted: 29/03/2012 at 14:22
