Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/127690
Final Round: European GP
Max Blaggl celebrates his victory and the
250cc World Championship that came
with it with a champagne shower.
was eighth , with Garcia ninth and Chandler 10th.
250CC GRAND PRIX
about them. I was missing my apexes
because I couldn't use the white lines,"
Beattie said. "Once the rain stopped
things got better. I was just braking and
driving it out in a straight line to get
around a bit ofchatter trouble I was having."
Itoh dropped back behind Barros,
only to crash on the final lap and injure
his neck. Barros was sixth and having
the same problem that's bothered him all
year, an inability to tum the bike quickly
in the first part of the comer.
Itch's crash moved Puig up to seventh. Mackenzie, whose tires were so
knackered he was expecting to crash,
Luea fastest •
barel
a re ly this season was tire
choice as critical
in qualifying as it was
at the 2.95-mile Circuito de Catalunya,
and for two reasons.
The first was the
weather. Instead of a
series of blistering
Catalan afternoons,
which some teams
had enjoyed during
their tests here, there
was only an intermittent sun and mostly
cool afternoons when
qualifying was run. Besides that is the matter of the corners, or rather, their shape and length. Because the circuit has a number of long, constant-lean-angle corners,
the contact patch is narrow and is worked exceedingly
hard, promoting overheating and early tire failure.
In combination the two are baffling. One crew chief
who'd tested in 9O-plus degree heat earlier in the year,
said that he was practicing with a harder compound lire
even though the temperature was about 20 degrees lower.
As it turned out the track favored the Dunlops of
Luca Cadalora (above), though not by much, and the
whole front row was covered by .723 seconds. Cadalora's best lap of 1:47.918 (98.451 mph) was a new track
record - about seven tenths under Mick Doohan's previous mark - but just .016 faster than Doohan. Both agreed
that pole position was mostly for bragging rights and
both had bigger worries ahead.
"Sometimes the difference between pole and second
and third is very small," Cadalora said after taking his
fourth pole of the year. His bigger concerns were tires
and top speed, and it was obvious from the speed gun
that the Marlboro Roberts Yamaha was down on speed.
Clocked at the end of the front straight, Cadalora's
bike was about 8 mph down on the fastest Hondas, those
of HRC's Alex Criville and Shinichi Itoh, both in over
19.1 mph. Of the works Hondas, Doohan's was the slowest, slow being relative at 186.917 mph, and it was put to
his testing of a new liquid cooling system for the exhaust
gases.
R
'