Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

ROAD RACE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP 4: Italian GP ROAD RACE SERIES advantage of the various tumbles and DNFs, and found himself in fourth on the 16th lap. Criville was by two laps la ter relega ting him to fifth, but it was still his best result of the year. "Criville had more speed and 1 couldn't stay with him," Beattie said. "1 had a big battle with Barros, especially after 1 lost some grip in the last 10 laps when the tires were worn. That hurt my speed mid corner, but the Suzuki's power helped me stay ahead." But just barely. Barros was three-tenths behind at the line and happy to keep the fourcylinders in sight with his Honda Vtwin. "1 tried to pass Abe before the line on several occasiqns, but had to stay behind him," ~he Brazilian said. . He was able to get by when Abe ran off the track on the 19th lap, losing spots to Barros and Regis Laconi. He recovered the Laconi spot, but not the Barros. "When Criville and Beattie went past me, 1 thought 1 could get them back and 1 tried to pass Beattie, but had a big slide on the brakes and went off the track," Abe said. . It was all he could do to stay ahead of the charging Jean-Michel Bayle, who was only about two-tenths back at the end. "The bike was very consistent and that was good," Bayle said. "The engine temperature was lower than it had been in yesterday's qualifying session and that helped the ridability a little. I had a tough time with the V-fours on the straights, but the bike and me were good on the brakes and it was easy to pass guys at the end of the start-finish." Gibernau finished about a second Max Biaggi (1) leads Tetsuya Harada (31). Loris Capirossi (65) and the rest of the 250cc GP pack, Biaggi held off Marcellino Lucchi and Capirossi at the finish line. . Luca Cadalora was next on the first Yamaha, the former Power Horse machine now painted in the colors of rival energy drink Red Bull. The distraction of the upheaval in the team should have had an effect on him, though he claimed it didn't. "Obviously, there is a lot going on here with the team and everything, but I am just concentrating on the race," he saiol Of the riders behind him, Doohan specifically mentioned Cadalora as a threat, though, judging by his times, it's hard to ichael Doohan ended teammate Tadayuki Okada's per- see why. He only ever put together two laps at speed, spending fect season oi pole positions by taking his first of the much of the time in the pits making adjustments. Movistar Honda's Carlos Checa was at the end of the second year, despite chattering and grip problems, at the row, also spending too much time in the pits and not enough on Mugello Circuit in the hills north of Florence. the track to work out a good setup. His last lap was his best and Repsol Honda's Doohan did a trio of blistering laps with less he claimed he'd found a solution that he could use for the race. than 15 minutes to go, anyone of which would have been good The third row was a hodgepodge: Alex Barros ninth on the enough for the pole, the best one a 1:53.387 which gave him his Gresini Honda V-twin in front of Marlboro Team Roberts Jean39th career pole - though it was slower than his time from last Michel Bayle, Lucky Strike Suzuki's Daryl Beattie, and Team year. As usual, there were a slew of Hondas at the front, but Millar MQP's Jurgen van der Goorbergh. Barros probably had the most traumatic session, crashing Doriano Romboni crashed_ the Honda party, putting the Aprilia %Occ V-twin in fourth, at the end of the front row, much to the one bike and nearly the second when the gearbox broke. (He'd dellght of a sparse Italian crowd on a very warm Italian Satur- had a similar gearbox failure in Malaysia.) Luckily, the problems came after he'd set his fast time on the sixth lap, not comday afternoon. Despite being on the pole, Doohan didn't have an easy time ing very close to equaling it afterward. Bayle continued to impress on the ever-improving Modenas, of it, fighting a front end which amplified traction trouble on a track he felt was both bumpier and dirtier than last year. At one his 10th-place qualifying spot the best ever for the team at a track which penalized its lack of power and acceleration, and in point, he. ran off the track when he couldn't get the Honda steamy conditions which robbed it of what power it does have. turned. "We had some problems with heat this afternoon which we ''I'm chasing the bike around:' Doohan said, adding that his off-track excursion was caused by "chasing the front. It's not so didn't have yesterday or this morning," Bayle said. "Maybe it was a water-pump problem, but when the temperature rises much a front problem as a grip problem. When we try to get rid of it to give it more grip it turns into challer, so it's a very fine you lose low-rpm power, and that makes the engine much less responsive." llne." Kenny Roberts Jr., his teammate, was having trouble with a But wide enough to give him a margin of .402 of a second on teammate Alex Criville, the Spaniard putting in a burner of a rear end which was unsellled on braking, and he ended up 18th. "We're just having,problems getting into comers without the final lap to secure second position on the 26-rider grid. Like Doohan, Criville was having a hard time getting over the rear end losing traction, and it's very difficult to ride hard when that's happening," Roberts Jr. said. bumps, and it wasn't until the last three laps that he was able to Behind Bayle came Daryl Beallie, the Lucky Strike Suzuki dip into the 1:53s. "The track is very bumpy and it's a big job to get the bike, rider the only one in U,e field who didn't improve his time from Friday to Saturday while experimenting with two different working well through all the comers," Criville said. Repsol Honda V-four rider number three, Tadayuki Okada, approaches. "I had two bikes with different spring and suspension setwho'd taken the pole in the previous three GPs, ended up third today, his problem being a vexatious rear-end chatter. Like tings, one a little more extreme in the direction we'd already taken and the other back in the opposite direction," Beattie said Doohan, it took a final-lap mad dash on a qualifying tire to set after dropping from sixth on Friday to 11th on Saturday. "Neihis fast time. "If I had not had the problem, I think it would have been ther of them worked out for us toda y." The Yamaha Team Rainey bikes of Norifumi Abe and Sete possible to have been on pole for the fourth time this year," Gibemau sat side by ~e on the fourth row, both riders using Okada larnented. Then came IP Aprilia's Doriano Romboni, the Italian who the final lap to impr()ve, though not far enough. The second Lucky Strike Suzuki of Anthony Gobert was had also started from the front row here last year. After missing the Asian races due to a wrist injury, he finished sixth on the even farther back, all the way in 20th place, though the AusAprilia Rsv 500 at the previous GP in Jerez after coming tralian was competing under oppressive conditions: It was his through from 19th. The Aprilia, a 430cc engine last year, is up to first race of the year; he'd never seen the circuit; he wasn't fully 460cc this year, and Romboni noticed the difference at Mugello, fi! from his broken right collarbone; and he was still adjusting to the 326-mile circuit which has one of the longest uphill straights the Michelin tires. Not only that, but the team has struggled all year and the machine is clearly the most deficient of the Japanof any track on the calendar. "The bike improved a lot," said Romboni, who's still work- ese works bikes. 'The changes to the bike since I've been away don't really ing up to peak fitness, through an interpreter. "For sure when you can have more horsepower it's belfer. Here for sure it's a suit my style and I'm having trouble gelling it to stay on the llnes that I want," Gobert said. He was going for a fast lap when place where you need more horsepower than somewhere else." He added that he might have been farther up the grid had he he ran off the final comer, nearly crashing on the dirt. "That was at the end of the session, so that was my last chance," he added. not come up on Criville on his hot lap. "I am afraid he held me up and then I did not get another Still, it was his best lap. He wasn't alone at the rear of the grid. Fellow Aussie and opportunity to try and improve my time:' he saiol "By the end of the session, the rear tire was destroyed, and that also made it 500cc rookie Troy Corser was back there, the World Superbike Champion fighting an ill-handling Yamaha that he felt was impossible for me to try for a better time." Two of the Aoki brothers led off the second row, FCC Tech- down on power, though he had the 13th-fastest top speed in the nical Sport's Nobuatsu fifth on the four-cyllnder Honda, mar- second session. 'Tm happier with the chassis for sure, but I'm having a few ginally in front of the V-twin Repsol Honda of brother Takuma, whose aggressive cornering nearly negated the power advan- problems with the back coming round on me," Corser said. Behind him came two ROC Yamahas, a V-twin Honda, and tage of the four. "Ii was not a bad time, considering that my twin is not as the Paton in a one-off wild-eard appearance. Kenny Roberts said when the season began that he was fast as all those four, cytinder bikes and that it is the first time I going to release as much information as possible about the have seen this circuit,· Takuma said. Doohan puts the sto s on Okada M Modenas KRV3, and he's kept his word. Not only are there weekly updates on the Roberts Internet site, but he's held court at the first two European GPs. In Mugello, he made instantly and abundantly clear that, although the bikes are finishing races now, they haven't progressed as much as he'dlike "I think everybody knows that I'm a very competitive person," Roberts said. "In one way, you can say that if you look at this situation this time last year we were drawing this thing (the Modenas triple) on a piece of paper. If you can take yourself out of this for just a minute and realize just what we've done in that length of time, I'm very happy. And a lot of people keep reminding me of that. "And, on the other hand, I feel very badly t\lat it's not going better for the riders. For me, it's an engineering task, and we know that with a little more time we're going to engineer our way to the front. But for the riders it's very frustrating to have their second year on a 500 and all the training that they've gone through in the winter, and they're developing these kinds of probkms. . "So, yeah, on the one hand we're happy and on the other hand we're very eager to make this thing right. Because I think that it's about 40 percent of what it's capable of, and I think it's 40 percent of what it's capable of in a very short time. "The test bike is coming on stream. It's not like we don't have anything to test. We have a roomful of stuff to test. We're getting a handle on what (Kenny Roberts) Junior's having more problems with than Jean-Michel (Bayle), and I think when we fix Junior's problem it's going to help Jean-Michel. So now 1 think it's a mailer of getting the thing out on a race track and taking all the theories that are flying around in the team in engineering and prove them out one by one, and putting the bike on the race track in a much stronger condition than you see it right now. "The temperature is obviously not helping us. Probably from the last race at Jerez we have a lo-degree drop. Instead of running from 85 to 95 (centigrade; the Honda NSRSOOs run at 70), we're running at 68 to 75. So Jean-Michel had a bit of a problem this afternoon with one of the systems. But we made a big increase after the race in testing. Sure, we have new parts coming, but it's things like that we're testing. We have a new radiator for this race and we'll have a new radiator for the next race. We'll have a new water pump, and we'll probably have a new water-pump speed. We should have the new fairing done and painted by then. There's new stuff coming on all the time. There are engine components that are in the motor now that are really contributing to Junior's problems that won't be there at the next race. If they are, we'll understand the parts and in a very short time after that be able to fix that. We have major, major engine parts coming: a new crankshaft, for example, that we think will contribute to solving the problem thM we already have. It's just a matter of getting these things made, getting somewhere to test them. "The gasoline problem that we've had: We've had a block: age on gasoline going to the main jets. The actual main jets in the last three Grands Prix haven't been controlled by the main jets but by another system. That system wasn't correct. So this race we're starling all over again with the jetting. As you can see today, we've made a lillle bit of progress today on top speed because the jetting got a little closer. We're not brave enough to stick in the main jet that we think we can go with to make it run with these guys. It's just going to take us a little bit of time." And money. Roberts said that it was costing about three times as much as he expected. "We're not looking at the figures to date, but it's triple what J thought it was," he said. 'There are reasons for that. It probably will level off. We really want to know what it will cost to go racing the way I want to go racing. If we're not competitive, we'll know it's not because of financial restrictions. Right now there are no financial restraints. If hotel rooms are cheaper, racing is cheaper. Until then, costs are going to go up." Asked if he would be doing any of the testing, Roberts replied: 'There's no need for me to ride the motorcycle. There's no sense for an old man to go out and ride it. We need honest feedback from the guys who are riding the motorcycle."

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