Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

Bostrom's polar opposite is American Honda's Miguel DuHamel. The track has been very good and very bad for him, but mostly good. He's won the Daytona 200 three times and the 600cc Supersport race six times. He's been on the ground more than a few times, on more than a few different bikes, and suffered a major engine failure this year while in the hunt. Still, DuHamel wouldn't change a thing. "What are we going to do?" he asks. "I was talking to a couple of people before that were saying the four-cylinder is pretty fast in the midcomer - faster than the twins. So how are we going to regulate their speeds in the mid-comers if you're going to regulate our top speed? It's a neverending argument, so, basically, just shut up and go racing and live with the bed that you made. If you signed with the company and you know they don't have the power, be prepared to tuck your brains out and ride the living hell out of it. " DuHamel wasn't fazed when he was told his telemetry measured his top speed at 200 mph in qualifying. "I felt comfortable this year doing that kind of speed. I didn't have any problems at all with it. There was a couple of years when my front end.. .! was sliding and tucking the front end on the RC45 on the banking, because we were having trouble with suspension. But that's my problem and I got to take care of it and I got to make my bike better. I didn't come in crying that it's too fast and too dangerous." But others have. When Erion Honda's Kurtis Roberts blew a tire on the back straight, it caught more than a few people's attention. That it happened as he was straight up and down and heading for the chicane certainly saved him from serious injury. American Honda's Hayden had been watching Roberts working his rear tire, but was ahead of him when Roberts' tire blew, getting the word over the radio in his helmet. "When they radioed it to me, it wasn't exactly a shocker," Hayden said. Roberts was seen on television smoking his tire out of turn one more than once, hardly the type of riding conducive to tire life. But he denies that's what caused his rear tire to fail. "I smoked it out of one every once in a while, mainly when Nicky [Hayden] was in front that lap everything happened," Roberts said. "Nicky was smoking the tire as well, through the kink and through turn two in the first leg. Almost every lap, he was smoking it. Everyone can say what they want, but I think something's wrong there. " Dunlop's Jim Allen is the man in the middle. As Dunlop's road race manager in the U.S., the former racer ..has the unenviable task of trying to improve the Daytona rubber every year, while increasing the safety margin. Dunlop's record this year was admirable, especially with qualifying tires. In 2001, riders couldn't make a full lap on a qualifier. As recently as the December tire test, Yamaha's Anthony Gobert shredded a qualifier in the chicane on his fast lap. "It is quite a scary thought just to hope your rider comes around on one hot flying lap in qualifying," Yoshimura Suzuki team manager Don Sakakura says. "Other tracks, it's really not the same problem." The qualifiers were so good this year that Hayden was heading toward the unthinkable 46s when he highsided in the chicane. His lap of 1:47.174 remained impressive and nonpareil and earned him a Rolex.. With the exception of the failure of Roberts' rear tire, which is not to be underplayed, Dunlop's record was virtually spotless. It's worth noting that Roberts was the only Honda rider to have tire trouble in the 600cc Supersport race. His spinning sideways slide exiting the chicane on the final lap, right in front of teammates DuHamel and Hayden, probably cost the Honda team any chance of victory. "The biggest problems come from the speeds at Daytona, they always have," Allen said. "That's why we take things so seriously there." This year, the tires Dunlop developed specifically for Daytona "were pretty good - damned good. We really did our very best. We had, obviously, had an early tip-off that the Hondas were going to be pretty good and we came back with a couple of things that addressed the problem we had in December when Nicky [Hayden] tested there and didn't get his full 18-lap run in, but we fixed it. We didn't fix it well enough for Kurtis [Roberts]." The fix was a new tire designated the 360, the hardest of Dunlop's dual-compound range. Hayden turned his best laps on it early in practice, though it wasn't as benefi- cial to the riders on the four-cylinder machines. "From a standpoint of tire integrity and safety, I think we have done a pretty damned good job and can do a pretty good job with keeping the tires in one piece," Allen says. "There's always an exception. Kurtis' thing was a notable exception this year. As Dave [Watkins of Dunlop UK] and I said Sunday night, there's always something to take the shine off of it. You always leave that place feeling like you haven't done your job. For the most part we really did." The riders have mixed feelings. "As far as the banking, I think those Daytona Dunlops have been really coming through with the tires and tire safety," DuHamel said. Yoshimura Suzuki's Mat Mladin, who won the previous two runnings of the Daytona 200 said, believes "the problem is because of the banking and the high speeds on the banking, and the g-forces. The tires have to be so hard that they don't have any grip and that's why you get so much wheelspin and then you generate more heat. It's very much a no-win situation when it comes to the tires. Dunlop has done so much to make tires better over the years. With Daytona, it seems it's almost an impossibility. They can build a tire that's not going to come apart, but the lap times would be six or seven seconds a lap slower. And it would be impossible. It'd be like riding on ice. We certainly don't need that." Yamaha race team manager Keith McCarty thinks that it's all kind of a combination, the power that the bikes make and the available material for the tires to be made out of. "I don't know what the total answer is," he admits. "I guess you could restrict the speed somewhat, you could add weight, but to come up with that kind of formula that's fair Duel. and equitable for everybody out there, I don't know." McCarty thought more pit stops might be an option, but talked himself out of it. "You can require more pit stops, mandatory pit stops. To me, that would be the safest and smartest thing to do. Everybody's really doing it on three tires and if you made them do it on four, there's a real good chance that that could help. Then again, if a guy knows he's going to use three tires, he's going to have to conserve and if you give him more tires, then maybe they won't. It's possible that's not really the best alternative either." As stressful as the 11 days of racing in March have become, Allen realizes the importance of the exercise. "From a technical standpoint, we've just learned an awful lot about keeping tires together at high temperatures at Daytona that you can't learn at any other track in the world," he says. "Places like Phillip Island and Hockenheim, places like that, we benefit a lot from what we learn at Daytona." Roberts believes there's more work to be done and it can be done with track configuration. "If they slow the speeds on the banking, getting on the banking and leaned over and the speeds around there, it would tend to alleviate that problem. Because the thing that kills tires is fifth gear on the bank, the thing's spinning and everything on the bank. It's melting the tires." Roberts discussed changing the track with AMA Pro Racing Board Chairman P.J. Harvey. "Where you enter the chicane, fine," he says. The exit is where the change should be, Roberts says. "If they carried down around the apron [along the east banking] longer before you actually turned back on it and make it more of a stop-and-go corner to where you would accelerate straight and then you would slowly get on the banking, it would slow that down. And do the same thing, not even out of six, but keep you on the apron out of six instead of going straight up the banking. Something like that would help out a lot. You'd be so much slower getting on. The main part of the problem is the part coming right off the banking or on the banking." Others suggested moving the chicane farther down the backstretch, closer to NASCAR tum two. The exit would then be onto the flat part of the backstretch and not send the riders straight toward a wall, albeit one with some Air Fencing. The downside is that it would significantly increase speeds onto the banking and the tri-oval. "Coming out of the chicane, you might be going another 10 mph faster or going into turn one a lot faster and you're just going to hit an impact area that much harder," Bostrom argues. "That's why I'm sure the track can't be fixed." Slowing the speeds onto the banking is an option if the track is reconfigured, but that's not going to hap- n • _ S • APRIL 3, 2002 25

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