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/128197
MaMBiaggi By MICHAEL SCOTT PHOTOS By GOLD £, GOOSE ax Biaggi would never admit it, but he is the most puzzling of riders. The most puzzling of people, perhaps. A riddle, wrapped in an enigma, that somehow grows increasingly fascinating with the passing of time. On top of that, he is blessed with a riding talent that is impossible to sum up in a single word. It can be incandescent. It can be smooth, accurate and intelligently applied (increasingly so - last year, anyway). Or it can be suddenly squandered in foolhardy error. It can sometimes lie dormant. It seemed like that at the start of last season. After a year of (as it transpired) rather overblown publicity, the new M1 Yamaha four-stroke turned up in public for preseason testing and proved a major disappointment, as it was outrun by the obsolesoent two-stroke Yamahas at Estoril and Valencia. Max made no secret of his dismay. The bike was "an embarrassment," he said, adding at a Marlborohosted press conference: "I'd like to congratulate Honda on building such a good bike." Teammate Carlos Checa was not only a bit more discreet in his comments, but he was also quicker than Max. And ahead of him in the championship, in the early stages. Things started to turn around, for the bike and for Biaggi, with the approach of the summer break, and he moved ahead of Checa overall. Then came the shock. Yamaha dropped him, in favor of his Spanish teammate. Biaggi had been dumped. It seemed to act like a red-hot poker. Biaggi came back in scintillating form, winning the next race at Brno after King Rossi burned up his rear tire trying to keep up and doing it again in Malaysia without any such help. As he outstripped Tohru Ukawa to take second overall, teammate Checa went into a disastrous slump, and it didn't help when he crashed out of the lead at Rio after getting left on the line. And it began to look as though Yamaha had made a very serious mistake. As team morale slumped in the pit lane, Blaggi stayed serene, announcing soon afterward that he had signed for three years with Pramac to ride a Honda. Far from being weakened by the episode, he instead seemed to gain in stature, both in his own eyes and to the world at large. Biaggi is the only rider to have won four consecutive 250cc World Championships. He also won his first-ever 500cc GP, at Suzuka in 1998, finishing second overall to Mick Doohan, riding a Honda. But he complained a lot about the bike and at the end of the year switched to Yamaha for the first of four up-and-down years. At the last race of that era, he gave us this exclu- M At the start of the season, after I had raced so well, I didn't expect to be so far behind the Honda. The bike had a lot of problems, and to discover this - was like a knife in my back. I'm paid to do my job with the spirit for winning, not just to ride around waiting for something to come - but this was the way already for many years. I'm sick, really sick So you spoke also to Yamaha at the time? Yes. I said to them, "You know, you're losing face." Yamaha is the second-biggest factory in the world. And I'm losing face, too. The people have dreams - that I should be a competitor for Rossi. But I did not have the same gun. I had a gun with no bullets. So give me the right bullets. Before the end of last season, Yamaha had already been testing, and they had excellent results "the mission - the four-stroke era." They made a lot of noise - for what? It looks like they gave the press 22, 2003' eye I e n e tion? No. He said that with a couple of clicks here, a couple of cUcks there, the bike is ready for winning. That's what he said - I hear this, because honestly the lap time was good, and from then, they didn't touch so much. Then you and Carlos tested at Brno, and it seemed to go well. I was slower than Checa because I was mainly struggling with trying to win the championship haps that took the bike in the wrong direc- Max, it all went wrong when the four-stroke came. It wasn't good, and you spoke your mind. You've faced criticism for that, and maybe lost the ride. JANUARY his peculiar riding style? (Shakes his head) Kocinski said to me: "I've been testing all year, and they've only changed one crankshaft, hardly anything else. No change." But Kocinski has quite a peculiar style. Per- of it. sive interview. 28 the opportunity to attack them. It was very bad, and I said so. How did they go wrong with the bike? Was it because of the test rider, John Kocinski, with vv s