Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

shot at it the year before because I broke my shoulder. The 2002 start, we went to the first couple of tests, and I kind of saw the difference in the Michelins, and I go, "Oh, no, the boys got to work pretty hard." Dunlop was working really hard. They did good. I think every test they must have had five new tires to try, but we just couldn't catch up to the Michelins. That was kind of a tough thing to accept. And throughout the season they tried really hard. Every race they brought us a couple of new tires. I don't know what Michelin found that was so genius in the tire, but they found something. They did a good job obviously finding something. I just hope the other manufacturers catch up. It's nice to see everyone do well. I don't like to see one brand kind of rule the show, but that's how it kind of goes. You see, one tire goes real good, and then the next tire kind of catches up and passes it. But Neil Hodgson did better than you on presumably the same tires ... And on my bike from 2001. That's still my favorite bike. I don't know why, even in preseason tests, I never got along with that 2002 bike. BaYliss seemed to get along with it. He said it was the tires. The motor configuration was the only thing that was really changed a little bit. But it really, really affected the way the bike entered the corner. And I just ended up having a lot of chatter. I could never tip the thing in. And about halfway through the race when the tire would start to go, I couldn't lean the bike over any more because the thing's coming around on me. So it's kind of strange. We tried a million things, and Ducati did a great job. They made me several different clutches. We tried a lot of things like that. Many times in qualifying, when you put on a sticky rear tire, the bike worked great. So they'd just put on a qualifier, and we'd be fast. Many times we were the top three in qualifying. And then we wouldn't be anywhere in the race. Start the race, maybe run up front for five laps and then just go backwards. And the race times were actually worse in 2002 than they were in 2001, even though I qualified a second quicker than I did in 2001. was there no option of going back to the older configuration? I don't think so. Ducati tried real hard. It just didn't work for me. I know Bayliss was doing really well on the thing, and Colin [Edwards] was always right there. It seemed like Colin, many of the times. seemed like he was the faster of the two riders. And Troy just out-trained him, outrode him for the first half of the season. Troy was the guy, for sure. Then it seemed like once Colin got his act together, and so did Honda, that was the end. I know Troy was riding really hard and trying. Did having your brother Eric at the races affect you at all? lt was good to have him there. It was nice for him to come over. The only thing it did to me is it made me miss home. He came over and I was Q A Q A Q A Q A front in races and just playing and doing the whole European thing, which is nightlife. And we just played every single day. We just played hard, hard, hard. The race would come, we'd race. The race would be fun because we'd be up front. Go play some more. I didn't miss home. And I couldn't wait for the next season to start. We came home, very short time. You're only home about a month, it seems like. You've got to go back and start testing. And '01 testing was going real well. I was really, really psyched with the new team. I thought we had a shot at the title, and that kept me enthused. I stayed over there. I hardly ever came home. I just stayed there. I didn't miss home at all. I was just so into the racing thing. And we're partying, on the bike, train, on the bike. And I loved it because we were actually racing for a championship. And that's the only reason I'm here. I wouldn't even ride if I didn't have a championship to race for, basically. That's why 2002 - it was a bit tough to accept that you weren't racing for a championship, no matter what. Then you start getting homesick and you start going, "If I can't win, I don't want to be here." What about your outside interests like rock climbing? Some people think you need to eat, sleep, and breathe motorcycles. Do you think it helps to have other activities? I think it does. In 2001, I just went climbing over there. And all I did was climb, climb, climb. No partying. Climb and more climbing and race. And we were really fast. At the end of the season, I started developing these forearm muscles that were giVing me a bit of arm pump, and at one point, when I climbed every day in Sardinia for a couple of weeks, went to Imola at the end of '01, and in two laps I couldn't release my handlebar and grab the brake, and I'll tell you, that was scary. And Alpinestar had to make me a special pair of gloves that had elastic banding in the fingers that automatically released the fingers. I was like, "That's a problem." So in '02, I kind of cut out the climbing, very little climbing, and then I was really unhappy, because then I miss home even more because I didn't even have my hobby. My results were bad. The best result I had was when I went climbing for a week in England. I drove my motorhome by myself to Germany, showed up there, and I was just fast. I was like, "God, I'm really, really quick." It took me a couple extra weeks to realize I just went climbing for a week, relaxed, listened to my music, drove here. I was in my own little world. That really helped. The last week all I've been doing is thinking of us building a bam project and the house and having a lot on our mind. It doesn't affect Eric. He's kind of a machine. I showed up here, and I was really psyched to ride, because we don't get to ride the road racers very much. So every time you get a chance to get on the bike, you just want to go out there and burn the thing up, and I got on the bike, and I was slow, and it's just been kind of a disap· pointment. When did you know your time with Ducati was over in 2002? Halfway through the season, I just couldn't get the results. I had one podium finish all year. That's it. And it was frustrating because we never set Q A like, "God, you know what? Home." And when he wasn't there, I clidn't think about it so much. But when he came over, then he'd come over for a week and he'd leave. I was like, "I had fun when he was here." You weren't worried about him racing? Q Yeah, you always are. The only problem with having your brother there - you're racing around, it's Saturday, it's Friday, or whatever, and you see somebody crash and it's a green bike, and the first thing you do, it just wrecks your lap because you look. Any time somebody crashes, that's the only one bad part. Everything else was positive. Did you feel like in your three years that you were part of the European culture? Or were you always homesick? The first year I had a lot going on. We were trying to blend in, trying to learn when you can eat, when you can't, where to go and what to do. Just how to get around. It was really hard to get around the world the first year. Just me and Mark. Then we had the motorhome over, and we had to figure that whole thing with motorhomes, and it was like a big job. It actually kept us so occupied for the first part, even though we were both kind of missing home a little bit, we were so occupied we couldn't even think about home. The only time we thought about home is when we actually flew back home after about five months in Europe. We flew home, and then we're like, "Oh, my god." We got home and we were like kissing the ground when we got home. Then you realize how much you missed home. The second half of the season came, and I'd lost my Ducati factory ride, and we had the NCR team, and then I didn't miss home any more because we were running up A Q A Q A cue I .. n eVIl's

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