Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

But is Rossi really that good? In the 125cc class he was always on an Aprilia as good as the best; likewise in 250. In his rookie season in 500 he was fortunate not to be riding the impossibly violent 2000 factory Honda NSR that was foisted upon the unfortunate Alex Criville and Tadayuki Okada. And then in 2001 and 2002 he was clearly on the very best machinery and working out of the very best team, with Jeremy Burgess as crew chief. How does Rossi compare to the great champions who came before him? If we could devise a formula for virtual GP racing, could the Valentino Rossi of 2002 beat the Mick Doohan of 1997, the Wayne Rainey of 1991, the Eddie Lawson of 1989, the Freddie Spencer of 1985, the Kenny Roberts of 1980, the Barry Sheene of 1977, the Phil Read of 1974 or the Giacomo Agostini who won 15 World Championships? TOP 10 SOO/MOTOGP WINNING PERCENTAGE [ '1975·PRESENT·) Rider 1. Valentino Rossi (I) 2. Mick Doohan (Aus) 3. Kenny Roberts Sr. (U.S.) 4. Freddie Spencer (U.S.) 5. Wayne Rainey (U.S.) 6. Eddie Lawson (U.S.) 7. Kevin Schwantz (U.S.) 8. Barry Sheene* (GB) 9. Wayne Gardner (Aus) 10. Alex Criville (Sp) Starts 48 137 58 62 83 127 104 97 102 114 Wins 24 54 22 20 • 24 31 25 19 18 15 Winning Percentage 50% 39.4% 37.9% 32.3% 28.9% 24.4% 24% 19.6% 17.6% 13.2% TOP TEN SUPERBIKE WINNING PERCENTAGE [ '19BB-PRESENTl Wins 27 22 59 23 11 31 16 23 8 14 Winning Percentage 34.2% 28.9% 26.9% 24.2% 22.9% 17.7% 15.1% 14.5% 14% 11.9% 1- I~ Rossi has, so far in his career, dominated in a way that no one else has since the days of Agostini and MV (and that was in a time when "Ago" often rode the three- and four-cylinder MV Agusta 500s against a field of privateers on Norton and MatchJess singles and 351cc Yamaha twins). If we compare Rossi with the returning MotoGP riders, we see that of the nine current riders who have won at 500/MotoGP level, only Biaggi has managed to win more than 10 percent of his starts. WINNING PERCENTAGE AMONG CURRENT MOTOGP RIDERS [ONLY NINE CURRENT PARTICIPANTS HAVE WON AT 600lMOTOGP LEVELl Rider Starts in SOO/MotoGP 1. Valentino Rossi (I) 48 78 2. Max Biaggi (I) 104 3. Kenny Roberts Jr. (U.S.) 59 4. Garry McCoy (Aus) 5. Alex Barros (Brz) 179 31 6. Tohru Ukawa (J) 7. Loris Capirossi (I) 73 8. Carios Checa (E) 108 98 9. Sete Gibemau (E) Wins 24 10 8 3 6 I 2 2 1 Clearly, then, Rossi is used \0 winning and goes to the grid on Sunday expecting to win. No one else on the MotoGP grid has experienced the success that Valentino has in the top class, but if we are looking for other riders with Rossitype stat lines during their formative 250 years, we find two. Both Max Biaggi, who won four World 250cc titles and 29 races (and probably stayed in 250 two years too long). and Daijiro Kato, who was Virtually unbeatable on a 250 in 2001, have 250 success rates comparable to Valentino's. In fact, Kato's 250 winning percentage is even better than Rossi's, but by less than a single point. [CURRENT MOTOGP RIOERS) Stats say that Doohan was a .394 hitter, while Rainey hit .289. Somehow my gut disagrees with that. And that is where motorcycle stats fall short - not everybody gets the same size bat, so to speak. Daohan spent his career on the mighty Honda NSR, while Rainey made the best of the slower Yamaha YZR. And what kind of numbers would Kevin Schwantz have put up if his number 34 had been on the nose cone of a Honda NSR? And this takes us back to Rossi. Of all the riders who have ridden in GP racing's premier class in the two-stroke 500 and, now, the MotoGP era (from 1975, the first year a two-stroke rider, Agostini, won the 500cc class), Valentino Rossi is the only one to have won 50 percent of his starts. I checked this level of winning out against the top World Supetbike riders and discovered that Rossi is the only .500 hitter in either division. Starts 79 76 219 95 48 175 106 159 57 117 ONLY KATO MATCHES ROSSI'S SUCCESS RATE IN 250 WINNING PERCENTAGES IN 250 CLASSES • Sheene's results from 1973 and 1974 are included Rider 1. Doug Polen (U.S.) 2. Troy Bayliss (Aus) 3. Carl Fogarty (GB) 4. Raymond Roche (F) 5. John Kocinski (U.S.) 6. Colin Edwards (U.S.) 7. Giancarlo Falappa (I) 8. Troy Corser (Aus) 9. Anthony Gobert (Aus) 10. Scott Russell (U .S.) falling to a dismal 11 th in defense of the title in 2001. Over those three season Roberts won eight of his 48 starts, or a substantial 16.7 percent, more representative of his ability than his overall 500 record of 8 for 104 (7.6%). Rossi has probably never started a Friday free practice session with a bike that did not have the potential to take him to victory on Sunday. Few riders can say that. Winning Percentage 50% 12.82% 7.69% 5.08% 3.35% 3.22% 2.74% 1.85% 1.02% Rider Daijiro Kala (J) Valentino Rossi (I) Max Biaggi (I) Marco Melandri (I) Shinya Nakano (J) Loris Capirossi (I) Olivier Jacque (F) Tohru Ukawa (J) Nobualsu Aoki (J) Jeremy McWilliams (GB) Starts 36 30 87 47 34 84 80 Wins 17 14 29 10 6 12 7 4 77 Winning Percentage 47.2% 46.6% 33.3% 21.3% 17.6% 14.3% 8.8% 5.9% 1.8% 1.7% 1 57 58 1 Of course these stat lines aren't fair to riders like Jeremy McWilliams and Nobuatsu Aoki, who spent several years riding private machines in 250. Tohru Ukawa, however, has spent his entire career on factory bikes and has usually run near the front, but over the years he has just not been a c1incher. .. not a closer. Ukawa in 250 was on the podium 29 times in 77 starts but scored only four wins. The conclusion is that Ukawa tends to come out on the short end of battles for the win. But until Kato starts to show this kind of dominance in MotoGP, he will not represent a real threat to Rossi, who, in MotoGP, leads all performance categories except qualifying. So. is Rossi as good as his stats? Probably not, but he might even turn out to be better. This year will tell us a lot more than last year about what Rossi is made of. There has never been a .500 hitter in modern (post 1974) Grand Prix racing, and logic tells us there probably won't be when Rossi's final stats are recorded. Given the emergence of so many competitive machines in the hands of very good riders, he will probably be closer, at retirement, to the kind of career-winning percentage numbers put up by the likes of Mick Doohan, Kenny Roberts Sr. and Freddie Spencer (the only modern riders who have retired with .300+ batting averages in 500/MotoGP) than to the extravagant 50-percent winning rate that he currently sustain.s. Last year Rossi won 11 of 16. That seems to be an impossible pace to maintain. Given the depth of field this season, if he wins eight of 16, that will be a great achievement. Looking at career stats, the most likely riders to beat him would be Biaggi or Kato, but Biaggi doesn't have a full works bike, and Kato, regardless of his stunning 250 record, is still looking for his first win in the big class. Capirossi and Barros have had a good spring, but they have been streaky riders up until now. This will be the year they have the best machinery they have ever ridden. In their 500/MotoGP careers, neither Capirossi nor Barros has ever been in the running for the lead in points after half-season, and it seems unlikely that either will this year. That makes Rossi, regardless of what happens in the final IRTA tests, the likely champion as he goes for the three-peat in 2003. But as a Cub fan, I have always believed, blindly, in the unlikely. Without faith in the possibility of the unlikely, all hope would be lost. Cub fans believe that past form can suddenly be reversed and that historical underperformers can suddenly blossom. 1 remember believing (praying) that with just a bit of luck, a few Texas leaguers and the occasional wind-blown double, the fleet and forgotten (by you) Solly Drake could become Chicago's Willy Mays. And maybe Loris or Alex can become Valentino (and maybe this will be the year that the Cubs go all the way). What do you think? eN But GP racing is not baseball, and we can't consider mere wins-to-starts stats without taking into consideration the competitiveness of the rider's bikes. The fact that Kenny Roberts Jr. has won only 8 of 104 starts tells us, perhaps, more about the bikes Roberts has ridden than it does about his true level as a rider. After a rookie year on a 500cc Yamaha in 1996, Kenny Junior spent two seasons on his dad's underpowered Modenas triples before finally getting on board the Suzuki two-stroke 500. The Suzuki was competitive in 1999 and 2000, good enough to take Roberts to runner-up in '99 and to win the crown in 2000 before cue' D n III vv S • APRIL 9, 2003 57

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