Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

t is tr ad itio nal in the week befo re th e first ra ce to pr ed ict a vintage season to come. This year, one can do so wi t h ve ry r ea l since r it y. When three-time top-class champ ion Valentino Rossi jumped ship from his co mfo rt a ble berth w ith th e dominant Honda factory tea m to underdog Y ama ha, he guaran teed that interest would run at fever pitch. Can the Ita lian genius racer tu rn around the fort unes of Yamaha, without a win for a full season and without a World Champ ionship since 1992, when Wayne Rainey won the third of three in a row? Ca n his revered crew chief jerry Burgess, who also moved (after 2 1 years with Honda!), work his magic on the nearly there M I Yamaha? Can the Yamaha factory come up w ith the tech nical improvements Rossi and Burgess will no dou bt require? What will Honda do to fightback, having promised last year that if Rossi left, it would do everything it could to destroy him? And how will the other factories Aprilia, Ducat i, Kawasaki, Proto n and Suzuki - res pond to a third year of the 990cc MotoGP class that offers an easier opportunity for glory than the last two, when the Rossi/Honda combination was almost unbeatable? All these questions will be answered over the next 16 ro unds, the first of wh ich is the South African GP at the Phakisa Freeway on Sunday, April 18. The track outside the gold mining city of Welkom, south of johannesburg, cannot be counted on as a reliable indicator of form . At an altitude of some 4900 fee t, thin air saps engine pe rformance and I thrott le response, while frequent earth tre mo rs (the ground is honeycombed with gold-mine shafts) riddle the already slippery, seldom-used surface with bumps. An unreliable indicator? Well, for the past two years straight, eventual champion Rossi has been beaten in a last-corners scramble, by teammate Tohru Ukawa in 2002 and Sete Gibemau in 2003. It remains to be seen if he can reverse the tr end in 2004, especially on a Yamaha MI that has not shone there in the past. But things are different at Yamaha. It has already commissioned a radically different versio n of its in-line four, a configuration that is thought to have four rather than five valves per cylinder but more crucially to have changed crankshaft timing. In place of the conventional symmetrical firing pulses of an in-line four, shifting the center two crank pins by 90 degrees would make the intervals emu late a 9O-degree V-four. This is what observers believe Y amaha has done; it is saying nothing. And Rossi has shown his sheer class through the testing season, esp ecially at the last two group IRTA tests in Spain. The cheeky Italian was fastest both at Cata lunya and jerez. He did several fast laps at that speed, but it remains to be seen if he can sustain this new -found Yamaha pace for full race distance. The opposition is formidable : a phalanx of six Honda riders including three former World Champions ; four Ducatis - two new GP4 machines and two of last year's race-wi nning Desmosedici versions; three other Yamahas, two Aprilias and two Proton V-fIVes. And two other Japanese factories that have improved considerably over the winter - Suzuki and Kawasalti. Honda's biggest prob lem may come , \ from infighting among itSow it has threatened to impose It is hard to guess who thl'Ywill fav many insiders tip Colin Edwards as t f! man to watch. mainly because of his double Superbike World ChampionsHips and his great consistency. With so many different potential race winners, the title will go to the man who is at or near the top the most often and who keeps scorihg rather than risking too much for individual race wins. But Honda also has Max Biaggi, Sete Gibemau and Alex Barros, formidable old hands, as well as the highly promising Nicky Hayden and hard-charger Makoto Tamada. The Honda RC2 I IV has been improved under the skin over the winter, with a revised swingarm and rear linkage, a better slipper clutch, and (most crucially) more horsepower. Yamaha has another of the new engines for Carlos Checa, with Marco Melandri and Norick Abe on the older type of engine, at least for now. Ducati's threat, led by factory riders Loris Capiross i and Troy Bayliss, has bee n spiked preseason by poor test res ults. The bike is still the fastest out there in te rms of top speed (2 15,4 mph at Catalunya!) but has so far proved hard to set up. This w ill be a drawback at the very twisty South African track. Aprilia riders jeremy McWilliams an roo kie Shane Byrne have had thei guns spiklld because the ne bike is not ready; Proton riders Nobu Aokl and Kurtis Ro berts have the ne bike, but it, too, is not ready, the revised engine s . I they The neweh engine tum last much froen Roberts Jr. competitive I second-fastest, Rossi, with team far behind. The t from Michelin to 6ri tests could hardly speak enough of the rubber, even though one catastrophic high-speed blowout triggered a heavy crash for Roberts in Malaysia. Who will win? Well, that's what we'll all be waiting to see. And it's a season that could go all the way to the end before it is decided .

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