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/128342
,------,- e- y--::c ' e ts-J:- =-' k- So' t y--- - - - - - -- - - - - - - K,-:- nn- Ro-b -r- r.-=rco" s-= ,-F e[Aoki] elected himself, and that was the com mittee. And then [Max] Biaggi stoo d up and said, "I wa nt Kenny on the commi tte e because Kenny will demand correct things," and I said, "Okay, it's fine with me ." That was it, because I basically talked to everybody. That's kind of how that came about. From there, we have leverage, because MotoGP is the biggest thing to a lot of tracks and a lot of coun tries. So everybody wants the riders to be safe. But America is far behind in everything. NASCAR eve n put in soft walls. Nobody wa nts to see the riders getting hurt . The public do esn't want to see riders getting hurt. Mot oGP, or whateve r you want to call it, has been arou nd a long time. It generates a lot of money, and if the riders aren't happ y... It's the same t hing you guys have but a different scale. Who else is involved? You'd have to talk to [riders rep Franco] Uncini or [FIM safety inspector] Claude Danis. I don't know what the chain of command is. But we always meet every weekend, Safety Is Paramount Kenny Roberts Jr. spends a lot of time trying to make t hings safer he week after Daijiro Kato was fat ally injured in t he 2003 Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka, the riders took action. During a meeting at the South African Grand Prix in Welkom , they organized a rider-safety comm ittee. Kenny Roberts Jr. was nominated by one of his fellow riders. The others are Valentino Rossi, Sete Gibernau and Nobuatsu Aoki. Together with representatives from various orga nizing and sanction ing bodies , t he r ide rs inspect their current race venue. They make suggestions about wh at work needs to be done. Most, but not all, tracks have been extremely cooperative. The riders had the power to deny t he Honda-owned Suzuka Circuit a slot on the 2004 MotoGP calendar. It's absent T in 200S as well. Despite the pressure of the champ ionship, and all that involves, the track -safety meeting is sacrosanct. "I think is importa nt because now th e bikes are very, very fast and is very important to do n't stop now," Rossi said in Brno. "This year we continue . We see , especia lly, also if we need to go in new tracks we go to see and we give some advice and we continue." Amo ng t hese new t racks is Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, though it' s unclear who will inspect t he trac k if the nece ssary work is done. Roberts made a number of de ta iled recommendations after a trip this past w inte r. He , along with Carlos C heca and Wayne Rainey, did a lap of the 2.2-mile 34 SEPTEMBER 22,2004 • CYCLE NEWS road course. There's no ques tion it needs work to meet MotoGP standards. T he o nly question is whether there's time fo r the work to be done. But th at's for another day. We int e rviewed Robe rts in his motorhome shortly after his Saturday safety meeting. It had been a long day. Though he 'd gone well in the dry, the Bridgestone rain tires were clearly not the match of the Michelins or Dunlops . He'd start the Czech GP farther back than he would have liked. Whe n was t he rid er-safety commission born? Actually, we met in South Africa, and then we basically needed Valentino [Rossi], because he was World Champio n, and Sete [Gibe rnau] elected himself and Nobu 40th Anniversary Carmelo [Ezpeleta, CEO of Dorna] , and IRTA and the FlM. We only deal with stuff on the safety side, and if they have a ques tion to make the racing better. Then we try to help them if they have conce rns about safety. If not , then we go over track -safety condi tions . Th is part icular track here [Brno] did everything we wa nted, safetywise. As of now, it's one of the safest tracks . It's not rocket science . It's just common sense. Do the r ide rs meet in a dvance and discu ss wh at needs to be done? We got there and it's like, "Hey, did you see how close that wall was?" O r Sete will run off the track or someone will make a mistake and they 'll go, "What did you th ink of how close that wall was?" Then it just kind of goes from there. Somebody said t hat yo u ran off the track in turn on e at the Sachsenring and fou nd the wall was t oo close. Basically, a lot of my stuff is just kind of looking around the trac k. Where [Marco ] Melandri crashed [at the Sachsenring in Germany], I said there needs to be a curb