Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

there, because if you make a little mistake, you're going down. And it end ed up being true, with him crashing and Norick [Abe] crashing. Y make a litt le mistake and you ou run off the track a little bit and then you highside in fourth gear. We've got to have tolerances. And for me, that' s o ne of the biggest things at the moment. Curbs, you don't want to use as an advantage, you just want to use the m for a mistake. So you need to have curbs tha t don't have a lot of grip, as far as mechanical grip, but they 're safe. like Laguna Seca's last turn - you need a correct curb there so that people can use that when they start to highside and pick it up and still stay on the gas. But they lose a little bit of time . There's just not a correct curb there . That 's one of the problems . W he n yo u ma ke suggestions, how sp ecific are t hey? Do you have bl ue pri nts or draw ings ? We'll go out and assess everything we can. We're not going to sit down with a three-dimensional CAD program. We just go, "We ll, it's uphillor it's downhill or this or that" or whatever makes sense to what they can work with. Who d oes th e fo llow-up] That wo uld be the rider-safety rep , Franco Uncini, or Claude Danis. T hey have yo ur re commendations a nd kee p after t he track, Basically, when Carme lo [Ezpeleta] hears the stuff, whe n all the safety guys hear it and all the riders agree , everybody says, "Hey, we've got to fix it," the tracks are obligated to fix it because they want to have a Grand Prix and they don't want to see peop le get hurt . Whe n I talked to Valentino, he sa id not a ll th e tracks did everything. He singled out Mugello as th e one t hat did th e le ast of w hat yo u'd asked for. Specifically, I don't know. I'm not going to sit here and rate them . A lot of the m can do things and a lot of them can't. Some of the se tracks are built on land that people own and won't sell. We're not a government. We can't just say, "We're going to take this land and give it 20 more feet of run-off because we can." Basically, he' s IDO-pe rcent right; when Valentino says something abo ut safety or I say somethi ng or any of the riders say something, it' s correct. I don't know if they [Mugello] are the most or the least. I don't know why they won 't comply. Most of the time , it's because they don't own the land. If they don't own the land, then it' s a three -year pro cess: They buy it, they've got to get bids, there 's a certain type of mosquito that lives there... Where does Suzuka standl Suzuka, obviously, is not going to pass in the curren t track layout. You've got a bunch of figure e ights on that thing and they don't own the land that they need to ow n to make it bette r. The riders want to fall down and slide to a stop and then get up and go back out on the bike. Suzuka, one little mistake may end your season. We don't need that. The series doesn't need it. like [Alex] Barros last year on the Yamaha: He crashe s and tears his knees up in a fourth -gear crash. The wall is too close to the trac k. We're going there for very minimal amounts. In the long term, if it was the only GP and let's say Suzuka had a million peo ple coming to the race, it'd be a different story - but it's just not that way. Over the years , just so many things have happened there, everyone was fed up with. Did you make recom mendat ions on ho w it co uld be fixed? We said we don't want to hit walls. W hat [Makoto] Tamada did there or [Tohru] Ukawa, where he pushed the front and then ran thr ough the hairpin and hit the wall. If he would have hit anot her rider, one of them wo uld have been dead. That' s just not acce pta ble. Do you expe ct t he m to do any of this work? They asked us for safety stuff. Dorna is going to have to decide for them selves what they need to do . eN IRenRE A DIVISION OF INCAC !It "" Io

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