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/128355
lentino Rossi handed Yamaha its first premier-class GP Riders' World Championship in 12 long years, achieving just what he'd said he aimed to do whe n he walked out on Ho nda 12 mont hs ago. After leaving Honda, he says, because of HRC management's insistence on diminishing the role of the rider (namely, himsell1) in developing Honda's V-fIVe MotoGP race bike and winning races with it, Rossi walked across the street to a Yamaha Racing operation desperate for success with its underachieving YZF-M I inline four. Turning the bike into a World Champion was a big task, but one year on and with the close support of Yamaha's new race boss , Masao Furusawa , Rossi has taken the Japanese firm's race operation by the scruff of its neck and delivered exactly what he'd said he'd do - beat Honda . Revenge is a dish best enjoyed cold, and it' ll be all the sweeter for Rossi because of the ma nner in which it was obtained: by winning the first of nine MotoGP race victories on his debut ride for Yamaha in South Africa, en route to clinching the title one race early in Phillip Island. Mission accomplished. The chance to discover from the hotseat exactly how Rossi and the Yamaha factory race team had turned the lackluster YZF-M I (which I found less than impressive when I first rode it one year ago) into such a dominant, title-winning package th is season , came in a pair of 15minute test sessions at Valencia two days after Rossi had swept to victory there in the final GP of 2004 - a race he didn't have to win, remember. After talking to him about the M I the previous week at V Yamaha's R6 launch at the same circuit , I'd been counting seconds until I could finally throw a leg over his 2004 ultrabike - The Bike That Valentino Made, with help from Yamaha, and Jerry Burgess and his crew. For this tit le, success was indeed very much a team effort. First though, just beforehand, I spent five laps getting reacquainted with Loris Capirossi's V-four Ducati Desmosedici about as different a motorcycle from the less powerful but much more refinedfeeling Yamaha as could possibly be imagined . These two bikes are at opposite poles of current MotoG P race development. The muscular, mighty, so-fast but so-flighty Ducati seemed eager to spin the standard rear Michelin we'd been assigned for our press tests at almost any revs in each of the bottom four gears. It needed lots of physical force and body English to wrestle it from side to side in Valencia's tight turns. After riding it, walking up pit lane to straddle t he Yamaha, seemingly so delicate and refined by comparison, was like looking at a Swiss watch to tell the time rather than Big Ben! The Yamaha feels lower and smaller to settle aboard than the Ducat i, which you sit in rather than on, surrounded by body work. It's a touch wider than the V-four Suzuki I had been riding at the same circuit the week before the GP. The YZF-MI also fee ls less tall and more wieldy than the GSV-R. Even compared to the ZX-RR Kawasaki I had tested the previous day also an inline four whose Suter-built frame is much more compact than last year's Incredible Hulk - the YZF-MI feels slightly smaller, if a little longer, than the Green Screamie. The Kawi is the bike it's closest to in architecture, tho ugh, not only in terms of chassis design, but also because of the engine layout. This is all the more true since Yamaha switched to a similar 16valve layout fro m January onward, parking the five-valves-per-cylinder format used previously. Watching the Yamaha mechanics fire the YZF-M I up with an ingenious rear-wheel trolley starter that didn't require them to lock the slipper clutch in place to do so, as Ducati must do (so presumably Ducati uses a higher degree of ramp angle to achieve this), was the signal to hop aboard and head off down pit lane. Right away I noted the MI's quite high, 3000-rpm idle speed at rest and the so-dist inctive gruff engine note of the inline four -cylinder motor with its closed-up firing order adopted for this season, compared to last season's even ly spaced Kawasaki-like screamer. My next surprise was that, unlike any of the other MotoGP bikes even the super-Superbike Suzuki - the Yamaha drives cleanly away from the mark almost as easily as a road bike. You don't need to wind up the clutch, nor do you feel any transmission snatch , any holes in the powerband, surging of revs or jerky throttle response. It just gets up and goes , with minimal fuss, just very fast - thus putting Valentino's unaccustomed good starts this season into perspective. The Magneti Marelli EFI, which was adapted to the bike from midseason, has a program that restricts revs to S800 rpm in first gear after firing up the motor, This is still good enough for the SO mph pit-lane speed limit, and when you change into sec ond for the first time, the program is wiped and you can use full revs in bottom gear - if you decide you need to do so (and you do , twice per lap, at Valencla). O ut on the track, it's best to ex plain what the YZF-MI is like to ride by te lling you first of all that it doesn't do, especially compared to Carlos Checa's flawed , 20valve, '03 bike that I rode a year ago. So, it doesn't wheelie any more in the bottom four gears out of Valencia's final turn onto the pit straight, reaching repeatedly for the sky as you try desperately to keep the throttle wound wide open as you powershift up the gearbox with the front wheel waving around your ears. It doesn't free wheel into corners like before, with all engine braking programmed out just to satisfy the unreformed 2S0cc two-stroke riders who were previously responsible for developing and racing the YZF-M I. Neither does it back into turns , thanks to a flawed weight trans fer, when you squeeze hard on the front brake lever and stamp on the rear stopper. And when you get back on the throttle to exit a turn, it doesn't snap away from your chosen line due to the overaggressive power delivery of the prev iously fitted flat-slide throttles, instead of the smoother, more user-friendly twinbutterfly design used now. And it doesn't skip about over bumps because of a toostiff suspension package. Instead, this is a motorcycle that, inside