Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

MOTOGP Round 8 July 10, 2005 ~ MotoGP World Championship setup at the end of day one. ''I'm only using four gears, and I'm only using two gears in the corners. I'm only using fourth for about two seconds, and not even wide open. The back hill is only third and rolling off before the jump. There's all kinds of ways to take it [that section]. "Our race performance on race tires... we're struggling. john [Hopkins] throws the new stuff in there and follows Valentino [Rossi] or whoever he's following, so from his side, it probably looks better. We're struggling with both ends on grip. You've got a Mich [Michelin] coming by you... I think john was on new tires and followed Valentino, and he went about a half-second quicker, I guess. He went as quick as Colin [Edwards) went, but Colin ran 24s, and when Colin came by me, it wasn't even the same race at the moment. I guess Michelin might know what the track's going to do, but we've been struggling awhile. Our results for the last three or four races, except for Italy, haven't been great." As for the new parts the team had for Laguna? down fifth ahead of Sete Gibernau, Colin Edwards and Carlos Checa after Marco Melandri and Alex Barros crashed out on the first lap. He held on for one more lap before both Edwards and Gibernau got by. He now had Checa on the Ducati putting pressure on him, and the Spanish rider squeezed by only to hand it back to Hopkins after crashing on lap eight. From lap eight to lap 26, Hopkins held on to seventh, battling with Troy Bayliss on the Pons Honda and Makoto Tamada on another Honda. Tamada squeezed by on lap 26 as Hopkins began to struggle with a less than ideal tire. The team had planned to run a different Bridgestone tire for the race, but the higher temperatures on race day forced them to choose a different compound than ideal. Hopkins finished an eventual eighth, one of his better finishes in a frustrating season but still well below his expectations in front of his home· crowd. "I guess this is just a learning experience again for everybody," he said. "It's really not where we wanted to finish. I was sliding around a hell Qf a lot, so hopefully I put on a good show. I just gave it everything I could, but with the high temperatures. we had to go with a tire that we really didn't use throughout the weekend. We had one tire that was working really good, but it needed to be a little cooler for that one. Unfortunately, there were warmer temperatures today. I gave it everything. I guess 1could say that I'm pleased to be the first Bridgestone runner and whatnot, but I'm not." When asked where he felt the Hondas of Tamada and Bayliss were better, he answered, '~t the apex of comers and on the throttle. They just have the grunt to get between point A and point B." He was happy to see Hayden and Edwards on the podium but felt that an opportunity had passed him by, at least until next year. "It's good to see Americans go one and two," he said. "But I wanted it to be me. We're still making improvements, and our time will come." Blake Conner 30 Kenny Roberts Jr. »"It would have been nice to be more competitive for the American fans, for myself, and for my family and friends, that's for sure." Kenny Roberts Jr. wanted so much more. As the longest-standing member of the current crop of Americans racing in MotoGp, no one has waited longer for a Grand Prix to be held in his home country than the 2000 World Champion. He also knew the reality of the situation: It would be impossible to compete at the front of the field on his Red Bull Suzuki. For Roberts, the race was to be a diffICUlt one, and he would ultimately finish a lowly 14th. Not what he wanted, but sort of what he expected. Still, it didn't sour the memories of his home race and even that was positive for Roberts, if for nothing else than the nostalgia that would came from racing in front of family, friends and the American race fans. Wearing a new Arai helmet custom-painted half and half with the colors of his championship year of 2000 and the three championship years of his father, Kenny, the race was special. That wouldn't change. It started on Friday with a positive. Roberts began by putting his Suzuki third in the first part of the first session. By the end of the second morning session on Friday, he was dropped to ninth. Here's a day-by-day look at the U.S. GP with Roberts Jr. Friday: "You're just setting it [the bike] up to go slow, really," Roberts said of his JULY 20, 2005 • CYCLE NEWS ·'It's hard to tell around here," he said. "You're accelerating so hard and so fast out of the comers, unless it's a huge difference. you can't tell." Roberts, like the other Americans, was under the gun from family and friends. Calls kept coming for passes, autographs, etc. "I think it's just how you approach it: If it's a pain, it's a pain, but it hasn't bothered me," Roberts said. ''I'm sure if you were racing for the championship, it would be a different thing. I have more time because I don't have any demands from the press or anything." But back to raCing: "Realistically, you have to understand that MotoGp, nowadays, as much as people want to talk about the riders and this and that, but if you put myself or john [Hopkins) on a Honda, we're going to be competitive. I know that sounds bad, but in the end, that's what you have to realize. We just have to try and make our bike, team and tires as good as we can. But realistically, on this bike, the quicker I want to go, the slower I go, because I don't use corner speed as much as this thing wants to use it because we're down on the engine side of it, and the rideability side of it, because the engine is not where we need it to be with torque and all that stuff. We're just trying to get through it and hope another evolution comes to where it changes the bike into something different - changes it to more into stopping and going, rather than where we are now which is just trying to apply corners speed." Saturday: "I expected a little bit worse, actually," Roberts said after qualifying 13th. "I got a break to follow some guys. The prob- lem is you have to qualify on the Suzuki real· Iy, really well because you're not going to pass many people in the race - simply because we don't have the machine to do it at the moment. It's just difficult. john is on the second row, and he'll get a decent start and end up eighth or 10th. If I get a decent start, maybe I'll end up somewhere around where he's at. The point is that john's not riding bad. If you put him on a good bike, he'd do really well. I know I can ride really well, but I need something to ride really well with. Right now, it's difficult. ''I'm not going to say what john's doing, but I remember when I was his age and I didn't win races and a championship, and your mental though process is a lot different. You don't know if you're ever going fast enough. You don't know what fast enough is because you're always pushing, nonstop. Then when the bike's not right, it's out of control and crash or whatever. And you don't know what happened. When you start to learn and figure it out, then you start to settle down. Neither one of those is the right way at the moment. We've got a lot of issues on this bike. Look at some of the guys in the U.S. two years ago when the Suzuki wasn't great. You make a couple of things, and now they dominate. I know Mat's [Mladin] not riding any different than when he was hating everything over here; it's the same deal. "We tried a tire that john [Hopkins) tried yesterday and I didn't get a chance to try, and that got me right into the 24s. I think the race pace for that bike will be mid-24s to high-24s if you can get with decent people. That's the race tire. We got about nine qualifiers so... it's a bit of joke, because you're going way faster. The corner speed is just ungodly. In places where you normally touch the brake a little bit, you're on the gas. It's just sick. .. Best-case scenario for tomorrow, Roberts added, "is IS guys in front of me take each other out, and none of them are the Americans, and we could have Americans one-two-three-four - and I don't care what order, either." Sunday: ':.\ctually, I'm not so much disappointed, because that's kind of where we're at," Roberts said after finishing 14th in the GP. "It would have been nice to be more competitive for the American fans, for myself, and for my family and friends, that's for sure. It's difficult because they don't know what you're going through and where you're at realistically. We went with a tire combination that we haven't tried this weekend because the track temperature got up to a point where we weren't at this weekend. And the setup that we tried from last night that we thought might help rear grip, none of it helped. I thought of pulling in with IS, 20 laps to go, but then I thought I would have just made things worse. If I came in just to get a tire to stay in 15th... It was one olthem fine lines between pulling in and going a little quicker, or staying out and going slow. It's not a fun deal." It Paul Carruthers

• Cover