Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
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By IN "HE PADDOCK MICHAEL SCOTT The Golden Age t's been a fascinating MotoGP season. True, it was rather too easy to prediet who would be winning the races - especially in retrospect. Valentino Rossi made it all look so straightforward that it's easy to forget how hard he had to work sometimes. Proof of that was at the last two rounds. He went just slightly off the boil - and got beaten. In spite of the predictability, I believe 2005 was something of a vintage year. I'd even go further than that. The normal state of racing is for one rider or one factory to dominate. Just as riders tend to win their titles all in a row, so, too, do motorcycles take charge for whole swaths of time. Then another I year left to run - as something of a Golden Age. But of a different kind altogether. In the last era, with the 500s, the impetus came from the fact that there wasn't really a dominant machine. With the 990s, there is a dominant machine. It is the Honda, which really, when all is said and done, is a superior piece of kit at almost every circuit. The "gold" in this golden age was because the Honda so frequently got beaten, last year and this, in spite of being so good. We all know why. Read Rossi's autobiography (a repetitive and rather smug but still illuminating tome) and you will be reminded of the reason he left Honda to Some of them never did - look at the fate of the once-devastating Max Biaggi, the man he beat by mere tenths in that opening round in South Africa; and of Sete Gibernau, whom he has put firmly in his place with repeated relish. The technical profile has changed somewhat since then. Yamaha's new-this-year compact engine came hand in hand with several other refinements, a handy power boost and a significant electronic upgrade prominent among them. This brought the M I significantly closer to the Honda, whose own V-five upgrade never made it to the races - they are still testing it to try and one takes over. Moments when more than one of either man or machine is seriously in the running are quite rare. They call them Golden Ages. The last one was in the 500cc era, when the machines were coming up to the end of their development. The Yamaha, Suzuki and Honda all behaved performed and somewhat differently, each having its strengths and weaknesses. But the right rider could make the overall effect more or less the same, in terms of lap times and race times. At the same time, there was a rare flowering of exceptional talent. In this way, the likes of Eddie Lawson, Mick Doohan, Wayne Gardner, Kevin Schwantz and Wayne Rainey would line up on the grid, and you wouldn't know which one was going to win. The Golden Age before that was in the late I960s, when the Japanese factories started to flex their muscles - Honda's technical adventure vs. the more prosaic, simple-but-c1ever two-strokes. In that case, the winner wasn't always so difficult to predict, but with all those different machines and noises out there, who cared? I believe that we will look back on the era of the 990s - which have just one more Ducati showed it had some strength left, but it needed a tire advantage to be able to drive it home. Kawasaki improved, and showed it still needs to improve some more. All of the above had the benefit of newly developed fly-by-wire systems, all from Magneti Marelli, and all not only smoothing out engine braking, but also offering a degree of traction control. Only Suzuki and Honda stuck with its own inhouse engine management. Honda's unique system is both clever and highly effective. Suzuki's is clumsy and primitive, and costs the riders much confidence, which is something they need plenty of to make up for their horsepower deficit. Suzuki is said to have been testing Marelli gear, and this might be the key to their next step forward. All still a sideshow to the Rossi phenomenon, of course. He won again on a bike that was generally inferior to the Hondas, if only slightly so. Proving again the ultimate triumph of humanity over physics. Then the year ended, very promisingly for the prospects of 2006, with a pair of race wins for young pretender Melandri. At the same time, U.S. GP winner Nicky Hayden had at last arrived as a serious- go to Yamaha - to prove that the rider was more important than the machine. It comes down to the nature of the 990s that he was able to do this. Given a certain standard (and you'll notice that he wasn't tempted by Kawasaki or Suzuki), the big MotoGP four-strokes give a rider enough room to move that he can start to impose himself to real effect. Rossi even won his first race on the M1 Yamaha, which, back at the start of 2004, was a long way short of the machine it is now. That was the mark of riding genius, and it so intimidated the opposition that it has taken until late this year for many of them to get going again. make good the promised improvement. Thus Colin Edwards was, on a good day, able to challenge for top positions on the Yamaha. The ex-World Superbike Champion's inconsistency might have been blamed on the machine, were it not for the example of his title-winning teammate. And class rookie Toni Elias was coming strong in the later races, too, so that Yamaha is now kicking itself that the Spaniard has been lost to Honda. This was a consequence of the GauloisesYamaha sponsorship wrangle that saw Fortuna also quit Yamaha for the Gresini Honda team. Elias will join double race winner Marco Melandri. ly consistent rostrum threat. Rossi will start the last year of the 990cc class under more pressure than he did this year. It may be his last season of racing, unless either the improving opposition or the new 800cc machines can prick his interest. He fears, however, as do I, that the new smaller bikes will be a pale shadow of the current booming monsters, and that cutting the engine size by such a big margin will take away too much of what he describes as "the taste." It is the taste of the 990s that has made the last few years special, and the next one as well. Good enough to be a Golden Age? That's my vote. eN CYCLE NEWS • NOVEMBER 30, 2005 75