P132
CN
III IN THE PADDOCK
BY MICHAEL SCOTT
IS DUCATI
THE NEW HONDA?
Who is more
important? The rider
or the engineers?
heavily reinforced.
For Honda, it's ingrained,
and has been for years. Rossi's
long-serving crew chief Jerry
Burgess, a long-term fixture at
Honda with Gardner, Doohan
and Rossi, summed it up neatly.
"For Honda, riders are like light
bulbs. When one burns out, you
chuck it out and screw in a new
one."
That attitude triggered Valen-
tino's turncoat departure to Ya-
maha at the end of 2003, taking
Burgess and his mainly Antipo-
dean gang with him. Valentino
was determined to prove that it
was the rider that made the dif-
ference, not the bike. Four more
championships proved his point.
If only he'd stopped there, for
exactly the opposite happened
when he went to Ducati for two
years. The bike ruled the results.
And not in a good way.
The Italian Stallions have been
revitalized since those dark
days. As well as being the most
technically adventurous MotoGP
bike, the Desmosedici is reliably
the most powerful. Desmodrom-
ic valve gear is not just for brag-
ging rights, you know. It cuts en-
gine drag and offers very precise
I
s Ducati the new Honda? Cur-
rent events in MotoGP show a
kinship that is both impressive
and slightly alarming.
One common thread is a clear
and rather heart-warming reli-
ance on having plenty of horse-
power and all the good things
that come with it.
Another is a certain arro-
gance—an attitude. It is the
creed that engineers are the
most important part of the race-
track combination. The riders
are secondary. Under the auto-
cratic control of the gifted Gigi
Dall'Igna, this notion has been
