Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

Bv Mrcuarr Scorr IN THE PADDOCK Chain Reaction Ipnere were rwo parlrcurar I events at the Grand Prix of I C"t"lrny" thrt might nor seem I to be related, but they were. I One was the ghastly six- bike pileup going into the first corner, which mercifully and amazingly caused no serious iniuries. It is the sort of accident that is always waiting to happen. The other was the return of Kenny Roberts Jr. with a front-row sraning posi- tion on his father's hybrid Honda-powered machine, and a finish right up there on the rostrum - his liBt in dryweather since 2000. What do they have to do with each other? Quite a lot, in an indirect way. l'm not trying to sug- Sest that Roberts Jr.'s retum was only the con- sequence of a depleted field, missing not only Sete Gibernau, but also 2006 race winners Loris Capirossi and Marco Melandri (the orher three involved - lohn Hopkins, Dani Pedrosa and Randy de Puniet - made the restart). He might have been a place or two lower if they had been running, but it hard- ly matte6. He was on the pace all thror.:gh qual- iryin8, and all race long. Given that he is a for- mer World Champion, this should not be so surprising. Given that he is Kenny Poberts J r., how- ever, it was. Because Kenny has spent the years since his title vic- tory in 2000 heaping something like shame on his 8.eat name, by racing at well below his ability. It's not really shame, however. For all of those years Roberts was riding a Suzuki, and there is no question about the capability oftheir machines - both the last ofthe 500 two-strokes and the first ofthe 990 four-strokes. Compared with Honda and Yamaha, they iust weren't good enough. Unless it rained. Suzuki has begun to address this prob- lem, with significant improvements for 2007- After dropping Roberts, as it hap- pens. He seemed due for retirement. "l thought l'd be watching this year's races from the couch," as he put it at Catalunya. He was given a lifelane in the rationality. lt is these men who remind us constantly by their actions that even at World Championship level, it's still only a motorcycle race. On the other, I admire anyone intelli- gent enough to rise above the unreason- able expectations of others, and to do things in his own way. fu the immortal Mike Hailwood once said. the idea is to win the race at the slowest possible speed, not the fastest. Kenny put a bit of a new twist on that one. What has this to do with the Catalunya crash? Well, everything, and also nothing. It depends on how you view that accident. It was triggered when the Ducati pair o{ Gibernau and Capirossi, both pumped up more matter of fact, saying that if all the riders were iust to give each other enough room. then all would be safe. Which is ,ust too sensible for most peo- ple, although very knny- We can expect that for the next few nces riders will be a little more circumspect into turn one, but memories tend to be short when the liShts go green. Roberts may be willing to protect himself from himseli but there are plenty of hotheads on the grid with a quite different approach to life, and racing. That is why rhe first-turn pileup is always an option. Especially at tracks where the start line is followed by a good straight. and then hard braking for a slow corner. Which includes quite a lot them. fu the dust settled, possible measures to prevent an exact replay of Catalunya were sug- gested. lf Gibernau's brake had not been iammed on, his bike wouldn't have looped, and it is even possible that nobody would have fallen if this had not happened. Off-road bikes already have equipment in place to prevent this occur- rence - a guard over dre front-brake lever that means only the rider can apply it, rather than some external obiect. Like a tree, or the back end of another motorcy- cle. lt would be simple enough to arrange something similar on road-racing bikes. Why stop there? The current regulations limit fairing width, which means that handlebars and levers inevitably proiect beyond the bodywork? A wider. fuller fairing enclosing the bars would not only protect the front brake. lt would also open up new aerody- namic possibilities. And, perhaps more importantly in 2006-style MotoGP pro- vide a whole new area for sponsor logos. We shall see if there is any response to this suggestion. ln the meantime, try to find some rerpect for rhe Caprain Sensible approach of Roberts and a few others. And thank the lucky stars that nobody was badly hurt in this most recent reminder of an old racing truth - that nobody wins the race in the first corner. Conversely, at Catalunya, several people lost it there. Cll them a whole bunch better than HRC's previous choice for engine supply, the .lapanese Moriwaki outfi t. But I digress. The point is whether we should heap shame on Kenny for refusrng to take unreasonable risks on a machine that was unable to repay those risks with top-linishing positions? Or whether we should respect him for an intelligent approach. After all, when the chances were there - as in the streaming rain at Donington last year, where he was sec- ond to Rossi - he did give it ever/thing. Personally, I am of two minds. On the one side, I rather like racing heroes who are proper maniacs. driven by somerhing more visceral than common sense and a ANDIHEIIYOA SAID... ONTHEGRID.THAT'S l3rn HEYSETE- NUMBER ANDTHETII SAIDTOYOU L()RISJOU DON'TWANTTO BELIEVE N THAT TND OF SUPERSTITIOUS NONSENSE I ir. ,*, 91 N G r R A o N .T o 5 F it I t :ii 98 JUNE2s,2006. CrCLE NEWS same way that his much more famous father's independent team was given a lifeline. Kenny senior had Honda V-live engines bestowed on him for his England- built rolling stock, and he chose his son as a rider. This new proiect has taken time to come together, and (rather to their own surprise) the England-based Team Robens required some advice from HRC before they could get their chassis to work. "We've never had this much horse- power and torque before,'' is how both Kennys explain it. Nevermind. The point is they haye been able to do it. and are now in a position to be fully competirive, and to keep on improving. This makes to the maximum by poor qualifying posi- tions, and the urgent need to make up for it before getting stuck midfield- They drift- ed into one another on the dash to the first corner, and collided. Because Gibernau's front-brake lever was iammed on in the collision, his bike ground-looped forward, settang off a potentially very cat- astrophic chain of events. Roberts, who came within inches of being involved himself, spoke about it after the race, as did Rossi. The lafter, himself the victim of a similar incident at round one at Jerez, joked that maybe there should be an agreement between riders that nobody would overtake anybody else until ofter the first corner. Kenny was AN UNLUCTY I [. s v

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