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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JULY 12, 2006 • C Y C L E N E W S 90 BY MICHAEL SCOTT IN THE PADDOCK I ronically enough, in the last year of the 990s, when they are on the verge of becoming obsolete, MotoGP racing is closer than ever. The statistics prove it. Qualifying times are tenths and hundredths apart, all the way down to the fourth and fifth rows of the grid. They are consistently much closer than the smaller classes, when it's usually been the other way around. And, apart from a blip in 2003, the average winning margin has just kept on shrinking. That was in the eight races before Donington Park, however - and the most unusually large margin of almost four sec- onds laid down there by just-out-of-his- teens Dani Pedrosa. We have to hope beyond hope that this was a one-off. After all, Valentino Rossi was injured and starting from 12th; Loris Capirossi and Marco Melandri were also riding hurt; Sete Gibernau and Toni Elias were away, injured. The dour young Spaniard (who has a lovely sense of humor away from racing, insist those close to his camp) made hay during these tempo- rary absences. There was an ominous feeling to the affair, all the same. Pedrosa is the standard bearer for the new kids on the block, and his 2005 250cc sparring partner Casey Stoner, also 20, his unwilling lieutenant, is all too eager to reverse these positions. What they have in com- mon is their background. Infant motocrossing/ dirt tracking aside, both cut their racing teeth on 125s in Spain as very young teenagers, and their path to the MotoGP monsters has been entirely via 125s and 250s. There are two anomalies here - or, more correctly, two expectations over- turned. One is that 125 and 250cc two-stroke racing would become irrelevant as a train- ing ground, once the 990 four-strokes took over. Everyone expected that big Superbikes would provide a better ground- ing. That has not really turned out to be the case. Both Nicky Hayden and Colin Edwards, for example, had to rethink their riding styles to get anywhere on the big 990s. Troy Bayliss had some fun on a Ducati at first, but then it all went wrong on a Honda. It was not a logical step. The other is the assumption, based on historical precedent, that the biggest Grand Prix bikes, overloaded with horse- power and bad manners, have something of a mean streak, and it should take at least a year to learn how to tame them. That at least is the way it should be, is it not? It's certainly the way it was with the old 500cc two-strokes. The inescapable conclusion is that the MotoGP bikes of 2006 are in fact rather too easy to ride - largely due to massive advances in electronics. The taming influ- ence of sophisticated engine-management programs has now gotten to the point where former 250cc stars can just jump on them and immediately pick up the pace. Can this be right? Certainly Pedrosa and Stoner are exceptionally talented, but they are not the first such to arrive in the class, and even Rossi took a year to mas- ter his NSR500 Honda. While musing on these topics, I came upon a particular example of a massive talent who had taken a wee while to mas- ter a 500. Kevin Schwantz arrived in 500s, won the opening GP of his first full season in 1988, but then demonstrated with a number of highsides and lowsides that he was still not quite fully in control. So I asked his opinion: Are the new bikes just too easy to ride? Have the electronics taken the challenge out? If I'd expected a "good-old-days" rant about how the kids of today had it all too easy, I was wrong. Schwantz thought about it carefully, and pronounced that it was not so. The bikes were no easier, he said. Far from it. The difference was, he said, "that if you make a mistake, they are much more forgiving." Stoner's view confirms this from the other viewpoint. To him, his supposedly daunting 990cc V-five Honda feels and rides "like a big 250." And the reason is only partially down to electronics, if at all, according to Kenny Roberts Jr. The biggest thing, he told me, was the improvement in tires. He had rid- den his Honda-powered hybrid with all the traction control and anti-wheelie pro- grams turned off, and described it as "awesome - spinning the wheel and wheeleying everywhere." But it wasn't actually more difficult to ride, he insisted, just a lot more dramatic. "I think they should all be like that." The landscape might change next year, when the 800s come on stream. Nobody is quite sure what to expect. Capirossi, for example, told me he hopes that with- out the great surplus of torque of the 990s, the 800s might be more demanding and fickle to ride, and would thus reopen the currently very small gap between rid- ers who are especially excellent and those who are merely very, very good. Roberts was hoping that they wouldn't need so many electronics, handing more control back to the rider. Others think there will be little difference between the 800s and the current 990s, especially after a couple of years of development. But hoping for a return to bad-tem- pered, snappish motorcycles that will keep the upstarts in their place is just wrong thinking. It's not going to happen. Look at the big picture. What we have here is noth- ing more and noth- ing less than engi- neering progress. Current MotoGP bikes not only have a great deal more power and per- formance than any predecessors, they also make that per- formance available to be used to the full much more eas- ily than in the past. Still looking at the big picture, it is exactly this sort of progress that justi- fies going racing in the first place. Never mind the fun, the adventure or the marketing potential. Engineers don't care about these things. Racing improves the breed. That's the whole point. And MotoGP is the pinnacle of that develop- ment. We may mourn the passing of spectac- ular, wheel-spinning slides out of the cor- ners, as we might not mourn the end of the era of horrible highside crashes. Both of these have been engineered out of rac- ing. Easier riding has been engineered in. Pedrosa and Stoner are presently the most conspicuous beneficiaries of this progress. They will not be the last. CN Is Easier Better? You can still get it all wrong on a 990cc MotoGP bike, but they are more forgiving than GP bikes of the past. Not that that's a bad thing. PHOTO BY GOLD & GOOSE