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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AUGUST 16, 2006 • C Y C L E N E W S 106 IN THE PADDOCK BY MICHAEL SCOTT Keep The Qs Coming E very MotoGP weekend has its special moments. The start. The finish. The final battle. These tend to overshadow the earlier special moments, but they should not be ignored. I'm thinking of the last ten or 12 minutes of qualifying. This is the time when all the niceties are forgotten. The previous three, hour- long free practice sessions have been devoted to studious analysis of gearing, to poring over section times and data, to tire-endurance tests, and to little clicks to and fro on the suspension. Now all that's over. It's time for the qualifying tires. For 10 minutes, you see riders out on three-lap stints. One out lap; one banzai run, clicking the apexes, winding the throttle and kicking up dust; and then cruise in. He'll already know his lap time from his onboard timer. You can see it from the way he sits on the bike. Back at headquarters, the times flash up on the screen. The order, more or less established over the preceding sessions, goes mad. Suddenly Shinya Nakano goes to the top. Then Sete Gibernau. Then, out of the blue, Chris Vermeulen. Look away for a minute, and suddenly Nakano is seventh, because Casey Stoner and Loris Capirossi have jumped to the top, then Nicky Hayden squeezed between them, then John Hopkins too. Valentino Rossi's in the pits, waiting for the last minute. Dani Pedrosa also. But Nakano's out again, with a second set of soft Bridgestones... and he goes faster again. Only to be eclipsed by Pedrosa, as the flag falls! Rossi's still out there, and a cou- ple of others having started their laps. You have to wait for flag time plus one lap before you know whether they will change the final order. The script above is imaginary, and iffy weather tends to upset the timing - peo- ple put their Qs on earlier, spoiling the drama. But you get the picture. And the jump in lap times remains sur- prising week after week. It might be at a long circuit a full second or more quicker than anything that has gone before. That's how it was at Mugello, where pole man Gibernau had previously run a best of 1:51.3 on race tires. His final qualifier, however, right at the end of the session took him round at a staggering 1:49.8. The qualifying tires (only rear tires, by the way - fronts remain as standard) do exactly what it says on the box, and noth- ing more. Sometimes not even that much. It has been known for a qualifier to give up its grip even before the end of what had until then been a staggeringly fast lap. On the other hand, at a short track such as Sachsenring, riders can sometimes squeeze two laps out of them. As long as they do last, they allow the rider to wind the power on hard and early - just how hard and early is a matter of guesswork, and is an element of skill in itself. But they are only about grid position. The fact that Bridgestone seems to have some- thing of an edge over Michelin in qualifying tires explains why their riders have managed to achieve five out of 11 poles so far this year (including two for rookie Vermeulen), and have been regularly on the front row, but have achieved only one win, and nothing like the same overall race results. For all other purposes, qualifiers are worse than useless. They have nothing to do with setting up the bike or improving race performance. Rather, the reverse: The huge amount of grip they offer can work against race settings. And prove a major distraction to a rider who might already be under pressure. For instance, Rossi, battling for the first third of the sea- son to find a way around his tire-chatter problems; chuck on a qualifier at the end of a troubled session - and the extra grip would just make the chatter worse. Which is why he started those early races from the third, fourth, and even fifth row of the grid. It's been great fun watching him pick his way forward from these bad positions, at the same time as the likes of Nakano and Vermeulen drop away backward, because their true race pace simply does- n't match what their qualifiers let them get away with. (Laguna was obviously an exception for Vermeulen, who led the first half of the race.) But there are serious safety issues involved when faster riders start the race behind slower riders. Rossi's lucky escape at the first corner at Jerez, the opening round, was one such example; so also, the massive six-bike pileup at the first corner at Catalunya. It might all be fun to watch, but you know, it doesn't make sense. Qualifying tires are a relatively new phenomenon, at least to the scale of today, where their use simply goes without say- ing. There have always been softer-com- pound, short-life tires available, after all. The one-lap specials of the last few years take the concept to its extreme. This is a symptom of the increasingly fierce tire war between incumbents Michelin and chal- lenger Bridgestone, with Dunlop scrab- bling madly to try to catch up. They exist only because they exist and are therefore a massive irrelevance. (Some might think this a perfect metaphor for motorcycle racing in general, but sure- ly being pointless is half the point anyway.) They are potentially dangerous. They interrupt the process of race preparation. They are very expensive, too. And they leave riders and spectators alike with a sense of wild excitement. An excitement that seems doomed. The last year of the big old 990cc MotoGP bikes may also be the last year of qualifying tires. It's because of a long-sought and finally achieved agreement between the three tire companies. It was thrashed out (after three years of false starts and sudden U-turns) at the British GP, just in time to meet Dorna's deadline. If they hadn't done so, Dorna would have applied their own rules. Now, the joint proposal is going through the process of ratification with the MSMA and Dorna before it can be officially announced. The details thus remain to be confirmed, but the broad outline is simple enough - a limit to the number of tires brought for each rider for each race. This does not specifi- cally ban qualifying tires - but including them in a strictly limited allocation means dropping one of the selection of race tires. A very risky business. Why not just ban quali- fying tires? The problem there lies in the definition: What is a qualifying tire? Just an ordinary tire with a different com- pound. It would be hopelessly complicat- ed to devise regulations based around such a complex formulation as to what makes up the compound of a qualifying tire. Especially considering that one tire frequently carries three different com- pounds - harder in the middle to cope with the power and speed, with varying degrees of softness for each shoulder, depending on the number of left and right handers on a particular track. Will the new cost-cutting rules really mean the end of qualifiers? I reckon so, but we'll have to wait and see. It will rob those final 10 minutes of qualifying of that electric excitement, that's for sure. Enjoy them while you can. CN