VOL. 52 ISSUE 24 JUNE 16, 2015 P109
Briefly...
Riders who stayed on at Mugello to
test with Michelin tires are bound
by their Bridgestone contracts not
to speak about the French tires.
Without this restriction, it is easy to
imagine what they might have said:
"They lose grip very suddenly at the
front." In this way—Valentino Rossi,
Marc Marquez and Jorge Lorenzo all
crashed at the tests—Rossi at the fast
Arrabbiata 1, fortunately without inju-
ry. Lap times were respectable, with
Lorenzo credited unofficially with
1:47.7, less than a tenth outside the
lap record, though 1.2 off Iannone's
pole two days before. Marquez was
a tenth slower. But the queasy front-
wheel feeling put the kibosh on plans
to run full race distance, with the rid-
ers unwilling to take further risks.
Marc Marquez did say that the tests
had been useful to his and Honda's
task: to coax some better manners
out of the beleaguered once-dom-
inant RC213V. An over-aggressive
engine, both in acceleration and
braking, has taken most of the blame
for his poor results. Part of the prog-
ress had been electronic; while at
Catalunya he had a new exhaust sys-
tem, evidenced by a slightly longer
bottom tailpipe. This, he said, had
improved corner entry, while they
continued the search for further soft-
ware refinements for the exit phase.
Asked cheekily if his crash at Mugel-
lo had helped him to understand the
limit, he smiled and responded: "The
limit is a thing you feel. Sometimes
when you are on the limit and some-
one is in front of you, you go over the
limit and that is when you crash. We
need to find this limit a little bit later.
We are on the way to find that."
Arm pump and associated wrist
continued on next page
