Motorcycle Forum / General / Racing / September 2008

Well, don't look too hard - at Misano in P3 Rossi was 0.7 second off
Stoner, and his fastest lap, his last of the session, included his best
section times in 3 of 4 sections. While Stoner's best section times were
on four separate laps, none of which were his fast lap, and of course
the margin would have been even greater had they both strung together
all their fastest section times on one lap. And in the one section he
wasn't faster in, in the QP he was no faster on race tires. Once again
Julian is spinning tales about how brilliant Rossi is, out-thinking his
competition at every turn, and yet again without any real foundation.

We just had two near-identical races, both where Stoner split from the
start and quickly built a 3-second lead, and in the first one he very
slowly added to that until the lap before his crash, and in this one he
very slowly had that lead carved away, at about a tenth a lap. Then he
crashed on the sixth lap. So is it pressure from Rossi that has done it?
It sure doesn't seem likely, a 3-second lead is huge, and carving away
at a tenth or so a lap would have meant it would have taken nearly the
whole race for Rossi to catch Stoner.

I tend to think Casey felt he needed to win in order to have any chance
at the championship, so may have been pushing harder than he did last
year, when for much of the year he really didn't but it came so easily
anyway. And like in '06 when he did the same he lost the front on a
fairly regular basis. The guy's still a kid, so it's hard to be too
judgmental, but the last three races have certainly suggested a weakness
in Stoner when he has to push or fight, kind of the same thing we saw in
05-06. You can't win championships crashing out with 3-second leads...

Champ <neal@champ.org.uk> Tue, 2 Sep 2008 14:47:35

You want another one? Rossi did a lot of laps in practice, Stoner not so
many partly due to his hand problem. Stoner had to go with the hard
compound Bridgestone, because although they didn't do race distance they
did enough laps to find out it wouldn't last. Rossi had a medium. So
Stoner goes into the race knowing that he's on a front tyre with less
grip than Rossi's. Rossi matches him and then Stoner loses the front.

So did Rossi optimise the bike to make the softer tyre do the distance?
Did Stoner push a harder, less understood, tyre beyond its limits trying
to do lap times that weren't possible on that tyre?

It is not just a Bridgestone thing.  Modern race tires do not need to
be scrubed in.  Some riders still like to scrub them in because that
is what they have always done and it just doesn't feel right going out
on shiny tires.  It makes no difference if you go right out and race
on them.  But if you let them cool down after getting them hot the
rubber will get harder.  That can be a good thing if it was a bit too
soft to start off with, but it is obviously not an exact science.

On Sep 3, 1:03 pm, "Andrew" <yogig.no.spamm.m.nos...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

The surface is affected more than the core so the hardening would be
less noticable after a few laps.  Could be he thought the tires were
back to normal and they weren't.  IMO it is more likely he needs a
reason for the crash and this one is convenient.  At his level the
rider is constantly evaluating the grip for changes so it seems
unlikely that he would have pushed too far just because the tires
usually have more grip.  When I say he needs a reason I don't mean he
is trying to put the blame somewhere else, just that he can now tell
himself he knows what happen so it wont happen again.  Going really
fast requires head games sometimes.

Bruce