Yamaha Factory Racing's Jorge Lorenzo (Photo: Yamaha Racing)

The New Bridgestones

The black art of building racing tires continues to introduce an element of randomness and unknown outcomes. The chatter that afflicted Honda riders in Malaysia was absent in Jerez, but like sharks off the coast, its absence was more worrying that reassuring to Stoner who believes it will reappear at other tracks and perhaps even at Jerez if conditions are significantly different for the Spanish Grand Prix in late April. Honda riders would rather have faced chatter at Jerez in order to be able to work to cure it. Now they wonder if it will be lurking in wait at Losail in Qatar.

Yamaha riders listen to chatter talk and shrug their shoulders. Something about the Honda seems to attract chatter while Yamaha riders are provisionally immune. It appears that initially the new Bridgestone front works better on the Yamaha than the Honda at Sepang, but Jerez did not produce the same phenomenon.

Ducati riders complained of corner entry problems and wondered if perhaps they simply weren't going in hard enough to find chatter problems.

The biggest complaint with the Bridgestones last year was that they did not warm up quickly. A season-long rash of cold-tire, early-lap crashes both in races and practice sessions (especially morning sessions) were blamed on this tendency to warm slowly.

This year's tires warm up quickly but some riders have complained that the trade-off is an early drop off in grip. Stoner, however, maintains that the big engines with all their mid-range torque are smoother and easier on the tires and that the proof of this is in the endurance of even the softer compound rears.

Ben Spies believes there is a tendency for performance to drop off, but he likes that, saying that his feel and confidence improve when the bike is loose and moving around. The Texan's biggest problem in his first two years in MotoGP has been finding the feel and confidence to let him push hard during the opening laps.

Although both Lorenzo and Pedrosa speak of early drop off in grip, their laps times on full-race simulations show that both men were as fast or faster during the final laps of their 27-lap runs. Lorenzo, as pointed out earlier, did his best lap on his 25th lap of the 27. Pedrosa recorded his best time from his race-length run on only his third lap, but did his second-best lap (just 0.022 slower) on his 27th lap.

Until now the riders have been running alone. The best evaluation of the new Bridgestones will come when the riders are running together and battling each other on the brakes and running different lines on corner entry and exit. Hopefully the combination of 1000cc engines and more forgiving tires will produce more overtaking, looser bikes, and a wider variety in racing lines.

The five years of 800cc racing, whether with the tire wars in '07 and '08 or the control Bridgestone over the final three years, produced only nine of 88 races that were decided by less than a second and precious few races with a last-lap overtaking.

But the statistics don’t tell the whole story. The final years of the 500cc class and the first five years of MotoGP 990 racing gave fans much more overtaking and uncertainly, while the recent half decade gave us races that, regardless of the actual winning margins, were often processional and predictable, with any slight advantage from qualifying simply multiplied by the number of laps.

The championship promoter, Dorna, has upset racing purists over recent months by stating that entertainment must trump technology in a televised spectator sport. The move to 1000cc and the very clear message from riders and Dorna to Bridgestone that tires need to warm up quickly even if they drop off later in the day, may produce the 'entertainment' that has been missing in recent years, but Dorna clearly intends to close up the field by slowing down the front.

This year there will be two races in one. At the front Honda and Yamaha will battle while Ducati struggles to close the gap. At mid-pack the best of the CRTs will chase satellite stragglers while the backmarker CRTs, running in some cases, hot-rodded long-stroke Superbike engines in less than ideal frames, will battle each other and, in some cases, be on the lookout for the dreaded blue flag during the final laps.

Change is not always pretty, but MotoGP needs change.