was the same, otherwise I would have been in a lot of pain – the last thing anyone wants to be worrying about during a race.
Tall riders often struggle. A lot of people think Colin Edwards is pretty tall, just because he is slim, but he’s actually not much taller than I am. It’s the six-foot riders that really have a problem, and there just aren’t that many about now. You don’t see many six-foot jockeys, either. My old Kawasaki France endurance team-mate, Terry Rymer, was a big lad and his height must have hampered him. We always had to compromise when setting the bike up because it was a big, bulbous bike – a tank of a thing. The bars had to be angled further out to accommodate Terry, and as a result I really struggled to hang off it.
One more way in which my preferred position meant that my bike differed from a lot of other riders’ bikes was in the size of the screen. Most riders like big screens, but when I’m in a corner I like to see nothing but the track in front of me. If you study pictures of me riding around corners, I’m hanging so far off the bike that the screen just does not come into my line of vision at all. If I’d had the same size screen as other riders – probably about 20 per cent bigger – I would have been cricking my neck trying to look round the side.
At tracks with long straights, however, such as Hockenheim and Monza, I did not have a choice in the matter. Gaining top speed down those straights was so important that I had to use a bigger screen to improve the aerodynamics of the bike. I didn’t like that at all because whenever I came to a bend, the bike did not feel like my own. It always took me a long time to get used to that change. Even so, I still didn’t use as big a screen as the other Ducati riders, probably going for half the normal difference between the two sizes.
When I started out, of course, these alterations were not an option. You had what you had, and you had to make do and mend. Or at least that’s what I thought. When I look back now, I think, You thick bastard! Why did you not make some brackets so that the footrests could have been moved forward after your broken leg?
Everybody said that I made myself look big on a bike because of the way I moved around in the saddle, as this shot at Kyalami in 2000 shows.
Even with all the expertise available to me towards the end of my career, I never stopped questioning things. After I had struggled with Honda in 1996, I expected everything to be perfect when I returned to Ducati for the 1997 season. But something did not quite feel right. In fact, I still believe that I lost the world title that year because the testing hadn’t been right for the bike. This niggling feeling lasted all the way through the 1998 season, when I regained the World Superbike title but was still struggling to hold my line through corners.
‘I still can’t seem to hang off the bike like I used to in 1995,’ I told Davide Tardozzi, my team boss at Ducati. ‘The tank seems to be getting in the way.’
‘Well, Carl,’ he replied, ‘the tank is bigger than it used to be. You need more fuel for a race now.’
‘What do you mean? Nobody bothered to tell me!’
The information just crept out like this because there had been so many changes in personnel at Ducati. The bigger tank certainly explained away a lot of my problems over the previous couple of years. The outcome was that they altered the tank for me and Troy Corser for the 1999 season. The shape and size had to be kept the same, but they managed to take some of the bulk off the top and add it to the bottom. We used it for the first time in pre-season tests at Misano in February. I tested for one day with the old tank, but when it was swapped for the new one I loved it from the word go. I equalled my best time for the test straight away, and that was on old tyres. Troy didn’t like it to start with because he didn’t hang off the bike as much as I did. If only someone had told either me or Slick about the new tank when we returned from Honda, things might have been a lot different in the 1997 season.
Flat out in the tuck position at Brands in 1999.
This experience taught me never to stop questioning even the smallest things. At the start of my final season, before the crash in Australia, I was convinced that something had changed with the gear lever.
‘Are you sure the rubber isn’t thicker this year?’ I asked. ‘Are my boots any different, then? Because something doesn’t feel quite right.’
When I went to the first test in Valencia, I changed the position of that gear lever so many times. The riders have this lever in roughly the same area on their bikes, because you never get the chance to ride other racers’ bikes, I’m not sure whether my preference was much different – it is not as noticeable as the position of the bars or the footrest – but for some reason I just couldn’t get comfortable during this test. I seemed to be hanging over the front of the bike and didn’t seem able to get my foot under the gear lever to go down through the box and change from third or fourth back to first. You cannot alter the position on the splines, because there would be too big a gap. On a factory racing bike, the gear lever bar is egg-shaped and swivels around so that it can either be under your foot or away from it. At this track, though, as I said, I could not make myself comfortable, for no real reason because the lever had not been altered. It was either too high when I was changing up through the box or too low when I was coming back down and had to put my foot underneath it. Perhaps it was because that circuit is hard on the brakes, with almost every corner taken in first gear. And you had to change so quickly down from fourth to second that the position had to be spot on.
Whatever the reason, it just goes to show how many things are going through a rider’s mind, especially that of a perfectionist like me, when he is racing and testing.
The credit goes to the Honda RC30. When Jamie Whitham and I rode for Honda in 1990, we both had a lot of problems with the front end of the bike. Jamie hated the bike more than I did. He hung off the bike a lot, but not in the same way as me. His style seemed to be led more by his neck, and his knee did not touch the floor as much as mine did. When I felt the front end going, I could actually try to catch it with my knee and try to push the bike back upright, and I have never worn out my knee-sliders as much as when I rode the RC30. Jamie was not able to do that and spent a lot of the year on his backside.
In some ways, though, I had those problems to thank for a lot of what happened in the future. Because I struggled for so long with that front end, it prompted me to take a tighter line so that I didn’t feel as though I was going to make things worse by sweeping in from the outside after braking late.
In the last few years of my racing career, I was always tighter going into corners than any other guy. It felt so much better for me. For someone who carried a lot of corner speed, you would expect the opposite to be true, that I would prefer to take a wider line, but I always thought that if I had been peeling in from way out while carrying so much corner speed I would have felt as though I was going to crash the front end all the time. It was almost as though I did not have the confidence to be out as wide as the other guys. So, at the point when all the riders were starting to brake, I would probably be a couple of feet nearer the inside kerb.
This was obviously more exaggerated on the slower corners. For the very fast corners, such as from Redgate down to Craner Curves at Donington, the line is pretty much the same for everybody; for the slower corners, though, the other guys would try to maintain maximum speed for as long as possible before hitting the brakes really hard
