were the Honda riders, who were also on Michelins. During 1999 they consistently managed to use a softer compound than us. Everybody considered that to be strange, because the four-cylinder bike can rev quicker and spin up more and so should have put more pressure on the rear. Misano proved a classic case of this, so during the warm-up on the Sunday morning I asked to try the hardest compound available. The team didn’t want to give it to me because Michelin had told them it was too dangerous in the cool early-morning conditions.
Most of my body is off the bike, trying to keep it as upright as possible and increase the contact path of the tyres and so increase the grip.
‘I think I can use it for the race and I want to go out with it now,’ I insisted. I eventually got my own way, so the last thing I wanted to do was make a fool of myself by crashing. I took it easy for two or three laps, yet still managed to set the fastest lap of the warm-up a couple of laps later. ‘It’s perfect, that’s the one I’m using,’ I said.
The first race was quite close between me and my team-mate Troy Corser, because the bike kept jumping out of gear. The suspension was also a bit soft, and when the tyre went off towards the end of the race there was a lot of sliding around. Troy had a reputation for being very good at setting his bike up, yet he would often be the one copying what I had done. After we sorted the gearbox and stiffened the suspension slightly, I won the second race by a mile. Had I had the right set-up for every race, nobody would ever have beaten me.
The climate was always something that had to be considered, but that didn’t always mean the hotter the country, the harder the tyre that was needed. The surface of the track had to be taken into account too. One of the worst tracks for tyre wear was Phillip Island in Australia, where the weather could be either very hot or very cold. The place was a nightmare and people would regularly blister their tyres there. All the corners are on the left side where you are driving the bike really hard and putting a lot of heat into that side of the tyre, which never has a chance to cool down. When you felt the back of the bike vibrating and juddering, you just knew that bits of the outer tread had come off and the tyre was knackered. One year, mine were so bad that the bits hanging off smashed the telemetry shaft at the back. If you were halfway through the race when the tyres went, it would effectively be over unless you pulled into the pits for a change, which is something you don’t often see at a race track.
The classic case when it all went wrong was at Brands in 1999. It was either that there simply wasn’t an ideal tyre available, or that we failed to identify it during qualifying – because you cannot physically test them all in the time available anyway. I was convinced that we should have been using one particular tyre – I think it was an ‘M’ tyre – but Ducati and Michelin persuaded me to change my mind and use the ‘P’ tyre that Troy had used on the Saturday. I had not gone all that fast during qualifying, but that was more down to me than the choice of tyre. Sure enough, the 17in rear we used for the first race just got too hot and blew out. A big chunk flew off and I had to pull into the pits to change it. That pit-stop was a disaster. The team looked like the Keystone Cops, mainly because they weren’t expecting me in at a track like Brands where we’d never had too many tyre problems before. At circuits like Phillip Island and Monza the engineers would have had an airgun and a wheel at the ready just in case, but normally I would try to wobble round instead and finish third or fourth.
Whenever a wheel change was needed, most of the time would be lost entering and exiting the pits, not actually in the act of changing the wheel. This wasn’t the case at Brands. I was sat on the bike, desperate to get back out, and I started thinking, This is taking a bloody long time! The mechanic had got the stand underneath, put the bar in to lock up the wheel, leaned on the rear wheel to undo it and broken the stand. So he had to rush inside to take the rear stand from the other bike, stick this under my bike and carry on undoing the wheel. All this in front of 120,000 fans. I was not best pleased. I could only manage 19th place after that, but at least it meant I finished every single race that year. That’s pretty unusual.
Troy had suffered similar problems, but only on the last lap, so he was able to nurse it round. But Haga had used the ‘M’ tyre and finished third without any problems, so for the second race the Michelin tyre expert said, ‘Look, this 16.5in will get you through the race. John Reynolds used it for the first race and finished fourth, although his times were not as good. We don’t think the grip will be fantastic, but it will get you through the race.’ The grip was terrible from lap 1 to lap 25, although I still managed to finish fourth. The thing that pissed me off was that Colin Edwards won both races with exactly the same ‘P’ rear tyre I had used for the first race. What am I going to do now? I thought as we tried to figure it out. For some reason Honda managed to run a softer tyre than we did throughout the whole of that season. Yet we had both run the same tyre the previous round at Laguna Seca and both teams had had the same problems.
It was something that bugged me all that winter. One theory was that Honda were able to get away with softer compounds because their bikes had double-sided swinging arms – the metal projections which hold the wheel in place. Maybe that was helping to balance the heat across the rear tyre, or even making the suspension work better. When I rode for Honda in 1996, their bikes had single-sided swinging arms. I didn’t win the world title that year because I couldn’t get any grip mid-corner. In the middle of the 1997 season they changed to a double-sided arm. Over 1998 and 1999 it became clear that they were getting better grip because they were consistently running softer tyres. I was behind Aaron Slight a few times in 1998 and couldn’t believe the drive he was getting out of some corners when my tyre had gone.
I started asking Ducati for a double-sided swinging arm in 1998, but we were only allowed to test it twice during the winter before the 2000 season. The conditions for the tests were not perfect, but at Phillip Island in January I was able to do a back-to-back 15-lap comparison with single and double-sided arms, and to be perfectly honest there was very little difference between the two. The Ducati hierarchy was not keen on the double arm because they felt it spoilt the look of the bike. I was not convinced by this, and neither was Davide Tardozzi. Had there been a big difference, they would have had to go with a double arm, but at the end of the day it was all about selling road bikes, so I couldn’t blame them. We tried to test it again at Valencia but I had a big fall, knocking myself out, and we didn’t get the chance to do another back-to-back because I didn’t test on the second day.
Obviously the riders can make a difference. Maybe I was a bit too aggressive on the throttle at Brands Hatch and put too much heat into the tyre because of all the weight of expectation on my shoulders – there were 120,000 fans desperate to see me win. Yet it’s never easy to draw conclusions like that. If you look at the qualifying session for the round that clinched the world title for me that year at Hockenheim, I did the race distance on one tyre and didn’t have a problem. I then did the race distance on another tyre and it started to vibrate, so I pulled in before it blew out. There was no question which one I should use. Troy opted for the same one as me, and he had major blistering problems in both races. Two riders on the same bike with the same tyre with completely different outcomes. So I suppose there is a bit of luck involved, although that’s a tiny factor compared to the rider’s skill and the importance of getting the set-up right.
Sugo was another track on which Michelin riders seemed to struggle. Usually, I am one of the riders who can still get results, even if the tyres have gone off. That was probably the difference between me and Troy in 1999. Once my tyres had gone mid-race I would brake a little bit later or come off the gas and lift the bike up a bit if I felt it starting to slide. Or I could hook it up another gear a bit earlier so that the bike was always driving forward and not spinning the tyres even more. I would do anything I could to get that bike home in second, third or fourth place if I knew I couldn’t win the race. Troy seemed to drop further down the field when he had a problem. But, in the last race of 1999, with the world title already in the bag, my tyres went off in such a big way that from leading the first
