the 2001 season. Ben Bostrom, although he was riding a Ducati, was fastest in the final test for 2001 at Valencia. Neil Hodgson is another rider who has always preferred Dunlops because they tend to slide round corners a bit easier, and he was fastest in the first test at South Africa.
The thickness of the tyres was also a factor that had to be considered. Often we would run a thinner tyre, probably by about a millimetre or two, for the really fast tracks. That did not make sense to me, but apparently the theory is that because there is not as much rubber there to get hot, the tyre stays cooler. There was always a base setting of inflation with nitrogen, again to keep them as cool as possible.
While I never minded trying out new compounds, or different tyre thicknesses, I was never that keen on experimenting with the profile of the tyre. Some are flatter, some more pointed at the apex. I always felt happier when somebody else was testing that kind of thing. Yet in Assen in 1999 I tried a new, more pointed tyre which had been tested on a 500cc bike on that circuit. Troy tried the same tyre but felt it was chattering all the time. I had felt it chattering a little bit too but I decided to stick with it, while Troy went his own way for the first race. I won the first race, and Troy decided to give it another go. I also won the second. I guess Troy was a bit shocked to learn that I was as good, if not better, at setting the bike up as he was. On reflection, throughout the year I made the correct tyre choice more often than Troy. The only time when his choice was better than mine was at Laguna Seca, when he gambled correctly for the second race.
I changed a lot as a rider in that year as I had started to think a lot more about set-up. I had stopped just looking at the TV monitors and thinking, So and so has just done a fast lap, I’d better get straight out there and beat it. Troy did that a lot in 1998, using a qualifying tyre very early on in the session to rattle the other riders, who would start swapping their tyres to try to match him. But you just have to ignore that kind of thing. In 1999, all I was bothered about during qualifying was putting in consistently fast lap times so that I could find the correct race tyre, and it paid off.
It was Davide Tardozzi who got me focused on finding the right tyre instead of being so bothered about being on the front row of the grid. Halfway through 1998, he began to say, ‘Look, you have to forget about doing these fast laps and concentrate on finding the right tyre. That’s how you will win the races.’ And I got faster and faster as the year went on, all the hard work paying off in the final round at Sugo, where I chose the right tyre and was the first rider home on a Michelin in the final and deciding race. I ended up beating Aaron Slight by some way, which hadn’t been happening earlier in the year when his choice of tyre had been better.
It’s so daft, though, to think that I was only learning about something as important as tyre choice at such a late stage of my career. But until 1995 it had never really been that much of a problem because the bikes were not as powerful. At first, I hated doing race distances on the Saturday, thinking that I would be knackered by the time it came to the race on Sunday. It was for my own benefit, though. If I had worked with the team as hard in
1997 as I did in 1999 to find the right overall package, I would have won the world title in that year as well. There is absolutely no question about that. Some of that was my fault, but a lot of the fault was also the team manager’s, Virginio Ferrari, who did not push me to do things.
One of the aspects of tyre work that has hardly ever entered my head is tyre conservation. Other riders will say that they go easy on their tyres in the early part of a race so that the grip is better in the later stages. I think that’s a load of shit. When I saw that green light come on, I went as fast as I could to win the race. Just about the only time I did go easy was at Phillip Island in
1998 when I had a good lead and I knew there were going to be problems later on in the race. As I came out of corners I tried to short-shift through the gears and go easy on the revs and maybe pull away at 10,500rpm instead of 12,000rpm so that the bike could pull nicely out of the corners. But when you are in the heat of the battle with two or three guys it’s very hard to think about saving your tyres, unless you are behind someone and in their slipstream for a couple of laps. I’ve heard riders in interviews say, ‘Carl won the race because he saved his tyres better than I did.’ That’s just an excuse because the guy who has come second has to think of a reason why he has not won the race.
It’s not just the fast tracks that can cause problems. One of the slower circuits is at Albacete in Spain, where trying to get good grip was a nightmare. The last time I was there, in 1999, I finished third in both races because I couldn’t match the acceleration coming out of corners of Akira Yanagawa and Colin Edwards. I was sliding all over the place. So it just goes to show the importance of tyre choice at every type of circuit.
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