michaelm

Lorenzo bike vs Vinales bike perhaps, can’t blame Rossi for this bike; he said they weren’t listening to his preferences, while Maverick asked for and was given the keys to the kingdom, although he is apparently now saying the 2020 bike was flawed from the getgo.

Bern1

I think this has been borne out to its conclusion. Next year is going to be where Fabs has to get stronger or he will be just another mid pack guy. Or crash trying to do better than that.

Yamaha, what a year. They really lost their way, what a shame really. Who’s head is going to roll?

p4p1

It does seem their biggest issue was the attempt to cheat in Jerez. If not for that I wonder if they would be in a better position? I still don't think all is lost. They've won more races by far than anyone else. Everyone seems very doom and gloom despite their bikes performing better than anyone else's. We heard last night on the broadcast it proclaimed that Suzuki had the best bike on the grid, I think it's a great bike but I don't think it's clearly the best. Rins was more or less as consistent or inconsistent as everyone else. Perhaps Mir is just really fucking good, his moto3 championship season was astounding.

Their 3 riders at the moment though are as Kesh pointed out reminiscent of Pedrosa, untouchable on their day but things need to be perfect. Fabio is still young so I think he's a good chance to turn things around. I expect that the next 2 seasons will be Vinales' last on a factory Yamaha. Mixture of good talent coming through and it being more or less proven that he will never have the consistency to push for a championship. I wouldn't consider it good practice to consistently throw your factory under the bus.

michaelm

Mir and Rins are really good riders imo, and the Suzuki a good all round bike, but tire durability was perhaps their largest advantage. This may be significantly related to the aforementioned high quality riders and good all round bike, but whether the Michelin tire lottery favours them as much next year remains to be seen.

p4p1

Suzuki does appear to be excellent on tyres but I don't think that takes away from Mir's ability to stick to his strategy of the late come on in many of the rounds. I don't know if Quartarao or Marquez for example would have been able to stick to that strategy so successfully. So while he and Suzuki have an advantage late in the race it did often come at an expense to the earlier part of the race and also qualifying. Maximising the Suzuki's strengths is something he did brilliantly this year, while others failed to do the same often enough on their bikes.

If the tyre lottery was a main culprit of the inconsistency it didn't make for an exciting or interesting championship battle. I don't think we saw championship rivals fighting each other for a win, podium or even a position during the entire season.

michaelm

I am not alleging any conspiracy, or intending to detract from Mir or Suzuki, both of whom I was very happy to see win, and in particular not from Mir’s racecraft. I am just of the opinion that the Michelin tires are difficult to anticipate and plan for, although having a good all round bike and an excellent rider who is strategically excellent in particular is not a bad way to go on this year’s evidence.

(EDIT My poorly expressed point such as it is was that I am not sure that Suzuki can have fully designed their bike ahead of time to suit what are imo bad tires. Obviously their entire operation used the tires everyone was given the best. The Yamaha bike/rider combinations seem to operate in a much narrower window, and I am not sure there was much the riders could do about it when conditions didn’t suit).

mjpartyboy

I realised this morning that when this season is finished, out of 14 races the title was won by less than seven race wins worth of points.

If Marquez comes back from the injury as strong as before and the rest of the field have a season like this, they'll all be racing for second place next year.

p4p1

I think the two conclusions you can draw from Michelin are that A) The tyres are relatively shit and inconsistent by design in an attempt to make the racing closer, harder to predict and "better" or Michelin are incompetent. I'm not sure which way to lean tbh.

For me a huge red flag was in 2017 when Michelin worked on the tyre that was rejected by everyone bar Rossi. IIRC they actually did say that after the testing they worked on the rejected tyre.

It leads me to believe it is a little from column A and a little from column B or it was at one point but now its just column B.

Macca

You've got this backwards.

Rossi was very vocal about the front tyre construction they started 2017 with saying that it wasn't stable/consistent enough (too soft) when pushed to the limit and he preferred one of the other options with a harder construction.
Michelin confirmed that they thought 'well, everyone but Rossi is happy with it, so that's the construction we will use'

Then after the first few races we had an ungodly amount of front end crashes which prompted the riders to vote on whether to force Michelin to change the front tyre construction for one Rossi originally preferred on 'safety' grounds.

They voted overwhelmingly in favour of of switching the front tyre construction (only Pol and Jorge voted against it as I remember and Rossi abstained)

michaelm

Vinales also, who had done rather well on the first tire in the early season.

I never had a problem with them making the previously rejected tire available, they just need to keep the tire originally voted for going as well. Dorna themselves have subsequently recognised this, there is a rule now.

Your perception was perhaps not the general one, there were even comments from other riders about Michelin making Rossi his own tires. MM was fine with the change of course, I think he may have even said, correctly, that a tire which suited Rossi was also a tire which suited him.

Perhaps Valentino learnt from experience having voted for the less durable tire in the previous rider tire vote which conveniently removed the tire on which Stoner was prospering early that season; Stoner predicted the tire voted for on that occasion would prove insufficiently durable under race conditions, very definitely correctly, with subsequent delaminations of the tire concerned including on Rossi’s bike in one race.