In both those cases some would state he was on the best bike on the grid. The duc may or may not have been the best in 07 but it was a f'ing rocketship! And then the bike got worse and worse as the other bikes got better over that year to date. Could honda suffer a similar fate because of Stoner Suppo and co? To soon to tell but it appears they are going the wrong way. Blame the tires if you want but the bike had chatter before this weekend.
As I said , saying someone won because they had the best bike is always an excuse, particularly when talking honda vs yamaha, and will be/is if applied to stoner this year as well.
To address your point seriously re stoner's development skills, or lack thereof, I don't and didn't say that no case can be made for it.
Imo it is virtually impossible to ride a bike conventionally better than jorge is doing at the moment, as was the case with rossi at his best for many years but particularly in years like 2008. It is entirely possible rossi could still ride the yamaha like that now, although I have doubts concerning whether his crew could match it with jorge's now. Remove any input from stoner, give honda an unlimited budget, the full time attention of agostini, krsr, lawson, doohan, erv kanomoto and prime jerry burgess and enough time to completely re-design their bike and replicate the yamaha and stoner still couldn't ride it in a conventional fashion on the current tyres as well as jorge. He beat jorge in 2011 and particularly valentino in 2007 by riding bikes with strong power (as you said) in an unconventional fashion which overcame any adverse aspects of the bike, particularly the engine characteristics, which it is apparently well nigh impossible for others to replicate and for which valentino and jorge had no answer no matter how well they rode with the equipment available to them in those years . The latter seemed to infuriate you and others, but I personally thought it was glorious, obviously from the viewpoint of being a stoner fan. Is yamaha's overall design philosophy smarter than honda's or ducati's? On the evidence of 5 of the last 8 world championships, soon it would seem likely to be 6 of 9, it would seem so, without discounting the excellence of the riders concerned.
My point though is that it seems stoner's unconventional method relies heavily on a suitable tyre, a tyre like those that the 2007 ducati and the current honda were designed around, without any input from him in the case of the ducati and probably not much in the case of the honda. My question to you is the same as to my friend jumkie (who I realise was mainly taking the urine, as the french say); why couldn't he and/or ducati and honda be allowed to continue to have such a tyre, in 2008 or this year? No-one has said jorge shouldn't be allowed to have the tyre that suits him. And why should honda have to totally discard their design because of an overnight change in the tyres?. If the control tyre was brought in to save money as is claimed, how does making the bike designs of honda, and ducati, suzuki and kawasaki before them, obsolete achieve this? People with allegiances as disparate from mine as roger and talpa seem to agree with me on the control tyre issue.
I am not saying he would necessarily be beating jorge even if he had a tyre more to his and honda's preference either.
