I still maintain that the roll of a rider in development is much exaggerated in the minds of us fans. I believe most people think the rider is saying, why don't you try this and how about that? But the reality is likely just for the most part how well the rider retains clear memory of what issues occurred at which speeds and at which parts of the tracks and how clearly he recounts it to the engineers. Also, as has been inferred the rider's style on the bike, in that different riders will be of greater value to different bike manufacturers depending on what handling characteristics they've baked into the bike.
I suspect Dovi is underrated in that category, simply because the progress was in small gradual steps, which worked well in the end. Early on when Rossi was with them they were throwing the kitchen sink at the bike and every time they came to a race it seemed, there was some dramatically novel part like a completely new carbon fiber swing-arm, things that radically affected the whole bike. It was like trying to fix a sticking window on the 3rd floor of a building by replacing the entire lower structure. It was kind of nuts. After Rossi and Hayden were gone, Ducati took a much more gradual approach. Lorenzo got a lot of praise during his brief tenure there, but really how much could he really have accomplished in such a short time? He was pals with Gigi and Gigi loved to go out of his way to give credit for his buddy.
You have to ask yourself: if Lorenzo was such hot .... at improving the bike, why is it that Dovi was taking the lion's share of the Ducati podiums?
And what Ducati rider has beaten Marquez, and we're talking young healthy Marquez in his prime, more than Dovi?
