It went to .... while he was injured an unable to test. I have said in the past his ability to ride around problems does not make him a good test rider. They need a pedro type rider for that. Bradl is not that guy.
It’s both things, always has been. In the end it is up to the rider to tell the team what he needs to make the bike better and it is up to the team to deliver. This is where the ability to communicate, analyse, adjust and try a few things to determine what works, etc. It is a skill on both sides. It is possible that neither Marc or Fabio is up to the task, or the factories aren’t delivering, or a combination of the two.
Went wide, hit the gravel, couldn't recover.
Honda and Yamaha both are ..... Yamaha had Jorge, Vale, Mav, now Fabio, all complaining from consistent issues that remain throughout the years. It's clear to me that the way Japanese teams work is very outdated. Good riders can't save them anymore.
They ain't the only riders on those machines.
Darth Puig strikes again. He fired Dani Pedrosa as an act of revenge as far I could see. How much better would he have been at developing the Honda than any rider who succeeded him ?. He would also quite possibly still be better as a race rider even now. I am a major Jorge Lorenzo fan, but I don’t think the Honda was his type of bike, he was fairly spent when he got there, and the bike made multiple attempts to kill or maim him before he could do anything anyway.
I was going to include stoner in my earlier post as someone who was hard to develop a bike around. Like Marc his freakish way of riding a bike made his data hard to use. Add to the fact that if they are winning on it, how do you change the direction of development? So it is easy to go in the wrong direction with riders who can ride around problems.
Yes. Not as if the Yamaha handles badly. It just doesn't make sufficient usable power. Can't really expect the rider to tell the engineers how to accomplish that. Whereas the Honda, seems neither to make sufficient useable power and it handles terribly. Funny how the KTM and the Aprila don't appear to be hobbled by the Magnetti Marelli unit. I suspect that HRC will continue to eat it, until they are allowed to use a proprietary ECU. It's like they can't wrap their heads around a Eurocentric algorithm.
Yes, these are good points. But, it is also the purpose (or used to be) to have two good riders in the team to keep everybody at the pointy end of the stick. Cooperation goes a long way when you look for improvement. For example the team can make a change to a bike and have both ride it, give input, etc. If you have a nobody as teammate, well then the input is pretty useless. Both Honda and Yamaha have been one rider teams for a long time now. Just because a bike is winning doesn’t mean it always will. In fact, if you don’t innovate while you are winning, you won’t continue to win for very long. which is what we are seeing now.
Good post. Imo Fabio is more of a JLo type rider than Stoner and MM. Consistent when things are right but has a hard time in no-optimum conditions. I was a doubter but he changed my mind. I believe the only current rider that could beat him on equal machinery is Marc. As for Stoner, his best season on Ducati and back at honda were his first seasons. I think that has a lot to do with his unorthodox style making development extremely difficult.
That's really besides the point. Having so many satellite teams A. overwhelms the field giving an unfair disadvantage to ALL teams. And B it supplies them with massive amounts of data and rider input. To my knowledge there is no precedent in MotoGp for any manufacturer to have that many satellite teams.
In 97 Honda had 8 bikes on the grid, I believe they won every race that year. Quite a few all Honda podiums.
