Qatar test.

moto vudu said:

Same sort of issues that have existed in racing since the very beginning and are not unique to last year's Michelins. Bridgestone had failures even when they weren't a new supplier and the issue with the Michelins wets were that they were used in the wrong conditions. The soft wets that experienced problems at Brno were fine in the soaked conditions at Assen. We debated this for at least a week last year and even motomatters had an article that said essentially the same thing I was telling all of you.

Tire choices that were unusable on a certain bike? I'm assuming you're talking about the problems the M1 had in cool temps, but that would be more the fault of Yamaha because they control how much weight their bike puts on either tire. It's not Michelin's job to make a tire specifically for the Yamaha, it's Yamaha's job to adjust their bike to the tires. But Yamaha wouldn't have expected any or many races with such unusually cool conditions.

I asked this question before regarding front end washouts, does anyone know for a fact that there were more front end crashes last year than 2015? It's easy to think there was because you remember what's most recent.

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You have hit on a major problem with the control tyre, something I have consistently argued against on here since 2008 when the control tyre was first mooted. Imo it is completely ridiculous that something supposedly introduced as a cost saving measure and to make the contest more even requires massive expenditure by manufacturers to re-tool their bikes to suit the tyres rather than a range of tyres being available to suit the bikes.

Any manufacturer of course can be caught unawares by conditions at a particular time and at a particular track which has certainly happened to both Michelin and Bridgestone. I don't see how tyres which explode systemically or fail in a variable fashion by sudden delamination can be considered acceptable; I would have no problem with those Michelin wets simply wearing out when conditions became less favourable for their use.

Daniboy said:

Early on yes, they were used to the awesome Bridgestone front and the Michelin wasn't as good and also lacked feel. However some riders learned quicker than others and moaned less as the season wore on, watch the first few races coming up, I'll bet the problems of last year are gone.

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Was still an issue as you would often hear/read a comment from a fallen rider that 'there was no warning', but what you did not hear so much was the specific questions being asked in pre/post race press conferences as by then (one can suspect) the media knew the answer so simply stopped asking.

The fact the riders 'moaned' less does not mean that the issue was not current or still present as it certainly was based on comments of fallers and/or near fallers

michaelm said:

You have hit on a major problem with the control tyre, something I have consistently argued against on here since 2008 when the control tyre was first mooted. Imo it is completely ridiculous that something supposedly introduced as a cost saving measure and to make the contest more even requires massive expenditure by manufacturers to re-tool their bikes to suit the tyres rather than a range of tyres being available to suit the bikes.

Any manufacturer of course can be caught unawares by conditions at a particular time and at a particular track which has certainly happened to both Michelin and Bridgestone. I don't see how tyres which explode systemically or fail in a variable fashion by sudden delamination can be considered acceptable; I would have no problem with those Michelin wets simply wearing out when conditions became less favourable for their use.

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I agree with everything you said. It would be difficult to construct a soft wet tire that would wear gradually on a dry track because the changes required would make it a hard wet tire.

Daniboy said:

Lap records were broken all season, races won in record times. Not bad for first season back after all that time out.

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Out of 18 possible new circuit records, there were 5.
Out of 18 possible new best laps, there were 6.
That is great, but since most records are/were from 2015, it's hard to give the credit to the tires and not to bike development. It’s certainly better than I would have guessed.

However, I just can't give Michelin a nice-rookie-year pass for 2016 because their tires came apart. That is inexcusable to me. And they aren't new to racing. A drying track is no justification for tires flying apart. Their incidents were not like losing grip because adhesion gets over used when pushing limits, or tires wearing out near the end of a race because of over using the rubber. There were serious issues, and even Rossi had problems. I will assume all this is in the past and things will be safer. But that does not mean that Michelin should be excused for their dangerous mistakes in 2016.

moto vudu said:

I agree with everything you said. It would be difficult to construct a soft wet tire that would wear gradually on a dry track because the changes required would make it a hard wet tire.

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And this is the great conundrum of the sport (in so many ways) - you have a critical piece of equipment in terms of safety and performance but you simply have no means of developing or testing until they are needed.

Basically, wet tyres start out as guess work and as such, their performance and longevity are a relative unknown when couples with the bikes and of course surfaces of the tracks.

As far as I am aware there is no facility that can truly replicate a fully wet track that would allow for testing and even if there were, it is not likely to replicate other tracks due to environmental and construction )track) variables.

I do not envy the tyre companies in all sports trying to develop wet tyres.

Daniboy said:

I wager a lap record means the front tyre is working fine, also because of that it's probably properly made.

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To use a single hot lap on a soft tire in the course of a 15 minute qualifying where the rider changes the tire 2 to 3 times, as a barometer of the quality of tire meant to last the course of an entire race - is to dispence yet another false dichotomy.

The soft tires are not qualifiers per se, and they should not de-laminate in the course of a full race. Where the Bridgestones
were at times used by several factory riders who managed to nurse them to the end of the race - and still end up on the podium
or just short of it - Michelin hard tires were falling apart well before the end of the race. It's one thing for a tire to be less than optimal when a company is just returning to the fray - and another thing altogether, when they disintegrate before the end of the race. And that wasn't just happening to riders pushing to the limit at the front. It was happening to riders on bikes with less grunt, traveling at lower speeds, doing much slower laptimes.

A more accurate measure of the quality of the Michelins would be the record number of front end crashes and the unheard of number of tire failures in that first season.

yamfan said:

Why was the front tyre Lorenzo won on in Qatar never used again?
The problem the Ducati boys had,Redding in particular, was the rear tyres delaminating. I don't recall anything negative said about the front tyre at that meeting, just the rears declared unsafe.

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Did I ask a question that's already been covered guys?
Apologies if so...

yamfan said:

Did I ask a question that's already been covered guys?
Apologies if so...

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I'm going to assume it's the same reason why a certain tyre was withdrawn for Assen 2015. To quote Marquez 'we all know why but we're not allowed to say'

p4p1 said:

I'm going to assume it's the same reason why a certain tyre was withdrawn for Assen 2015. To quote Marquez 'we all know why but we're not allowed to say'

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Thanks buddy, I suspected as much, but wondered why they changed the construction of a tyre that seemed fine for everybody at Qatar that didn't raise any safety concerns.
Fair enough if they used it again during the season at tracks it was deemed "suitable", but as far as I can ascertain they just kept increasing the stiffness of the front tyre construction.

yamfan said:

Thanks buddy, I suspected as much, but wondered why they changed the construction of a tyre that seemed fine for everybody at Qatar that didn't raise any safety concerns.
Fair enough if they used it again during the season at tracks it was deemed "suitable", but as far as I can ascertain they just kept increasing the stiffness of the front tyre construction.

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Which certainly hurt Lorenzo whether that was their plan or not, though I get the feeling if it was their plan they didn't expect Marquez to ride a mature season on a pretty .... bike and Rossi to make some unforced errors. It's a shame in this control tyre era their isn't more options for guys on the factory bikes(obviously this would trickle down to the satellites), I understand it's more expensive for the tyre supplier to have say a softer and a harder carcass with both soft and hard options because to would surely lead to much better racing for us fans rather than currently the fastest guys occasionally not being at the front because of tyre issues.

p4p1 said:

Which certainly hurt Lorenzo whether that was their plan or not, though I get the feeling if it was their plan they didn't expect Marquez to ride a mature season on a pretty .... bike and Rossi to make some unforced errors. It's a shame in this control tyre era their isn't more options for guys on the factory bikes(obviously this would trickle down to the satellites), I understand it's more expensive for the tyre supplier to have say a softer and a harder carcass with both soft and hard options because to would surely lead to much better racing for us fans rather than currently the fastest guys occasionally not being at the front because of tyre issues.

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Agreed, they'd already developed the softer carcass tyres so it shouldn't be a problem for them to make more.
If they give the riders a wider choice of tyres, then we'll have more riders on their chosen tyres and theoretically get closer racing.
After all it's what we fans want to see.

yamfan said:

Agreed, they'd already developed the softer carcass tyres so it shouldn't be a problem for them to make more.
If they give the riders a wider choice of tyres, then we'll have more riders on their chosen tyres and theoretically get closer racing.
After all it's what we fans want to see.

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I don't think so, we would get more runaway winners. At the moment the tires are a bit of an unknown and the fastest riders are forced to play a more conservative game than they would otherwise. The next thing is peeps called vudu marvel how Rossi is still competitive at 38, yet for the last few years he can't qualify for ..... He lacks outright pace of these go for broke young guys.

The young guys are the gun qualifiers. So imagine how would racing look if they kept developing tires to the point every lap was a qualifier? Wasn't there a huge fan base that constantly whinged in 2007 that it ruined the racing.

Now think of PI 2015 with Marquez and Lorenzo on prototype tire war rubber. No one would be complaining then of Marquez conserving his tires and holding up Rossi. Marquez would then be reeling off qualy laps one after the other and most likely win the race by 10 seconds like the good bad old days of 2007.

birdman said:

I don't think so, we would get more runaway winners. At the moment the tires are a bit of an unknown and the fastest riders are forced to play a more conservative game than they would otherwise. The next thing is peeps called vudu marvel how Rossi is still competitive at 38, yet for the last few years he can't qualify for ..... He lacks outright pace of these go for broke young guys.

The young guys are the gun qualifiers. So imagine how would racing look if they kept developing tires to the point every lap was a qualifier? Wasn't there a huge fan base that constantly whinged in 2007 that it ruined the racing.

Now think of PI 2015 with Marquez and Lorenzo on prototype tire war rubber. No one would be complaining then of Marquez conserving his tires and holding up Rossi. Marquez would then be reeling off qualy laps one after the other and most likely win the race by 10 seconds like the good bad old days of 2007.

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Hey man... as Vudu will tell you, it's all relative,

birdman said:

I don't think so, we would get more runaway winners. At the moment the tires are a bit of an unknown and the fastest riders are forced to play a more conservative game than they would otherwise. The next thing is peeps called vudu marvel how Rossi is still competitive at 38, yet for the last few years he can't qualify for ..... He lacks outright pace of these go for broke young guys.

The young guys are the gun qualifiers. So imagine how would racing look if they kept developing tires to the point every lap was a qualifier? Wasn't there a huge fan base that constantly whinged in 2007 that it ruined the racing.

Now think of PI 2015 with Marquez and Lorenzo on prototype tire war rubber. No one would be complaining then of Marquez conserving his tires and holding up Rossi. Marquez would then be reeling off qualy laps one after the other and most likely win the race by 10 seconds like the good bad old days of 2007.

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This is a great point, and I'm glad you brought this up.

Depending on how the tires are designed, they can obviously be designed in such a way that it artificially levels the playing field by forcing everyone into a middle area rather than having your glaringly obvious three way split of frontrunners, midfield, and backmarkers. You still have that currently, but tire lotteries have always been the great equalizer. Dorna and FOM don't like tire wars these days because god forbid teams be allowed to design bikes the way they want to, instead of being forced into the same ........ design bottleneck. Over the long haul, a spec tire hurts every factory/satellite team not named Honda or Yamaha since it becomes purely about money, and the amount of money required to refine the machine to gain those seemingly meaningless hundredths or thousandths of a seconds that all do add up into an advantage however small it seems. It's an argument I've had for awhile with F1, and several other major race series that the smaller teams have little to no chance of making inroads on the top/established teams of a given race series because it costs far more money to make gains when most avenues of development have been closed off. You're stuck refining what you have, and to refine things, it just becomes a case of how much money you have, hence why the same two teams win the championship every single year. Not to say that they can't .... up, but if they do, it's not as devastating to them as it is to say Ducati and the rest. It's a shame though because if a tire war were allowed, I believe that would give Ducati or even Suzuki the best chance of winning not just races, but a world championship.

JPSLotus said:

This is a great point, and I'm glad you brought this up.

Depending on how the tires are designed, they can obviously be designed in such a way that it artificially levels the playing field by forcing everyone into a middle area rather than having your glaringly obvious three way split of frontrunners, midfield, and backmarkers. You still have that currently, but tire lotteries have always been the great equalizer. Dorna and FOM don't like tire wars these days because god forbid teams be allowed to design bikes the way they want to, instead of being forced into the same ........ design bottleneck. Over the long haul, a spec tire hurts every factory/satellite team not named Honda or Yamaha since it becomes purely about money, and the amount of money required to refine the machine to gain those seemingly meaningless hundredths or thousandths of a seconds that all do add up into an advantage however small it seems. It's an argument I've had for awhile with F1, and several other major race series that the smaller teams have little to no chance of making inroads on the top/established teams of a given race series because it costs far more money to make gains when most avenues of development have been closed off. You're stuck refining what you have, and to refine things, it just becomes a case of how much money you have, hence why the same two teams win the championship every single year. Not to say that they can't .... up, but if they do, it's not as devastating to them as it is to say Ducati and the rest. It's a shame though because if a tire war were allowed, I believe that would give Ducati or even Suzuki the best chance of winning not just races, but a world championship.

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im not particularly a fan of Mark Webber but there was a comment he once made I found quite enlightening, specifically about the tyres and how it took the excitement out of racing. It was exactly as you are saying, the tires were so far below the potential of both the car and the driver, and worse still the team had refined the car to the most finite detail to milk out the smallest advantage. but the driver then had to be an absolute robot and stick to a predetermined lap time and not deviate from it, definitely not get excited and God forbid race. He also said something of the techniques required, basically don't brake or accelerate or the tires will fall apart, instead coast and tiptoe around the track like a ballerina. He said siting there reeling off laps knowing he could could be running seconds faster was mind numbingly boring as a driver compared to the tire war days when they would be pushing to both their physical and mental driving limit.

But I do understand the problem of becoming too fast for circuits with ever growing gravel traps. It's a highly unimaginative solution to limit the tire imo but then I guess I wouldn't be expecting anything other from the likes of the Bernie and Carmelo's of the world.

birdman said:

I don't think so, we would get more runaway winners. At the moment the tires are a bit of an unknown and the fastest riders are forced to play a more conservative game than they would otherwise. The next thing is peeps called vudu marvel how Rossi is still competitive at 38, yet for the last few years he can't qualify for ..... He lacks outright pace of these go for broke young guys.

The young guys are the gun qualifiers. So imagine how would racing look if they kept developing tires to the point every lap was a qualifier? Wasn't there a huge fan base that constantly whinged in 2007 that it ruined the racing.

Now think of PI 2015 with Marquez and Lorenzo on prototype tire war rubber. No one would be complaining then of Marquez conserving his tires and holding up Rossi. Marquez would then be reeling off qualy laps one after the other and most likely win the race by 10 seconds like the good bad old days of 2007.

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I see what you mean buddy, but I wasn't talking about prototype tyres, simply more choice of compounds and carcass stiffness for EVERY rider.
This way VR gets his stiff tyres JL gets his softer grippy tyres and every single rider gets his preference. This way we've got no arguments about artificially emasculating riders and bikes.
The best riders will be able perform to their best without compromising and hopefully we'll see great racing.
If MM, MV, JL, VR or whoever does a disappearing act, then good on him, he's the best rider out there and deserves the plaudits.
I get what you're saying about 2007, but the majority of the whinging was done by the Rossi fans used to seeing him walking away with races.
I know the cost implications would upset dorna, but I would love to see every rider able to genuinely be able to perform at his peak without tyre implications...

yamfan said:

I see what you mean buddy, but I wasn't talking about prototype tyres, simply more choice of compounds and carcass stiffness for EVERY rider.
This way VR gets his stiff tyres JL gets his softer grippy tyres and every single rider gets his preference. This way we've got no arguments about artificially emasculating riders and bikes.
The best riders will be able perform to their best without compromising and hopefully we'll see great racing.
If MM, MV, JL, VR or whoever does a disappearing act, then good on him, he's the best rider out there and deserves the plaudits.
I get what you're saying about 2007, but the majority of the whinging was done by the Rossi fans used to seeing him walking away with races.
I know the cost implications would upset dorna, but I would love to see every rider able to genuinely be able to perform at his peak without tyre implications...

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I am absolutely with you, I am very happy to see a rider win by 10 seconds if it is because they are actually 10 seconds better, much more than I am to see contrived last lap battles due to convenient yellow flags.

Amusingly, Dorna's supposed main endeavour in recent years is to promote wider competition, and hence Suzuki or Ducati winning a title should be their holy grail, but when Ducati actually did win their only title Dorna did not seem best pleased, with virtually the first thing they did being to take away the tyre co-developed by years of endeavour with Bridgestone which particularly suited their bike and then current top rider.

Birdman's point is valid though, if the bikes keep getting faster every year by whatever means eventually the circuits certainly, and perhaps even at some stage the riders, can no longer cope with that speed.

i have been arguing since 1998 that there should be sufficient variety of tyres to suit different bikes and riding styles, and would still have considered Ducati winning the title with their radical and different bike glorious with a rider other than Stoner.

michaelm said:

i have been arguing since 1998 that there should be sufficient variety of tyres to suit different bikes and riding styles, and would still have considered Ducati winning the title with their radical and different bike glorious with a rider other than Stoner.

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Agreed, especially for what is labelled a "Prototype" series. On the face of it, there isn't much more variety now in MotoGP than there is in WSBK. Think back to the mid 2000's when you had V4's, V5's, Inline 4's, the Cube etc.

#22 said:

Agreed, especially for what is labelled a "Prototype" series. On the face of it, there isn't much more variety now in MotoGP than there is in WSBK. Think back to the mid 2000's when you had V4's, V5's, Inline 4's, the Cube etc.

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Don't get me started on how stupid I think Spec-ECUs are for ANY prototype racing. It's NASCAR mentality with phony close racing. I really want to see the latest and greatest technology in F1 and MotoGP. Now, WSBK could be leading the technology front. What kind of sense does that make?

I understood the manufacturers agreeing to slow engine development and give Ducati a break to catch up. But, that is done. There is no reason that Ape, KTM, and Duc, can't run MM electronics and be competitive. But to force everyone to use it is annoying and the antithesis of the term "prototype".

Introducing a spec tyre was always the right decision. In theory, giving each rider a tyre that's perfect for him is fine but in practice that's not how it would work. One may as well insist that every competing rider be given a factory bike that ideally suits his style.

Rossi & Vinales would need to come to a compromise on the direction of tyre development. Marquez however would get his choice of tyre while forcing Pedrosa to ride on the same one. Lorenzo would get his preferred tyre, Dovizioso would have to make do. And unless Pirelli or Dunlop entered the fray with competitive models, rest of the field would be forced to contract with either Michelin or Bridgestone and take what was on offer irrespective of whether it suited their rider.

Would allowing every rider to pick their own tyre from any manufacturer, fix that? Not really. They'd effectively get a choice of 6 slicks & 4 wets (instead of 3 slicks & 2 wets), overhead at the supplier's end (not knowing how many of its products would get used) would go through the roof and they'd promptly pass that on to the customer. Which is fine if you're HRC and arriving at every round with enough spare parts to equip a third rider. Not so much if you're Aspar or Tech 3 and working within a tight budget.

And this wouldn't solve the basic problem in the any case. Each tyre manufacturer would still need to cater to the needs of the entire field with only two or three tyre types. You cannot guarantee that each rider would get want he wants.

What if Lorenzo wants softer compound but the field is split between those who want a medium compound (say Bridgestones) and those who want an even harder compound (say Michelins)? Even if he can adapt to a medium compound, he'd be hard pressed to compete with Marquez's perfect setup.

In fact, it would be better to just get Michelin to supply two extra tyre types - costs would still increase a great deal but not nearly as much as if they were forced to compete with Bridgestone week to week.

Its all very well when you're thinking of how it'll impact the top 2 or 3 factory riders but ask the satellite team bosses how they feel about restarting the tyre wars and you'll likely get an earful.