Stoner might retire by the end of 2012 season.

Talpa said:

He also went on to lose the following 3 titles after blitzing the field in 07....... When the others caught up and got the right rubber. Like I said the regs helped him a lot early on

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There is rider who blitzed the field in 2009, and is well on his his way to losing the following 3 titles. Can you name him?

michaelm said:

If bridgestone are still providing the old hard tyre (I wasn't sure they were), then I have no complaint, and nor should casey. If the new 2012 tyre suits others better than him, then it is the reverse of the previous situation and no concern of his competitors.



I think there was more that was odd about ducati than tyres in early 2008 (post qatar anyway) concerning which stoner has made no comment post ducati, not that he has made any comment about the tyres either. His only real criticism of ducati period is that rossi has been given much greater resources than he was.

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I think the 07 BS tires are long gone.



http://motomatters.c...ng_fast_em.html



[quote Casey Stoner]

Casey Stoner: "So there's something strange going on with the way their tires work. And when you do have to run them in from something that is not working at all, I mean, you're going through the first couple of laps, or the first lap at least scrubbing the tires. People don't realize when we're scrubbing the tires, we're actually losing the front, losing the rear the whole time in the first lap. It's just like you're in the wet. You stick your knee out, you scrub, the front tire closes and it just "kkkrrrkkkrrkkrr" it pushes across the track. Just trying to get rid of whatever film is on top.

And I don't know why they have done it. When I rode with them in 2007, 2008, they weren't still great at that sort of thing, we struggled a lot more than the Michelin's at warming up, but not quite as much as the way they are now. They seem to be really just trying to cut costs, I guess, they have to make them this way to make sure they last, to make sure they can get the life out of them. For testing, for other reasons, not just finishing a race distance, but for actually getting distance out of them in testing."

[/quote]

michaelm said:

I always thought you were on the money about the 2008 tyre situation, and my problem was always the bridgestone tyre ducati took a leap into the void and expended several years to develop being taken away, not bridgestones being made available to other riders.



There was the engine related dnf followed by reversion to the 2007 engine, and the bike not just being unwieldy but not wanting to turn at all at jerez and estoril. I wondered at the time whether this was the result of an attempt to make the bike "handle better". perhaps even at stoner's instigation, as talk that he couldn't dogfight with rossi obviously rankled. If so, it had similar results to the attempts in 2010 and 2011. I am not sure why they went carbon fibre either, although the perceived wisdom at the time did seem to be that it was antiquated and off the pace, and I believe stoner was frustrated they couldn't give him a number 1 and number 2 bike that had more than a passing resemblance to each other.

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For some reason, I can empathize with Casey about the tires. He finally wins another title, and the GPC are immediately in talks to change the tires again. Who's charged with leading the revolt? Capirossi. They guy who whined, from sun up to sun down, about Ducati abandoning him to help the young kid. I have nothing against Capirossi, but he obviously weilds some kind of social power or he leverages some victim status, evidenced by his ability to get his number retired and land a job at Dorna before he even stepped off the bike. I'm sure Casey is a bit wary of another well-connected Italian.



Regarding the tire situation, it was so difficult to detect, I often wondered if the tire changes had any signficance. However, recent events make tire rules seem more likely than not, imo. The MSMA are currently sitting around the meeting table, discussing ways to pinch pennies and create new half measures to appease Dorna (same thing M and B were doing in 2007/8). In F1, Michelin and Bridgestone were at the negotaiting table frequently, trying to salvage the F1 tire war, and they had created a system of very complicated homologation procedures. They had the motivation and the means. Regardless, I think it is important, if for no other reason than to demonstrate that they tried to save the tire war. Michelin even went so far as to supply and fund Tech 3 in 2008 (judging by the livery).



Carbon frame was about weight distribution, imo. Ditch the steel. Bake the carbon. Stash the weight somewhere else now that special tires were gone. Ducati always believed they needed something special to beat Rossi. Really, beating Rossi was basically their obsession, something we learned in the near past when Duc spoke about the cultural phenomenon of competing against Rossi and then hiring Rossi. Anyway, carbon frame was the x-factor to beat Rossi Yam when they no longer had different rubber to Yamaha and Honda. If you can't beat them, join them. So they hired Rossi/Burgess and now they run aluminum twin spar.

The carbon frame was all about getting maximum breathing into that engine. Ducati have stated a number of times that with the perimeter trellis frame, they had run out of the ability to make the airbox match their needs.



They had a couple of choices - conventional deltabox or something different.



The design ethic was to make a steering head/airbox combo that was stiff enough that the box could be as big as possible, to allow for current and projected needs. That lends itself to a composite chassis.