Читать книгу Foggy on Bikes - Carl Fogarty - Страница 11

‘Carl Fogarty the person and Carl Fogarty the rider are two different people, but his personality has a lot of influence on his riding. Sometimes, he had to be aggressive off the track because it was the only way he knew how to transmit his personality. When he is with other people he sometimes looks uncomfortable if he doesn’t know them. Carl is still a bit shy, even after all his success.

‘In the beginning he was a bit hard to manage because I had first to try to understand him. Then I was lucky because we found a very good feeling together. It’s not so difficult to read him. It means looking him in the eyes and already knowing what he needs and what he wants, or what he wants to say. Also, he understood that I was often already doing what he was going to ask for.

‘Carl was very aggressive on the throttle, so we needed to set the bike up hard on the rear. Especially when he thought the grip was poor, he would turn the throttle so quickly that it was difficult to set the rear suspension. But, at the end of the day, you could always say that Carl would ride round any problems with the bike. He would try hard during qualifying but we always knew that he would put in 110 per cent on race day.

‘His body used to move a lot on the bike and he would use his weight to adapt to different corners. And if there were problems with the bike, he would use his own body to solve them by hanging off at different angles. He would not hang off as much as someone like James Whitham, but just use his bodyweight to hold the corners. In that way he could carry high corner speed, a big part of his technique.’

Davide Tardozzi

Ducati factory team manager