Читать книгу Foggy on Bikes - Carl Fogarty - Страница 16

We must have looked like four Michelin men, except for the fact that we were using Metzeler tyres. It was my first trip to Japan, with my dad, my mechanic and a guy called Lew Durkin, who came everywhere to help out. We were still on a pretty tight budget, so we couldn’t afford to pay freight charges. A bike had been lined up for me to ride in the 1989 Formula One World Championship round in Sugo, but we had to bring out our own gear – including tyres.

So each of us checked in for the flight with a tyre on each shoulder, along with all the other stuff we needed. But that was nothing compared to having to find the right train when we got there and then to carry this lot all the way to Sugo. We arrived to find a disgrace of a bike. There was oil all over the place and the brake pads were knackered. We’d also heard that Joey Dunlop was not going to make the trip. So there was a RVF sitting there doing nothing while I, the reigning world champion, had to make do with this heap. There was no way, though, that they were going to let me use that bike.

It didn’t matter for one practice session because Metzeler produced a fantastic rain tyre and I was easily the fastest when it rained. We had loads of Japanese hanging round the garage trying to see what kind of tyres we were using. There was probably no one else in the world using Metzeler tyres on short circuits because Metzeler couldn’t afford to travel to places like Japan. We had to do all the work on the tyres ourselves, although they advised us on pressures and the like before we went.

I had a crap race, finishing 13th but picking up a few valuable points towards my next world title. But the ‘fun’ did not stop there. Dad didn’t know we had to phone ahead to secure reservations for the flight home, so when he tried it was fully booked. They eventually found us some seats but told us we needed to pay a penalty for having too much weight; we had to carry a one hundredweight toolbox on board as hand luggage. Luckily we had left all the tyres at the circuit – even though we had ended up not even using them for the race – because we couldn’t be bothered to lug them all the way back to Tokyo.

In those days, we used Metzeler tyres because they were free and we couldn’t afford Michelins. They weren’t that bad, especially on road circuits. Everyone else in 1989 was running 17in Michelin rears on the Honda RC30, while I was running 18in Metzelers. It was all a bit ‘pre-war’, but I loved it. People thought I was mad, and they were a bit hit and miss. At some circuits, such as Thruxton and Mallory, the Metzelers were crap, but at others they were great. The previous year at Donington when I was going for my first F1 world title, there was no way the Metzelers were going to work, so I bought a Michelin, scrubbed the name off, stuck some Metzeler stickers on and came fifth to clinch the championship. Michelin were not too happy when they found out, of course; while Metzeler didn’t know what to think. They were too busy celebrating the win anyway. Then, again at Donington in 1989 the Metzelers were brilliant. Niall Mackenzie had returned from the Grand Prix circuit and thought he would clean up in all three races. He didn’t, but I did. From then on, after signing for Honda in 1990, I was on Michelins for the rest of my career, apart from one year on Dunlops in 1992 as a privateer, when we had to negotiate a special price.

There didn’t seem to be the same tyre sponsorship available in those days as there is for young riders today. Nowadays, the methods of selection are a bit more sophisticated, but the need to go to any lengths to get the right tyres on the bike is even more important. Tyre selection is perhaps the most crucial part of qualifying and practice. When I started out in racing there was not too much choice. Everyone pretty much ran on intermediate Michelin tyres – a bit like today’s cut slicks, which have grooves sliced into the rubber by a machine, but straight out of the mould. If it rained, there was a wet tyre, so there were only two choices. Even by 1995, the choice of tyre never seemed critical as they all seemed to work on the best bike I have ever ridden.

I wish it had been like that towards the end of my career. Now there are different compounds, different sizes and different shapes to take into account when trying to decide which tyre to use for a race. In 1996, when I was riding for Honda, finding the right rear tyre was an absolute nightmare. I guess it’s because the bikes are getting faster and more powerful, so there is less and less grip and more and more heat in the rear tyre. From that date onwards it was almost as though you would win the race if you could find the right tyre – as simple as that.

The size of the tyres when I started out was 18in. That size then dropped to 17in and now 16.5in tyres are sometimes used. When the 17in came out in 1985, it looked really good. Although it was an intermediate tyre, the sides almost looked as though they were slick, with no tread. Maybe it was just a psychological thing, but I loved it.

Everybody seemed to be using Michelins in those days, although a lot of racers and motocross riders have now switched to Dunlop. It was always pretty well accepted that Michelin produced a better tyre for superbikes and Grand Prix bikes while Dunlop made tyres more suited to the 250cc and 125cc series. But the balance has shifted because Dunlop now produce a very good superbike tyre. In the few races I competed in 2000, I noticed that Dunlop had made big strides during the winter.

But there have been a lot of changes recently. In the last dry races of my career, at Kyalami in South Africa in 2000, I rode on a 16.5in front and rear tyre for the first time in my career. It felt really good, although I went back to a 17in at the front for the second race because I was struggling to change direction a little bit. The smaller the wheel, the fatter they are, and because my shoulder was already injured for those races I found the steering really heavy. Although I was going really quick and set the new lap record, I kept losing the front because the 17in tyre at the front was a bit narrower and would not hold the track as well. I was given a few warnings when going over bumps, but I guess I ignored them and down I went.

For the rest of the year, all the riders on Michelins used 16.5in tyres at the front and rear. It’s strange because in my last six years of racing, I had tested 16.5in and 16in front wheels but never liked them. I always asked for them to be changed back straight away to 17in with a 5.75in rim at the back and 17in with a 3.5in rim at the front. The steering on the others always felt heavy and they didn’t give me any advantage. The only problem with the 17in tyres was that their grip would drop off very quickly towards the end of a race. But a 16.5in rear, while not providing the same grip at the start of a race, would be better towards the finish.

So deciding on the size of tyre was never really too much of an issue. Most of the debate centred around what was the best compound for the conditions and circuits, especially at the rear, where all the drive comes from. I would go so far as to say that finding the right rear is the most critical part of racing. More often than not I would find a front tyre I was happy with early on and then stick with it. But, particularly in 1997 and 1998, not being able to find the right rear tyres cost me a lot of races. When Davide Tardozzi became my team manager in 1998, we started to ride race distances on a Saturday to make sure that we found the tyres which would last the 25 laps and give good grip.

With so many different options in the choice of compound or profile – there might have been between eight to 15 choices available – it was easy to miss the best tyre during testing. It might have been tested and ruled out, for instance, during practice on a Friday, when the grip of the track was not as good. Come race day, when there were a couple more days’ worth of rubber on the track, it might have performed a lot better. And that choice was even harder if there was a sidecar meeting. After the sidecars had been on the track for two days, the choice we had made on a Friday might be completely useless by the Sunday because sidecars deposit a lot more rubber than bikes, and the more rubber on the surface the better the grip on most tracks. The hard work of 1999 paid off though, because seven times out of ten we chose the right tyre.

Michelin have always got a pretty good idea of what to use when we arrive at a meeting. The obvious starting point is to return to what was used the previous year. My tendency was always to go for as hard a tyre as possible at the outset, and try the softer ones later if necessary. As I carried a lot of corner speed, I wanted a tyre which would hold together well mid-corner when I was leaning over as far as possible. So my rear tyres always tended to be that bit harder than those of other riders. That wasn’t always the case, because Ducati had always got away with using a softer compound than Honda until 1995, but come 1997 we started using a harder compound because the engine had become so aggressive that it had started to destroy the softer compounds. So, around then, we started to lose an advantage over the Hondas. Softer tyres are not always ideal, though. If they get too hot they can grip too much and then the bike can chatter because it starts to grip-slip, grip-slip, grip-slip.

Even for Superpole, the one-lap shoot-out that decides grid positions, my qualifying tyres tended to be that little bit harder. But it has generally been accepted that Dunlop produce a better qualifying tyre than Michelin, and Troy Corser confirmed that with his move from Michelin to Dunlop when he rode for Aprilia in 2000. That didn’t bother me because Michelin produced better race tyres, which was far more important. Superpole was never my strong point, yet I still finished second in the Superpole standings for the season behind Troy in my final full year in 1999. Had I been fourth instead of fifth at Sugo, I would have won the competition – a competition I didn’t even know existed.

The only other people I could compare my choices with, apart from my team-mates, were the Honda riders, who were also on Michelins. During 1999 they consistently managed to use a softer compound than us. Everybody considered that to be strange, because the four-cylinder bike can rev quicker and spin up more and so should have put more pressure on the rear. Misano proved a classic case of this, so during the warm-up on the Sunday morning I asked to try the hardest compound available. The team didn’t want to give it to me because Michelin had told them it was too dangerous in the cool early-morning conditions.

Most of my body is off the bike, trying to keep it as upright as possible and increase the contact path of the tyres and so increase the grip.

‘I think I can use it for the race and I want to go out with it now,’ I insisted. I eventually got my own way, so the last thing I wanted to do was make a fool of myself by crashing. I took it easy for two or three laps, yet still managed to set the fastest lap of the warm-up a couple of laps later. ‘It’s perfect, that’s the one I’m using,’ I said.

The first race was quite close between me and my team-mate Troy Corser, because the bike kept jumping out of gear. The suspension was also a bit soft, and when the tyre went off towards the end of the race there was a lot of sliding around. Troy had a reputation for being very good at setting his bike up, yet he would often be the one copying what I had done. After we sorted the gearbox and stiffened the suspension slightly, I won the second race by a mile. Had I had the right set-up for every race, nobody would ever have beaten me.

The climate was always something that had to be considered, but that didn’t always mean the hotter the country, the harder the tyre that was needed. The surface of the track had to be taken into account too. One of the worst tracks for tyre wear was Phillip Island in Australia, where the weather could be either very hot or very cold. The place was a nightmare and people would regularly blister their tyres there. All the corners are on the left side where you are driving the bike really hard and putting a lot of heat into that side of the tyre, which never has a chance to cool down. When you felt the back of the bike vibrating and juddering, you just knew that bits of the outer tread had come off and the tyre was knackered. One year, mine were so bad that the bits hanging off smashed the telemetry shaft at the back. If you were halfway through the race when the tyres went, it would effectively be over unless you pulled into the pits for a change, which is something you don’t often see at a race track.

The classic case when it all went wrong was at Brands in 1999. It was either that there simply wasn’t an ideal tyre available, or that we failed to identify it during qualifying – because you cannot physically test them all in the time available anyway. I was convinced that we should have been using one particular tyre – I think it was an ‘M’ tyre – but Ducati and Michelin persuaded me to change my mind and use the ‘P’ tyre that Troy had used on the Saturday. I had not gone all that fast during qualifying, but that was more down to me than the choice of tyre. Sure enough, the 17in rear we used for the first race just got too hot and blew out. A big chunk flew off and I had to pull into the pits to change it. That pit-stop was a disaster. The team looked like the Keystone Cops, mainly because they weren’t expecting me in at a track like Brands where we’d never had too many tyre problems before. At circuits like Phillip Island and Monza the engineers would have had an airgun and a wheel at the ready just in case, but normally I would try to wobble round instead and finish third or fourth.

Whenever a wheel change was needed, most of the time would be lost entering and exiting the pits, not actually in the act of changing the wheel. This wasn’t the case at Brands. I was sat on the bike, desperate to get back out, and I started thinking, This is taking a bloody long time! The mechanic had got the stand underneath, put the bar in to lock up the wheel, leaned on the rear wheel to undo it and broken the stand. So he had to rush inside to take the rear stand from the other bike, stick this under my bike and carry on undoing the wheel. All this in front of 120,000 fans. I was not best pleased. I could only manage 19th place after that, but at least it meant I finished every single race that year. That’s pretty unusual.

Troy had suffered similar problems, but only on the last lap, so he was able to nurse it round. But Haga had used the ‘M’ tyre and finished third without any problems, so for the second race the Michelin tyre expert said, ‘Look, this 16.5in will get you through the race. John Reynolds used it for the first race and finished fourth, although his times were not as good. We don’t think the grip will be fantastic, but it will get you through the race.’ The grip was terrible from lap 1 to lap 25, although I still managed to finish fourth. The thing that pissed me off was that Colin Edwards won both races with exactly the same ‘P’ rear tyre I had used for the first race. What am I going to do now? I thought as we tried to figure it out. For some reason Honda managed to run a softer tyre than we did throughout the whole of that season. Yet we had both run the same tyre the previous round at Laguna Seca and both teams had had the same problems.

It was something that bugged me all that winter. One theory was that Honda were able to get away with softer compounds because their bikes had double-sided swinging arms – the metal projections which hold the wheel in place. Maybe that was helping to balance the heat across the rear tyre, or even making the suspension work better. When I rode for Honda in 1996, their bikes had single-sided swinging arms. I didn’t win the world title that year because I couldn’t get any grip mid-corner. In the middle of the 1997 season they changed to a double-sided arm. Over 1998 and 1999 it became clear that they were getting better grip because they were consistently running softer tyres. I was behind Aaron Slight a few times in 1998 and couldn’t believe the drive he was getting out of some corners when my tyre had gone.

I started asking Ducati for a double-sided swinging arm in 1998, but we were only allowed to test it twice during the winter before the 2000 season. The conditions for the tests were not perfect, but at Phillip Island in January I was able to do a back-to-back 15-lap comparison with single and double-sided arms, and to be perfectly honest there was very little difference between the two. The Ducati hierarchy was not keen on the double arm because they felt it spoilt the look of the bike. I was not convinced by this, and neither was Davide Tardozzi. Had there been a big difference, they would have had to go with a double arm, but at the end of the day it was all about selling road bikes, so I couldn’t blame them. We tried to test it again at Valencia but I had a big fall, knocking myself out, and we didn’t get the chance to do another back-to-back because I didn’t test on the second day.

Obviously the riders can make a difference. Maybe I was a bit too aggressive on the throttle at Brands Hatch and put too much heat into the tyre because of all the weight of expectation on my shoulders – there were 120,000 fans desperate to see me win. Yet it’s never easy to draw conclusions like that. If you look at the qualifying session for the round that clinched the world title for me that year at Hockenheim, I did the race distance on one tyre and didn’t have a problem. I then did the race distance on another tyre and it started to vibrate, so I pulled in before it blew out. There was no question which one I should use. Troy opted for the same one as me, and he had major blistering problems in both races. Two riders on the same bike with the same tyre with completely different outcomes. So I suppose there is a bit of luck involved, although that’s a tiny factor compared to the rider’s skill and the importance of getting the set-up right.

Sugo was another track on which Michelin riders seemed to struggle. Usually, I am one of the riders who can still get results, even if the tyres have gone off. That was probably the difference between me and Troy in 1999. Once my tyres had gone mid-race I would brake a little bit later or come off the gas and lift the bike up a bit if I felt it starting to slide. Or I could hook it up another gear a bit earlier so that the bike was always driving forward and not spinning the tyres even more. I would do anything I could to get that bike home in second, third or fourth place if I knew I couldn’t win the race. Troy seemed to drop further down the field when he had a problem. But, in the last race of 1999, with the world title already in the bag, my tyres went off in such a big way that from leading the first race with a few laps to go I ended up finishing second.

I noticed during 2000 that a lot of riders had started to run softer compounds. For the first time in years, someone on Dunlops had a realistic chance of winning the world championship going into the 2001 season. Ben Bostrom, although he was riding a Ducati, was fastest in the final test for 2001 at Valencia. Neil Hodgson is another rider who has always preferred Dunlops because they tend to slide round corners a bit easier, and he was fastest in the first test at South Africa.

The thickness of the tyres was also a factor that had to be considered. Often we would run a thinner tyre, probably by about a millimetre or two, for the really fast tracks. That did not make sense to me, but apparently the theory is that because there is not as much rubber there to get hot, the tyre stays cooler. There was always a base setting of inflation with nitrogen, again to keep them as cool as possible.

While I never minded trying out new compounds, or different tyre thicknesses, I was never that keen on experimenting with the profile of the tyre. Some are flatter, some more pointed at the apex. I always felt happier when somebody else was testing that kind of thing. Yet in Assen in 1999 I tried a new, more pointed tyre which had been tested on a 500cc bike on that circuit. Troy tried the same tyre but felt it was chattering all the time. I had felt it chattering a little bit too but I decided to stick with it, while Troy went his own way for the first race. I won the first race, and Troy decided to give it another go. I also won the second. I guess Troy was a bit shocked to learn that I was as good, if not better, at setting the bike up as he was. On reflection, throughout the year I made the correct tyre choice more often than Troy. The only time when his choice was better than mine was at Laguna Seca, when he gambled correctly for the second race.

I changed a lot as a rider in that year as I had started to think a lot more about set-up. I had stopped just looking at the TV monitors and thinking, So and so has just done a fast lap, I’d better get straight out there and beat it. Troy did that a lot in 1998, using a qualifying tyre very early on in the session to rattle the other riders, who would start swapping their tyres to try to match him. But you just have to ignore that kind of thing. In 1999, all I was bothered about during qualifying was putting in consistently fast lap times so that I could find the correct race tyre, and it paid off.

It was Davide Tardozzi who got me focused on finding the right tyre instead of being so bothered about being on the front row of the grid. Halfway through 1998, he began to say, ‘Look, you have to forget about doing these fast laps and concentrate on finding the right tyre. That’s how you will win the races.’ And I got faster and faster as the year went on, all the hard work paying off in the final round at Sugo, where I chose the right tyre and was the first rider home on a Michelin in the final and deciding race. I ended up beating Aaron Slight by some way, which hadn’t been happening earlier in the year when his choice of tyre had been better.

It’s so daft, though, to think that I was only learning about something as important as tyre choice at such a late stage of my career. But until 1995 it had never really been that much of a problem because the bikes were not as powerful. At first, I hated doing race distances on the Saturday, thinking that I would be knackered by the time it came to the race on Sunday. It was for my own benefit, though. If I had worked with the team as hard in

1997 as I did in 1999 to find the right overall package, I would have won the world title in that year as well. There is absolutely no question about that. Some of that was my fault, but a lot of the fault was also the team manager’s, Virginio Ferrari, who did not push me to do things.

One of the aspects of tyre work that has hardly ever entered my head is tyre conservation. Other riders will say that they go easy on their tyres in the early part of a race so that the grip is better in the later stages. I think that’s a load of shit. When I saw that green light come on, I went as fast as I could to win the race. Just about the only time I did go easy was at Phillip Island in

1998 when I had a good lead and I knew there were going to be problems later on in the race. As I came out of corners I tried to short-shift through the gears and go easy on the revs and maybe pull away at 10,500rpm instead of 12,000rpm so that the bike could pull nicely out of the corners. But when you are in the heat of the battle with two or three guys it’s very hard to think about saving your tyres, unless you are behind someone and in their slipstream for a couple of laps. I’ve heard riders in interviews say, ‘Carl won the race because he saved his tyres better than I did.’ That’s just an excuse because the guy who has come second has to think of a reason why he has not won the race.

It’s not just the fast tracks that can cause problems. One of the slower circuits is at Albacete in Spain, where trying to get good grip was a nightmare. The last time I was there, in 1999, I finished third in both races because I couldn’t match the acceleration coming out of corners of Akira Yanagawa and Colin Edwards. I was sliding all over the place. So it just goes to show the importance of tyre choice at every type of circuit.