Foggy on Bikes. Carl Fogarty
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.
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