Date: 24/06/2011
Bridgestone,
the exclusive tyre supplier for the MotoGP World Championship, is coming under
increasing pressure to improve the warm-up characteristics of its tyres after
more high-profile incidents at Assen on Friday.
All three Repsol Honda riders - Casey Stoner, Andrea Dovizioso and Hiroshi Aoyama - fell in the opening minutes of morning free practice after struggling to generate enough heat in the rear tyre.
"We're struggling with the left hand side of the tyre, we just can't seem to get the temperature in to it," said world championship leader Stoner.
Dovizioso, who fell at the same turn, told a similar tale: "I crashed exiting turn 9 on the second lap as there was a wet spot [and] also the tyre on the left was not up to temperature yet."
Aoyama managed to crash despite backing off: "I saw Casey and Andrea falling in a left hand corner and I immediately thought I had to be careful because here it's very difficult to get grip in left corners. But a few corners later I crashed and it was totally unexpected. It was a big one, around 190 kilometres per hour and I hit my back. It was very painful."
All three Repsol Honda riders - Casey Stoner, Andrea Dovizioso and Hiroshi Aoyama - fell in the opening minutes of morning free practice after struggling to generate enough heat in the rear tyre.
"We're struggling with the left hand side of the tyre, we just can't seem to get the temperature in to it," said world championship leader Stoner.
Dovizioso, who fell at the same turn, told a similar tale: "I crashed exiting turn 9 on the second lap as there was a wet spot [and] also the tyre on the left was not up to temperature yet."
Aoyama managed to crash despite backing off: "I saw Casey and Andrea falling in a left hand corner and I immediately thought I had to be careful because here it's very difficult to get grip in left corners. But a few corners later I crashed and it was totally unexpected. It was a big one, around 190 kilometres per hour and I hit my back. It was very painful."
Fortunately, the Repsol trio
avoided serious injury, but Monster Yamaha Tech 3 riders Colin Edwards and Cal
Crutchlow are both nursing broken collarbones after 'cold tyre' crashes at the
previous Catalunya and Silverstone rounds respectively.
In the aftermath of his British GP
accident, which occurred with a tyre that was still 'cold' despite being on its
third lap, Crutchlow made clear that something should change.
"I crashed for the same
reason that everyone else is crashing in this championship: the tyres are not
right. I think now there have been more than 60 crashes with these tyres,
losing the rear on what they call warm-up procedure," Bikesportnews.com
quotes Crutchlow as saying.
Bridgestone, which supplies two
types of slick-tyre compounds (one soft and one hard) for each event, insists
it is working to improve warm-up performance - and stressed that, at Assen at
least, track conditions were much colder than usual.
“The track temperature was 15
degrees Celsius lower than during qualifying here last year," said
Bridgestone's Hirohide Hamashima on Friday. "Pole
time was just 0.2seconds off the lap record set last year, but the effect of
the conditions was felt more during the initial laps and in the area of tyre
warm-up.
"For this reason, our softer
option slicks were favoured all day today. This [warm-up performance] is
something we are looking at very carefully, and speaking to the riders at
length about, as we focus our efforts on this area."
"In my opinion the two tyre
selections are too similar," explained Stoner. "At a lot of races
there's not much difference between the soft and the hard. The temperature
range is too close together.
"They [Bridgestone] always
seem to be expecting warmer weather, but at these tracks we know it can be
cold. And when it's colder the tyres just don’t seem to work on both sides. We
just can’t get temperature into them.
"We had a lot of problems
last year. This year it's better but it's still not good enough. It's makes for
some pretty big problems and unfortunately it's dangerous. You just can’t feel
the tyre. You don’t know what it's going to do.
"Having more tyres wouldn’t
change anything. I think there needs to be a bigger temperature range, so the
two tyre options overlap a little in the middle, but not as much as now."
"When the Bridgestone tyre is
hot it is the best tyre in the world," added Assen pole sitter Marco
Simoncelli. "But it is strange because when you go slow, you risk more.
Because if you don’t push the tyre hard you lose the temperature."
The most high-profile victim of
the cold-tyre crashes has been seven-time MotoGP champion Valentino Rossi, who
broke his leg in practice at Mugello last year shortly after backing off to let
another rider past - allowing his tyres to cool.
Late on Friday evening, it emerged
that Bridgestone was prepared to rush a softer compound of tyre to Assen for
use on race day, but some teams - presumably those in best shape with the
present tyres - rejected the proposal.
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