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