There are two other things to take into account when positioning the handlebars. The main one, as I mentioned earlier, is that as well as up and down you can change how the bars are angled into or away from the bike. And as my style was all about hanging off the bike as much as possible, I always thought that the further I was tucked in, while remaining comfortable, the more I could hang off in corners.
I think this is why people used to say that I looked big on a bike. I was often told that I looked a lot smaller in real life than I did when I was riding. The press have written things like, ‘Never has someone so small made himself look so big on a bike.’ A lot of small riders look lost on a bike, and I’m a small guy at 5 ft 8 in, but it’s because I hung off the bike and moved around the saddle so much that I appeared bigger. Again, if the bars had been angled further out from the bike, I would have been straining forward, with my weight too far over the front.
At some tracks, with a lot of right-handers, I would angle the left-hand bar a bit further into the bike than the right. As I hung off the bike, the movement of my left arm would be limited by the bike’s tank; moving that bar in a few millimetres gave me the chance to hang further off to the right without that left arm catching on the tank. I probably first did this in 1997 when I was struggling with the line of my Ducati, especially at tracks like Donington where I was having difficulty at corners such as Redgate, McLeans and Coppice. Albacete was another track where I sometimes felt the need to do this in order to maximize the contact patch of the tyre and find the best possible grip.
When I asked Slick to do this in Spain, he presumed I wanted the right-hand bar moved inwards as well, and got to work.
‘What are you doing that for?’ I said when I saw he was working on both bars.
‘Well, I presumed you wanted them both doing. You couldn’t ride to the chippy with it like that,’ he replied.
‘Just leave it with the left-hand bar,’ I insisted.
Other riders tended to prefer more of what I would call a motocross style, where the bars are sticking out more in the manner of Fred Merkel. That helps them carry more speed into the corners before braking and sliding the back end round, a bit like a speedway rider but obviously not so exaggerated. It allows them to use the strength in their arms more easily. The riders who are very good at this are Noriyuki Haga, Chris Walker and Anthony Gobert. That was never my strong point. My style was all about carrying speed at mid-corner and my position was perfect for that. One thing the angle of my bars was not perfect for, though, was storage. The mechanics could never get my bike into the transport crates because of the bar positions!
The second thing to take into account when setting the bars is the positioning on the fork-legs. Like every other rider I know, my bars were as high as possible, touching the bottom of the yoke. Again, that was just a comfort thing – I did not want to be crouching any lower than I had to.
The other things that have to be decided on when trying to get the best possible position on a bike are the location of the footrests and how much padding to have on the seat. Much of this was actually forced on me because of my injuries. I had lost a lot of flexibility in my right knee because of the two bad breaks early on in my career. Obviously, on the bigger superbikes there was not the same pressure on my knee to bend as much as there was on a smaller 250cc. But even on superbikes, I could still try to make my racing position as comfortable as possible. The key was to have my footrests a bit further forward than other riders. When Troy Bayliss first sat on my bike after I had crashed in Australia, he could not believe how far forward they were. By moving the footrests forward, though, I stopped my legs being cramped up and also stopped myself from leaning any further forward than I had to. Again, I think some riders like to have their heels as far back as possible to help them slide into corners. That was the last thing I ever wanted to do. I wanted to ride smoothly through the corners and keep the wheel turning forward, so moving the rests back was not something I was bothered about.
At the end of the 1995 season in Australia, after I had agreed to ride for Honda the following season, I asked Slick to check the height difference between the top of the seat and the footrests on the Ducati that I had been riding. I was worried that the Honda was not going to be as comfortable, and when I first sat on the Honda it turned out that the difference was about an inch less. The footrest position seemed okay, so we had to add foam to the seat until the height difference was the same, otherwise I would have been in a lot of pain – the last thing anyone wants to be worrying about during a race.
Tall riders often struggle. A lot of people think Colin Edwards is pretty tall, just because he is slim, but he’s actually not much taller than I am. It’s the six-foot riders that really have a problem, and there just aren’t that many about now. You don’t see many six-foot jockeys, either. My old Kawasaki France endurance team-mate, Terry Rymer, was a big lad and his height must have hampered him. We always had to compromise when setting the bike up because it was a big, bulbous bike – a tank of a thing. The bars had to be angled further out to accommodate Terry, and as a result I really struggled to hang off it.
One more way in which my preferred position meant that my bike differed from a lot of other riders’ bikes was in the size of the screen. Most riders like big screens, but when I’m in a corner I like to see nothing but the track in front of me. If you study pictures of me riding around corners, I’m hanging so far off the bike that the screen just does not come into my line of vision at all. If I’d had the same size screen as other riders – probably about 20 per cent bigger – I would have been cricking my neck trying to look round the side.
At tracks with long straights, however, such as Hockenheim and Monza, I did not have a choice in the matter. Gaining top speed down those straights was so important that I had to use a bigger screen to improve the aerodynamics of the bike. I didn’t like that at all because whenever I came to a bend, the bike did not feel like my own. It always took me a long time to get used to that change. Even so, I still didn’t use as big a screen as the other Ducati riders, probably going for half the normal difference between the two sizes.
When I started out, of course, these alterations were not an option. You had what you had, and you had to make do and mend. Or at least that’s what I thought. When I look back now, I think, You thick bastard! Why did you not make some brackets so that the footrests could have been moved forward after your broken leg?
Everybody said that I made myself look big on a bike because of the way I moved around in the saddle, as this shot at Kyalami in 2000 shows.
Even with all the expertise available to me towards the end of my career, I never stopped questioning things. After I had struggled with Honda in 1996, I expected everything to be perfect when I returned to Ducati for the 1997 season. But something did not quite feel right. In fact, I still believe that I lost the world title that year because the testing hadn’t been right for the bike. This niggling feeling lasted all the way through the 1998 season, when I regained the World Superbike title but was still struggling to hold my line through corners.
‘I still can’t seem to hang off the bike like I used to in 1995,’ I told Davide Tardozzi, my team boss at Ducati. ‘The tank seems to be getting in the way.’
‘Well, Carl,’ he replied, ‘the tank is bigger than it used to be. You need more fuel for a race now.’
‘What do you mean? Nobody bothered to tell me!’
The information just crept out like this because there had been so many changes in personnel at Ducati. The bigger tank certainly explained away a lot of my problems over the previous couple of years. The outcome was that they altered the tank for me and Troy Corser for the 1999 season. The shape and size had to be kept the same, but they managed to take some of the bulk off the top and add it to the bottom. We used it for the first time in pre-season tests at Misano in February. I tested for one day with the old tank, but when it was swapped for the new one I loved it from the word go. I equalled my best time for the test straight away, and that was on old tyres. Troy didn’t like