Fastest Page #8

comfortable front end,

you start carrying more speed,

a little more entry speed,

and then your lap

times start dropping.

What matters here is that the

tire contact patch is so small,

and you've got to put 220

horsepower through that.

So, it's a game of not

over-stressing those tires,

but taking them to the limit

of their ability to grip.

But never too far.

And it's that little bit,

that last little bit,

that all these teams are

searching for to make them work.

Suspension is working,

but the tire is not working,

so we need to push on tire,

try to get tire working.

Before riding, tire warmers

heat the tires to 80 degrees Celsius.

Out on the track, the riders

have to work them hard

to generate additional heat and

the grip that comes with it.

It is regular to go over

You can't touch them when they

come in, put it that way.

It's like touching a metal

kettle in your kitchen.

And that's where that

amazing grip comes from.

By the time you get them

up to that temperature,

they become so sticky,

it's almost like glue.

The bikes are infinitely adjustable.

The laptops tell the story.

They may burn fossil fuel,

but these are effectively

digital machines,

their performance

pre-programmable.

There's so much technology

nowadays with anti-wheelie,

anti-spin,

anti-rectum control.

I mean, they got all kinds

of sh*t on this thing that...

You're constantly trying to

tweak this, play with that.

This line is the gearbox.

You see second, third,

fourth, fifth and sixth.

You see, the throttle

opening is the blue line.

Then we have a lot of sensors

checking the engine performance,

like lambda sensor,

temperature.

The total number, including

the mathematical channel,

is around 200,

but normally we check 20.

The KISS Principle.

Keep it simple, stupid.

Okay, so we go

with the first bike.

Yes.

Parallel up.

Yeah.

And the second bike,

bring that home.

Working

with him is amazing.

If you work with him, you can

realize how amazing he is.

Sometimes,

Valentino can make a race

with the same lap time

from beginning to the end.

I can take the lap number four

and I overlay lap number 25.

You can't see any difference in

speed between the lap number four

and the lap number 25.

Rossi

he has that edge-

He can feel very well,

this line.

He's going on that edge for all

the race, so he's good at that.

Mantequilla is the new

word, of this year, of my team.

When you ride

very smooth on the turns,

when you ride

like Mantequilla,

like you are putting

butter on bread,

with the knife, very

smooth, very precise.

This is the

Mantequilla style.

My dad, he was a mechanic. He was

in the garage with a hammer.

So I was thinking, "When

I became a real rider,

"I want to be at the same constant

as a hammer, with the same force,

"and in the same time."

Hammer, hammer,

every lap the same.

This is more or less

the two best skills I have.

The smooth style and the

hammer constant pace.

The other riders are more

inconstant, apart from Valentino,

who is, more or less,

the same constant as me.

It's one

of the best points about Jorge

that he's not

a big technician,

but he knows exactly what

he needs to be fast.

He says, "If you fix the braking,

I will be three times faster. "

Always, if we are able to do

it, he is three times faster.

Lorenzo, this year, he's

made everything look so easy.

He looks like he could

take a hand off

and put it behind his back

and do the same thing.

Sometimes I can feel a little

bit of frustration from Valentino.

He's developing

the machine,

and in the meantime,

he is preparing the tool

for his best rival

to try to beat him.

We have the bike that we have

worked very hard on for seven years

to make as good as it is.

Jorge has come along and

inherited a lot of that work

and has done

a great job with it.

It's not my bike because

Vale has been doing the evolution,

so he has been making

the bike for his style.

But I adapt

my style to the bike.

Every time I beat Valentino,

some part of the press says,

"Why do Ramon and you make

"better settings than

Vale and Burgess?"

And I say,

"Maybe it's not

a question of the setting."

He learned a lot

from Valentino.

He's learned too much

from Valentino.

Valentino has

developed the bike,

and he's got

the bike ready made.

What bothers

Rossi's fans is not just

the fact that Lorenzo's

winning races,

but that he's mimicking

Rossi's style.

Rossi has the sun and moon

on his helmet and leathers,

Lorenzo, a halo

and devil's horns.

One leg of Rossi's

leathers is yellow,

one leg of Lorenzo's, red.

He's a copycat.

We don't like him

so much here in Tavullia.

How much of that

is getting up Rossi's nose?

Maybe the imitation is part of

Lorenzo's way of winding Rossi up.

Valentino, nine wins here at

Mugello, seven in the MotoGP last week.

You think of Mugello, you

think of Valentino Rossi,

but it will be tough on

Sunday for many reasons,

for Jorge,

in particular.

Unfortunately, I had a bad

idea to crash with a motocross bike,

to have an injury that

may give me some problem,

but championship is long,

we need to fight.

I noticed that Valentino

was very anxious at this time.

It was a difficult moment of

the season because of my shoulder injury.

I need victory in Mugello.

He had a lot of

pain to the shoulder,

and coming to Mugello,

he said,

"I am like a gambler,

I want to play the joker."

We think of the joker

because it's like when you play cards

and you have the joker, at one

moment, you have to play.

And you have to play

when it's important.

He'd come out on a new

tire, he'd done one out lap.

Then he was on his second lap

and that's when you slow down.

But he hadn't done

a complete flying lap,

so the tire

temperature was already

at the bottom end

of its working range.

I slowed down because

I had Barber following me-

I slowed him down

for six or seven seconds.

And when I started to push,

the tire on the left was cold

and it was a big

high side, very fast.

That was

just in front of me.

So in the practice, I saw it

out of the corner of my eye.

It was ugly because

that's a really fast place.

It was a bad feeling because

I lose practice, I made a mistake.

But after, when I touched

the ground, I had pain.

I said, "Maybe the

problem is bigger."

The violent impact

of the foot

on the asphalt

broke the leg.

And the broken bone pierced

the skin and became exposed.

When I understood that I

broke a leg, I was quite desperate.

The pain was hard.

A cold tire crash

is usually the worst,

because you just

have no idea.

It's like you walked

through the front door,

and somebody

had a baseball bat

and just smacked you in the face

without you knowing about it.

I stabilized the injury and put

the bones back in the body.

It's not good for the bone

to be exposed to the air.

Together with

Dr. Macchiagodena at Mugello,

we arranged to get him

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