I am really happy to be back with another diary for the Yamaha website – mainly because it means I am back for another year of MotoGP! There were some doubts about whether that would be the case towards the end of last season but I was delighted to sign for another year with the Monster Tech 3 Yamaha team and I hope to continue for at least a few more.
I am 36 years old now but I’m having fun and if I’m having fun doing what I’m doing then I don’t see why I should stop. It used to be a pain in the ass leaving my family at home in Texas so I could come to Europe and race but now I have three kids so when I don’t have them jumping all over me it’s kind of like a vacation! I get to come and do what I love to do, I feel good and I’m certainly not looking at 2010 being my last.
Unfortunately the current season so far has not gone to plan after a good preseason. Testing went really well at Sepang and for the most part in Qatar and I felt really comfortable with the new bike. Even though Yamaha kicked ass last year and they had the best bike on the grid, they worked hard in a few different areas over the winter and made improvements. They have not reinvented the wheel because I can remember going to Sepang before and having a completely new bike with new engine and new chassis and new everything. That cost a lot of money. When you talk about what they brought new this year, it wasn’t that much but all of it is in the right area. As long as you spend the money where you need to it works out
One thing they did really well was building a new engine for the new rule, which means we can only have six motors for the entire season. It meant the engineers at Yamaha had to come up with something more reliable and not only did they manage that but they also made it faster too, which normally doesn’t make sense. I don’t know how but they did it! As far as working with the new rules at the races is concerned, we are always swapping and changing the engines and trying to keep as few miles as possible on them. I have used two in the three rounds so far – one for the races at Losail and Le Mans the other for the race at Jerez. Obviously the guys are working all the time on trying to make the electronics better. We have a good setting that we know works, but we are always trying to improve it and I think that we still have a few more things we need to test before we start running anything new.
The bike has a lot of potential but for various reasons in the first three rounds we haven’t been able to make the most of it. In Qatar I struggled all weekend and I never seemed to get on top of the problems we had. We made the bike a little better for the race and it was certainly more comfortable to ride and that showed in the improved lap times, but it obviously wasn’t enough to get close to that top five. The front grip was great but I was lacking a bit on the rear and I couldn’t get a set-up that pushed the tyre on the ground.
As for Jerez, I think I’ve had one good race there in my entire career and this year wasn’t it! Again I had issues with the rear grip and I couldn’t hold any load on the tyre at full lean angle. That also created some problems with the front-end, so I just struggled with the balance of the bike. It’s the exact same issue that I had in Qatar even though the set-up was quite a bit different.
I was hopeful we would find a solution for Le Mans because I’ve had some of the best races of my career there but last weekend I just didn’t have the confidence. I spent a lot of the race behind Marco Simoncelli and he was able to brake deeper than me. As soon as I’d brake and lean the bike over, I started to have a problem. It is a worry for us but, like I said, we know this bike has potential, I know it inside out so we’ll regroup and try and be much stronger at Mugello.
A lot of people are asking me about Ben Spies and the truth is he has made a very impressive start to his MotoGP career, as I knew he would. It has been a few years since I had a team-mate pushing me this hard but it is healthy competition. The target is to be number one Texan but I’m sure that’s his too so even though we have a great relationship off the bike, whenever it’s race time, it’s go time. After a great start to the year in Qatar Ben is already finding out a few things about the harsh realities of MotoGP but we’ll help each other.
We know the YZR-M1 has potential because Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo are dominating the season on it so far. Everybody knows that I call Vale the GOAT because in my opinion he is the greatest of all time but I have to say Lorenzo has been very impressive. For him to come from where he did at Jerez was pretty incredible. I got behind the Hondas and it was pretty tough so to chase Dani Pedrosa down and ride like he did… hats off to him because he rode brilliantly. With Casey Stoner running into a few problems it looks like it could be a straight fight between those two for the title but it is still very early days.
We are heading into June already but we are still in the springtime of the MotoGP calendar, with fifteen races still to go. Hopefully Ben and I can break up the ‘fantastic four’ soon and get back on the podium because with the Monster Tech 3 Yamaha team behind us and the YZR-M1 underneath us we both have the means to do it.
In Italy we had a pretty good flag to flag race last year. We were back in twelfth and came back to finish sixth. If it was completely dry this year that would be great! I have never been on the podium at Mugello so to do that this year would be fantastic.
