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  Ryder Notes: Hope At Last?
  by julian ryder, back home in the uk now
  Thursday, February 07, 2008

  It is now traditional that I fill in the gap between testing and the start of racing for real with a bit of British optimism about the upcoming season. We are not good at this, well the English aren't. Apart from the brief burst of hope provided by our rugby team last year in the world cup our national sporting teams have crashed and burnt in spectacular style. We haven't even made it to this Summer's European football championship, and our cricketers have plummeted from brilliant to also-rans in an amazingly short period of time. The up-coming Olympic Games looks like being embarrassing for our athletes but at least we have a couple of decent boxers (although the best one is Welsh) and a good young tennis player - oh, hang on, he's Scottish.

  So it is with some trepidation that I find myself looking forward to the MotoGP season not least because we have an English rider who shows signs of being able to race with the front men. He is James Toseland, currently better known in the UK for an amazing bit of piano playing on the BBC TV's Sports Review of the Year than he is for his racing. This annual beano has attracted massive audiences for the last 40 years and is the Sports Personality of the Year is the single most prestigious sports award in the UK. James came on stage on his 'Blade then stepped over to the piano and bashed out a stomping blues accompanied by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, no less. The camera cut to last year's SPOTY, Euro three-day event champ Zara Phillips who also happens to be Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II's grand-daughter, grooving along. He immediately went up from ninth in the voting for the award to fourth. That was back in December, now you cannot switch the radio on on a Saturday morning without hearing James, and he sometimes gets to talk about motorcycle racing. For the record, he was well on his way to training as a professional musician when the racing took over.

  Well before James won his first World Superbike title in 2004 a MotoGP team manager asked me if this promising young rider had had the necessary 'reality checks' to make him a candidate for a Grand Prix ride. I was able to tell him that James had a tough childhood laced with personal tragedy, then had to deal with the death of his team-mate Michel Paquet in his first season in the world stage. He also broke both ankles at that Monza meeting; James was 16 years old at the time. Unlike a lot of the young riders my questioner had to deal with, James did indeed know the price of a pint of milk.

  That factory Supersport ride with Honda was false start to JT's career on the world stage, he retreated to the British Superbike Championship and rode the wheels off an out-gunned Honda twin which resulted in a broken thigh. From there on it was Ducati all the way to his first world title in '04 (he was the youngest ever Champion) then a difficult title defence and on to Ten Kate Honda and a second title.
  Now he is a MotoGP rider, moving from a championship where finishing fifth meant he'd had a really bad weekend to a place where he you can do everything right all weekend and end up tenth. However, James is already at home in the Tech 3 Yamaha team, not least because his personal manager Roger Burnett and team boss Herve Poncheral know each other well. Poncheral was deputy manager of the mighty Honda France endurance team when Roger won all three 24-hour races with them in 1989. Toseland's first contact with them came at the Donington Park GP last year, and he is delighted to have another veteran of the endurance days, Guy Coulon, as his race engineer. 'He's forgotten more about motorcycles than I'll ever know,' says James with only a hint of exaggeration. Coulon invented the single-sided swinging arm while with the Elf team and the pneumatic wheelstand that cut pitstop times significantly. In the off-season he used to be found peering at factory Hondas in the middle of the desert during the Paris-Dakar Rally.

  JT's first contact with a MotoGP Yamaha was coloured by the embarrassment of sliding off on the fifth lap of Sepang, but as he later noted Rossi and Pedrosa hit the deck too. As for the differences between the Superbikes he'd been on for seven years and a GP machine, James doesn't see his new problem as much more complex, although 'It is a lot more difficult to get feel due to the overall stiffness.' As for the swap to Michelin: 'Lots of feedback, no problem.' Obviously he is still adapting, or 'learning the capabilites' of his new bike. Carbon brakes mean he is braking twenty metres later than he's used to, but corner speed is still higher and he has to get on the gas earlier. He is also aware of the concentration and attention to detail that is needed. Every aspect of set-up has to be spot-on, he says, because you just know half a second will cover the top ten. After all, there are now 13 world titles in the Yamaha teams and 11 riders on the grid who are able to call themselves World Champions.

  What about electronics, can you really crack the throttle fully open at the apex of a corner and let the computer sort it out? The answer is that of course you could set the electronics to do that, but the result would be a very slow lap. Electronics is just one of the many variables that have to be set up with complete precision if you want to be competitive. The one thing he found easier on a MotoGP bike was fast changes of direction, due to the bike's lighter weight, but overall race distance is much harder on the arms and legs due to greater loads under braking and acceleration.

  It was good to see that James finished his first test well inside the top ten, and quite amazing to see him third fastest in the Phillip Island test (Fiat Yamaha and Dani Pedrosa weren't there but it was still an astonishing performance by a rookie). On a track he knows well he was 'never off the same six inches of tarmac all three days' and when he put a qualifier in was able to concentrate on getting on the gas earlier and harder. That bodes well for the opening race at Qatar, a track James knows as well as most of the field.

  Us Brits have always known James was talented, when we first saw him he was winning the CB500 Cup races by the sort of margins that should have been impossible with a grid of identical machines. His fitness training regime is frightening and he's had all the reality checks a human being should be asked to deal with. What is his expectation for the year after that performance in Australia? 'I'm looking at rostrum places.' For once, this may not be misplaced English optimism.

  ENDS

  ...egy fecske nem csinál nyarat, viszont egy hülye százat csinál...

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