| Category: Streetbike News |
Source Credit: | |
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| MotoGP: Friendly Fire |
| How Honda HRC Failed Miserably in Portugal |
| Monday, Oct 16, 2006 | |
| Http://www.speedtv.com |
| Publication: Speed Channel |
| Edition: Monday, October 16, 2006 |
| Columnist: Dennis Noyes |
| Copyright Info: 2006 SPEED Channel | | |
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Dani Pedrosa sizing up Nicky Hayden moments before he crashed and
took out the (now former) world title leader (Photo: Getty Images)
Honda HRC executives seemed almost proud to assure inquiring journalists prior to the Portuguese Grand Prix at the roller-coaster Estoril circuit that there would be no team orders, no attempt on the part of HRC to ensure that 2006 Rookie of the Year Dani Pedrosa gave support to his teammate and championship leader Nicky Hayden.
But I, and many other long-time Grand Prix journalists, simply assumed that was a public statement and that the reality would be different, that someone of authority would put an hand on Dani’s shoulder and remind him that he worked for Honda and that many millions had been spent to try and win back from Yamaha and Valentino Rossi the World MotoGP title. Instead of backing off and following Hayden, and even protecting him from Edwards if both Nicky and Dani were able to pass the Texan, Dani took out his own teammate…a “friendly fire” incident.
What happened on the track must have seemed absolutely incomprehensible to TV viewers around the world. And I can only imagine that team owners from professional championships like NASCAR and F1 must still be laughing at the ludicrous spectacle of Pedrosa out of control up the inside, bouncing off the curb, losing the front and torpedoing his teammate.
I was not really that surprised. I actually was on the outside of that tight turn 6 and when I saw Nicky make a hard pass up the inside of Dani to move into third at that very corner the lap before, I knew that the Spaniard would be furious. Dani Pedrosa is a three-time world champion with very thin skin when it comes to being passed, especially when the pass is aggressive.
Going back to his final year in 250, I recall that his archrival Jorge Lorenzo made several passes up the inside of Dani at the Italian Grand Prix at Mugello. Dani eventually cleared off and won on the final laps. However, when I wrote in my Motociclismo column that Lorenzo and passed Pedrosa “more times in a single race than his other rivals had passed him all season” (only a slight exaggeration), Dani’s manager and mentor Alberto Puig complained, first to my editor, which I resented, and later to me, which I welcomed as an opportunity to understand a bit more about the closed, tight Puig-Pedrosa relationship.
I could not really understand Puig’s (really, it turned out, Dani’s) objections since what I wrote was something any observer would have seen. What I gradually understood was that Alberto considered any comparison between Lorenzo (who is now on the verge of winning the World 250 title) and Dani almost as blasphemy.
The entourage that shields this very talented rider is not large but it is very protective. And Dani seems to have two public personalities: one, cold, reserved, grim, that he shows to the Spanish press, and another, pleasant, open, smiling and almost chatty that he brings forward with the English-speaking press. In the environment of MotoGP I am a Spanish journalist and I frankly find Dani impenetrable and distant, but what riders say is really a lot less important than how they ride and how they are managed.
Dani rides very well, though he is not good yet in the wet and makes mistakes often on the brakes at the end of long straights. This is normal for a rider coming from 100 HP 250s to 250 HP 990s. The problem is that Dani has never before been in a position where his teammate is out-performing him in the points table. The whole concept of “team orders” is distasteful and foreign to him, I imagine, but, more importantly, none of the authority figures surrounding him seem to have told him that this is not just about him.
Furthermore, the marketing people from Repsol YPF, the Spanish-Argentine petroleum and natural gas company, seem not to care at all what Hayden does. I have been told by Repsol insiders that “Dani is why we are here.” | | | |
