With just one race to go in the 2012 MotoGp world championship it’s probably an appropriate to review the Ducati/Rossi experiment. Since Vale went to Ducati at the end of the 2010 season we have been underwhelmed with the performance, or lack of it, from the once-mighty Italian machine. Here are the stats.
2011. 17 starts. 1x3rd place, 139 points for Rossi, 7th place in the championship.
2012. 17 starts. 2x2nd places, 157 points, 6th place in the championship.
Many riders would be delighted to have that on their CV but, of course, for the 9 times world champion, the statistics are a damning indictment of how woefully inadequate the Ducati has been.
In qualifying, Vale has mostly been between 1.5 to 2 seconds slower than whoever took pole and his placings in the races have mostly been around 6th or 7th and usually anything between 20 and 30 seconds behind the race winner.
Summing it up at the press conference last weekend, Rossi basically said that there has been no noticeable improvement in the bike since he did the very first test for Ducati at Valencia after the last Grand Prix of the season in 2010.
How have the mighty fallen. It remains to be seen how much this disastrous experiment has played on his psyche once he returns to Yamaha. One hopes that he bounces back and regains both his form and his impish demeanour. With the departure of Casey Stoner from the ranks at the end of this year, the grid and the sport certainly needs some character and life to relieve the tedium of boringly efficient Spanish riders.
In other Ducati news, the announcement during the week that Ducati Corse (the factory) and Althea Ducati (the factory-supported race team) have parted company. Of course, since we are in the middle of one of Ducati’s “We can’t get the organisers to bend the rules in our favour enough so we’re taking our bat and ball and going home” periods, everybody knows that Althea really IS the factory team in everything but name.
HOWEVER, this year has been the first year in which Ducati have not been a real contender and the defending champion, Carlos Checa, barely got a mention on the boards. “See,” says Ducati, “We told you that the regulations don’t favour us.” Well, that’s not strictly true, either. Ducati’s lack of thrust this year comes more from a staggering leap in form by the BMW team and the technical excellence of the Aprilia. Both of these marques have won IN SPITE OF rather than because of the technical regulations at the moment.
The Ducati faithful have been hanging in, hoping that the Panigale will be their saviour. Changes to regulations for 2013 have certainly favoured Ducati again, especially in terms of vehicle weights, but we shoudn’t be surprised about that as it has ever been thus. BUT, the whisper out of Italy is that the Panigale has been a big disappointment in testing with the ultra-oversquare engine proving to be a big handful, missing the mid-range drive that has always been a Ducati hallmark and, worst of all, showing an alarming lack of responsiveness to tuning. It is said that the bike is already about as powerful as it can be made within the current configuration. No amount of fiddling seems to be able to liberate from the motor the sort of horsepower figures that would be needed in order for it to challenge BMW, Aprilia and Honda.
It seems that the Panigale might not be the weapon everyone was hoping it would be. But the situation is complicated (isn’t it always) because it seems that Althea has split from Ducati, but Carlos Checa hasn’t. Eh? What does that mean? Well, it emerges that Althea was getting their bikes from Ducati but the rider was being paid by Ducati Corse, making him a FACTORY rider all along. Interesting. Hot on the heels of Althea’s announcement came a press release from the factory confirming the split but stating that Ducati WOULD be running the team next year and that Checa would be the rider.
With the 2014 WSBK regulations looking like neutering the superbikes and relegating them to quasi-Superstock bikes, Ducati may well hang in their with the Panigale and Checa for 2013 and hope that the regulation change will bring the field back to them come 2014.
Either way, it looks like we will be seeing red for some time to come.