Zanimljivi delovi iz Benovog intervjua...
Crash.net: What was your perspective on last season, how do you rationalise that?
Ben Spies:
You don't really. I've never had a season like that before, we had a lot of mechanicals and problems and I also made some mistakes. It was just basically a really bad season and it shows how much the press and paddock's opinion can change in one year. If you can bounce back the next season it just automatically fixes everything though.
It shows who the real people are in the press and amongst the fans. In motorcycle racing it seems that you're only as good as your last race which doesn't say a lot for the fans of the people who are riding. I found it quite funny, but unfortunately that's the truth of it.
Usually I don't pay much attention to what people say online because they need stories to write about to get attention, but as regards what's happening behind the scenes with the rider and the bike, more often than not the fans are not getting the true story anyway because the factories won't allow it to be told.
Most of the time people who don't have something good to say are people who might not know too much or a kid who's in their mom's basement on the computer whereas people who come to races tend to know a little better, I've been racing long enough to know when something's right or not.
Crash.net:
Do you think you had similar equipment at Yamaha to Jorge's?
Ben Spies:
Errm, no. It's one of those things that you can never be sure about, but I just know that at the end of the day the chassis and the engine weren't the same, even at the beginning of the year and there were a couple of engine upgrades during the year that we never got. It's hard to know what was what and what was being tested on my bike, the equipment was not quite the same though.
Crash.net:
So you were fighting with lesser equipment at the end?
Ben Spies:
Yeah.
Crash.net:
An opinion among fans is that too many electronics are killing racing, where do you stand on that?
Ben Spies:
For me the easiest way to fix the racing and to make it closer is the level of the tyres. In WSBK BMW, Kawasaki, Aprilia and Honda can all win because the level of the tyre is much lower. Now you have to build a bike in MotoGP to reach the potential of the tyre and if you lower the tyre performance by 30% every manufacturer would be able to reach its potential. To cheapen things up, make things easier and make the racing closer they just need to make a tyre that will go the race distance which has less grip.
If you want closer racing, then that's probably the easiest way. Also the manufacturers wouldn't need to spend so much money on development and that would mean that we see more bikes on the grid rather than the CRT ones.
I'm not for or against CRT, they make up the grid but it is basically another class and by changing a couple of things around it would cost the factories less money to race and they would be able to afford to put more bikes on the grid.(http://www.crash.net...spies_-_qa.html)
