qatar fp

On occasion? Saying he had that Yam covered on speed is a huge
understatement and I think it's fairly safe to say the "Stones were better
too...

 

Sorry if I'm quibbling, but I was really asking the question of how
the teams would try to maximise their strategies given the very
different lap time/straight speed compromises we saw earlier on. I
wasn't claiming that they would be able to do so, but did discuss
several plausible (to me at least) scenarios. It's a given that all
teams will try to maximise their potential result given what they know
after practice and qualifying. But that doesn't mean that I think all
of them had the possibility of winning.

I think we saw those trade-offs go both ways. Rossi beat Pedrosa
soundly because even though Pedrosa could scoot past on the straight,
Rossi had the much better bike under braking. So much so, that it
looked to me like Pedrosa was hardly trying at the corners. But it
looked like DP used up his tyres. So he must have been trying hard at
least somewhere on the track.

At the time I posted the comment, I didn't expect Stoner to be able to
match Rossi for overall lap time. I still didn't, even after the
qualifying when they were all but equal. Even during the race I was
sort of expecting Stoner's tyres to start to fade sometime during the
race. Once it was revealed that Stoner still had something left at the
end, more so than Rossi, it was all over. So in the end, Ducati and
Stoner didn't need to pull anything out of the strategic bag, Rossi
had nothing to pull out, and neither did Pedrosa.

 

Whatever happened, the same thing appears to happen to him almost
EVERY race.

-Dirt-

 

Yeah, you gotta figure he went from Dunlops to Michelins and it took him a
while to get comfortable, he may have thought another switch might not have
been worth it, OR he's just gonna be a Honda guy no matter what and take
what they give. As close as he seems to play his cards and not really talk
we probably won't know until he either jumps ship, or retires..

Even though Honda has a history of getting in and out, sometimes in a big
way, I still get the feeling there's been a fundamental shift in their
thinking since the old boy passed. Maybe they're just playing the rules and
sponsors, but knowing what a wet dream it has always been for them to have a
Nip champ it's hard not to think it's something deeper, if not dark and
deeper...