As announced previously, after two years on a Ducati, Jorge Lorenzo will move to Honda for 2019. Prior to his time with Ducati, Lorenzo joined Yamaha in 2008, was second in the MotoGP point race in 2009, and took the title from teammate Valentino Rossi a year later. He was then world champion again in 2012 and '15.
Switching brands has in general not been easy for riders. When Rossi, after two MotoGP championships on Hondas (2002, 2003) switched to Yamaha, the transition was a close-run affair but he managed to put the Yamaha on top in 2004. Yet when he went from Yamaha to Ducati for 2011 and '12, he could not make the transition. Returning to Yamaha in 2013 he apparently needed time to assimilate techniques developed by others in his absence, climbing from fourth in the championship to second in 2014.
The nature of the problem became clearer when Lorenzo, too, went to Ducati in 2017. Lorenzo’s corner-speed style conflicted directly with the Ducati’s weakness in apex speed. Despite continuing effort by Lorenzo to adapt to the bike and Ducati’s work to adapt its machine to him, he did not win a race until this year, after which he declared he would be on a different bike in 2019. The problem is that both riders and bikes are specialized with respect to riding style, making it very difficult for a rider of one style to adapt to a machine evolved for another.
Let’s consider the apparent counter-example of Casey Stoner, who won 10 races and the title in 2007 on Ducati, then was second, fourth, and fourth in successive years as the Ducati became harder to ride (by an ultra-stiff carbon chassis), followed by his switch to Honda. In 2011, he again won 10 races and the title.
Significantly, in this case the difference was not between a corner-speed bike (Yamaha, Suzuki) and a more point-and-shoot bike (Ducati). Stoner’s move was from an understeering, hard-braking, and hard-accelerating Ducati to an understeering, hard-braking, and hard-accelerating Honda that had in mid-2010 been made somewhat easier to control.
I certainly hope that Lorenzo has discovered something within himself in the past 18 months that will allow a corner-speed rider to adapt to an extreme point-and-shoot bike, the Honda. Yet we must recognize that these qualities are built into the bikes; they cannot be converted one into the other by twisting the clickers and altering ride heights. Here is what Cal Crutchlow said about this point this spring at Circuit of The Americas: "You can try to change the style of the bike with settings, but we've done that many times. We've tried things many times on the [Honda] to be able to make the corner more round because we think with the Michelin that's the best way to make the corner—to brake earlier, carry the corner speed, and get out of the corner. But the DNA of the bike is the DNA of the bike, and you always end up coming back to the other way because it's the fastest. And a good rider will always understand what is the fastest way to ride the motorcycle."
Yes, it would be grand to be able to have it all—to brake late and hard, enter the corner decisively, apex at high speed, and then lift and accelerate. But, Crutchlow continued, “[Honda riders] brake so late; some corners we can brake 50 meters later than the other manufacturers and still stop the bike. We can see it on our video. Fifty meters is a lot. We blow the middle of the corner, but we may gain three-tenths in one corner.”
A corner-speed bike’s chassis has considerable lateral flexibility to allow it to remain hooked up even on fairly rough pavement at high lean angle (when the bike’s proper suspension is largely ineffective). A point-and-shoot bike needs greater stiffness to make hard braking stable and to provide the rapid maneuvering required for turning on a shorter radius (Crutchlow referred in the past to this shorter radius as “Honda’s vee-shaped line”). In the days before spec tires, corner-speed riders required stiffer tire carcasses to sustain continuous turning without buckling, while point-and-shoot riders needed a flexible carcass, which could produce a large footprint able to deliver strong acceleration during corner exit.
When Crutchlow made his original transition from World Superbike to MotoGP, he went to Yamaha. As pointed out a few years ago by Bradley Smith, to maximize corner speed the Yamaha has to have designed-in stability that will let it perch on peak side grip all the way around the corner. It is long and low, with highly stable steering.
"I'm from Superbike," Crutchlow said at the time, "so when I got on the Yamaha [in 2011], that's how I tried to ride it. It wouldn't do it! I had to learn to ride it its way." In his 52 starts on the Yamaha Tech3 YZR-M1, Crutchlow achieved six podiums.
This past two years we have seen the hard-charging Andrea Iannone’s efforts to adapt his Ducati-bred point-and-shoot style to the more Yamaha-like Suzuki. After a year-and-a-half, he has finally produced strong results, but the process was rough. How much career time can a top rider afford to gamble on such transitions? Despite his apparent success, he is now on his way to Aprilia.
I suggested at the time of Lorenzo’s “red period” that switching from one riding style to another might in difficulty resemble the well-publicized problem of learning to ride a bicycle with backward steering: It typically takes six months of struggle, and once you’ve learned to ride the backward bike you can no longer ride a normal bicycle; reconversion takes another six months.
Thinking back, we know that, although Colin Edwards Jr. won two World Superbike championships on Honda machines, when he rode the Yamaha M1 in MotoGP 2005–’07, he was never fully able to bring his abilities to bear in that series. His style was Superbike-derived: brake late and hard, get the bike turned early on a tight radius, then lift and accelerate, using the rest of the corner as a dragstrip on which to launch at high exit speed.
Teamed with Rossi in those years, Edwards had to ride a motorcycle being developed for his teammate’s entirely different style, one of braking earlier down to a higher corner speed, which was maintained to the exit. Such a motorcycle would not do the things Edwards could do so well; as noted by Crutchlow, he had to learn to ride the bike its way. In 54 starts, Edwards earned six podiums and was fourth, seventh, and ninth in those championships. This puzzled me until I began to understand how difficult it is for riders to adapt to a motorcycle of conflicting style.
None of this enables us to predict how Jorge Lorenzo will do on the factory Honda next year. It merely suggests a menu of possibility. By that time, Lorenzo will have spent two years adapting his corner-speed style to function on a more point-and-shoot motorcycle. In effect, Ducati has funded his re-education. By the end of this season, his stylistic conversion may or may not be complete. Will he win races? Or will he have to persevere through more ups and downs of the kind he has experienced on the Ducati? We’ll watch the post-Valencia test this coming November with great interest.