A head that thinks 500 rpm faster

THE TELEMETRY REVEALS ITS TRUE PILOTAGE

  • Only he achieves with his way of driving a step by 10 km / h curve faster.
  • That’s how he wins three horses in the same engines.

ALBERTO GÓMEZ. COWES 10/30/12 – 13:00.
The distance between some pilots and others is enclosed in the skull. It is a nontransferable secret. “A great driver is different from a great champion by his head,” Valentino Rossi said a few years ago. The head is the main engine. The other, with his cylinders, only obeys orders. The gas, the braking, the skidding, are pure abstraction. Behind there is a learning process. For some, the mechanics are simple, intuitive, like the deep talent of Stoner. Others need to internalize and rehearse it again and again.

Márquez is an explosive cocktail. His motorbike instinct is that of a cowboy, riding over the pianos with the whip in his hand, leaning on the asphalt when he needs it, making his motorcycle dance to make it enter the reason of an unimaginable curve. “Until half of last year I did not know how to enjoy the bike.” Now, play on the wire. His aggressiveness is demonized. And it combines it with a vision of the careers of a veteran.

“It’s amazing to me, I never saw anything like it in my life, even when I worked with Gardner or Lawson,” explains Didier Langouet, Suter’s engineer, the brand that has been proclaimed champion for the first time in Moto2. His way of feeling the bike is prodigious at his age. “He is very young and manages to understand things and transmit them as I have not seen anyone”, adds the coach, who does not think it is possible to match Marc and Rossi “because it is difficult to compare drivers.” They are different: Vale likes the show and Marc does not it’s like that “, but he does say that technically, Marc may be better than the Italian:” For me, Marc is more efficient as a driver “.

ASPAR
“It’s not that his motorcycle accelerates more, he accelerates more and before”

Patrick Primmer, an Australian who works for Öhlins, brand of springs and shock absorbers, and that unfolds between the box of Lorenzo and Marc, did not give credit the first time he met him. “There are pilots who need years to transmit what feels on the bike and he, the first day, already left me stunned”. In addition to his fluency to relate with fidelity what he felt in English, the language with which he communicates with Santi Hernández, his chief mechanic since 2011.

For this mechanic, who worked for pilots such as Crivillé, Rossi or Gibernau, the most striking is what the eye does not see. “Telemetry says a lot about Marc. It’s surprising to see how he drives, how fast he accelerates, how he goes around the curve, and how surprised he is to adapt his driving to the problems of the bike and how he supplements them”, reveals Hernández. He works hard on a key aspect: “He focuses where he knows that, because of his driving, he can not improve the time, not many pilots are trained.”

Questioned in some forums that argue that, although the Moto2-Honda engines are all the same, something they hide in the team, Marquez never paid attention to the speculations. Neither some of its rivals. Aspar, former driver and manager of a team in Moto2 with two Suter, reveals the magic potion of Márquez. “Comparing our telemetry with yours is amazing what you see,” he says.

THE DATA
35 seconds faster the Indianapolis race of 2012 than the 2011.

And what is discovered is a particular style that encloses horsepower not under the fairing but on its wrist. “It has a sensational curve, about 8 or 10 km / h faster than anyone, that allows you to have two or three horses in your hand when accelerating because these bikes run all the same,” he says.

Santi corroborates this information. “When you make a fast turnaround, the engine speed is high and the acceleration is higher, with these very standard engines, the lower you go, the harder it is to get the best torque from the engine,” explains his mechanic, basing his technique on a good placement of the bike on braking, letting it run afterwards.

Aspar believes that, the difference between Marc and the others in the engine regime is 500 rpm. “It is not that his engine accelerates more, it is that he accelerates more and much earlier”, confirms. This technique has its roots in the experience of 2011. “From this year to the past we have seen in the computer that it passes about 5 km / h faster on the curve, the tires have changed a little and the chassis, but it always does”, says Hernandez, who has seen a Marc “more mature.” At first he took the bike to him and now he takes the bike. As an example, Indianapolis. “The race was 35 seconds faster, almost a second and a half faster per lap.

Marca.com