[kropotkin thinks...] - Pete Benson Interview - Dovizioso's Crew Chief Talks Tires, T

[Ninjette Newsbot]

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As regular readers of MotoGPMatters.com may well be aware, we are fascinated by the impact of rule changes on motorcycle racing, and how the engineers try to work around them. So we were fortunate enough to spend 10 minutes with Andrea Dovizioso's crew chief Pete Benson, to ask him a few questions about how the new tire rule is working. But we got a bit sidetracked, and ended up talking about the impact of all sorts of rule changes.

MGPM: You've gone from a Kentuckian to an Italian, how's the communication with Andrea Dovizioso, do you speak Italian?

PB: No, I don't speak Italian, Andrea speaks English. His English is very good, so the communication is easy.

MGPM: Is he easy to work with?

Yeah, basically. Like all riders, he knows what he wants and expects to get it, which is normal. Once we sort of worked out what we both expected of each other and how to go about it, it's all sort of fallen into place very nicely. It's pretty good.

MGPM: About the single tire rule, and how it's affected your way of working, are you spending more time on setup now because you can't just throw tires at the bike?

Yeah, that's a lot of it. Obviously you've only got two tires to choose from and everyone's got the same tires, so you just try to get more out of the bike. You've got a basic setup from previous years, and so you kind of know what you want to do once you get to each track, and you just fine tune it. So now, you go out and test your two tires, and see which one you think is going to be the race tire, and then just work on fine tuning the thing from there. Instead of going "well, maybe we've got another tire that might work better", you just go "these are the two tires we've got, this one's the race tire, and this one we might be able to get a better lap on". So we're just trying to make the bike a little bit better.

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