Rossi adapting to Desmosedici
Added on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 by Carole Nash Editor
Rossi adapting to Desmosedici
Valentino Rossi has admitted that he has had to adapt his riding style to the new Ducati as time is running out to get the bike to work to his liking.
Rossi will ride the notoriously difficult Ducati Desmosedici in 2011 after moving from Yamaha but has seen pre-season testing with his new team hampered by a long-term shoulder problem. That has left Ducati engineers struggling to adapt the bike to Rossi’s riding style, forcing the Italian to change the way that he rides ahead of the start of the new season next weekend.
“This bike must be ridden mostly through oversteer, in the sense that, in order to make it turn, you need to get the rear to slide a lot,” the former World Champion told Italian magazine, Motosprint.
“In this respect the Ducati is very different from the Yamaha. But this is a manoeuvre I do to try to solve the problems we have now: in my opinion, with time, we’ll be able to improve the situation a lot.
“[Turning is] the thing we lack the most. But at the moment the only way to handle this bike is to adapt to that way of riding, it’s the bike’s DNA.”
But Rossi does believe that some progress can be made with set-up changes, with a few electronics tweaks likely to make him much more comfortable on the bike.
“There are some areas where we have pinpointed the problems, so we can solve them quickly,” said Rossi. “I’m talking about the bike’s behaviour when accelerating, the engine’s power curve, traction control, and all the electronic controls.
“I’m confident we’ll soon see improvements on these issues because the Ducati technicians are very good and I think I’ve given them precise indications.
“As for the rest, the problem is that we lack handling. We need to try to make this bike turn better: at the moment the Desmosedici has a lot of understeer.
“It’s up to me to adapt to the bike – also because we have little time at our disposal to do major changes,” he said. But while I adapt, we’ll carry on working to improve the bike.
“That doesn’t mean that I don’t think we can make it,” he said. “I won’t ever give up, and neither will my team and certainly neither will Ducati.
“We have many ideas, we just need time to work. I’m curious to see what this bike feels like on other tracks, starting from Qatar, and with other temperatures.”
