starts out as a belly button.....everyones got one, turns into a bad smell......hangs around cant get rid.:wink:
well, that got everyone's attention! to what i understood, the only thing the petetion petitions is that Ducati should race Motogp the ducati way and not be led astray by doing what everyone does : build some sort of a Honyamati. Personally i agree. It wil be impossible for them to beat honda and Yamaha at their own game. And that is exactly waht they have been trying in the VR period... this petition says : no more of this. the call for doing it right or to get out and focus on WSBK is not new and is far from unreasonable. The chance of being ridculed as a brand is to real i see no suggestion whatever that there is doubt on the commitment or passion about Ducati or Racing.. but im not an anglish native speaker..
I think Ducati should be left to get on with what they do best, engineering, in whatever way they deem appropriate. The punters will just have to lump it until they eventually come up with the goods, which one day they surely will. In my view the petitioners should take their snivelling little whinge and shove it up their collective jacksie.
Not wishing to drag this too far off topic, but..... With the state of the education system I'm not sure you can state categorically that he/she is not a native English speaker :smile:
Progress is never easy, especially for a small company, and you can be sure the people involved in the project are working flat out (within budget constraints) to make the bike better. The company must progress in order to stay in the game. To turn around as a supposed fan and say these people are failing and should go back to old designs and old ways is highly insulting to everyone involved in the project. And what's all this bollocks about copying? If Ducati were copying other teams they'd be closer to the podium than they are now. What this relatively small team has done so far in motogp against the might of Japan is pretty bloody special, but nobody gets it spot on first time every time. The bike will evolve, and eventually win, but it's a hard climb. The true Ducatisti are the ones who keep the faith.
we all keep the faith. But in stormy weather, everyone get's vocal and most of the 'unrest' comes from have the feeling that noone has a clue where to go next. Many would have preferred them to continue working in the carb non frame and suffer longer than to follow VR and co into alubeam land where they got lost.. and sorry but alubeam is the only place Duc knows 0% about... they never made one .. that is HonYam territory.. Hon nor Yam have to call Suter and co to make them a frame! Not being able to make your own frames , now isn't that an unsettling thought for a manufacturer of sportbikes? Not copy? ok but by going there they did abandon their own background to go Jap. Just to find out that they don't get the 'copy' right.. I said it before : Yam and Hon are at wizzardry level after 50 years of experience and honing those skills... no one will ever get up to that point coming from behind.. the real pain could come from diverting know how , skill and funding from wsbk. The place D can only loose.. and going on developping the non frame frame can contribute to wsbk as the pani has something similar... coming up with a superduper alubeam frame will bring nothing to wsbk and if people almost wrecked the company by not buying a 999 because of the missing SSSA, wait till they announce a aluframe...
i rest my case.. it took decades to learn this magic. Now they do have this knowhow and Ducati is still reading the intro of the book: Aluframes for Dummies. So going that route is the only place not to go. there are lots of confirmations to be gotten, the long list of tries form all non Honda and/or Yamaha competitors.. Suzuki dropped out after Schwantz en never recovered. Kawasaki even worse. Never even got close.. Kenny rodgers KR series: nice try.... even the sattelite teams can't get near.. and every quid thrown at a MeToo effort takes them further away from what they are: uncanningly good at coming up with new views and tech.. but hey , this is the electronic eq to a pub bar... and there everyone knows best ! especially those who don't know sh..it, including myself :biggrin:
no..not at all .. but i think they gave up one the nonframe frame way too early .. they lost 2 years development of this route by VR insisiting on having a YAMATI. Look how happy is, now he's back there.. And that DUC should not be in GP just to find out that the only thing they can win on is a yamhon ducalike... if this should all be true, then what is the point of staying in motogp? the only place where they will put the nonframe to use is wsbk.. and now they're not even doing that themselves.. they're all figuring out how to make an alubeam... and neglect whet they just spent years developping and what their customers are buying.. and are all waiting to see what it does in WSBK... this after being spoiled rotten when it cames to succes for over a qquarter century: 851/888/916/996/998/999/1098/1198 and now the 1199 being something completely new.. that in a time when competition in wsbk has never been fiercer.. It's like Heston Blumenthal spending 90% of his R&D budget on learning how to make sushi and not bother to show up in his F Duck and perhaps this is what the petition is all about..
the way I see it is ,they've tried trellis and won a world championship on it so all well and done. However bounderies need to be pushed and explored so they should revert to the carbon monocoque, Ducati have won numerous SBK's with trellis proving that for a road based series it works, fair play to them for going carbon with the 1199,which they WILL win races with and before to long a championship. The differing factors in GP racing must be the added 30-40 hp, control tyres and carbon braking , if they reverted to the monocoque/ they would eventually suss it out , the trouble being GP's are a shop window ,maybe not for selling bikes but as a brand credibility issue, Ducati know this and have been under pressure from themselves and I'd say to a lesser extent their sponsors and fans but mostly from the media's unrelenting obession at pointing out the fact at every opportunity . Maybe pulling out for a while wouldn't be a bad thing it doesn't seem to have bothered Suzuki or Kawasaki . At the end of the day the road bike racing is more relevent to me, that's how I get my taste of Ducati,riding an affordable dumbed down version of a competitive race series, does it for me all day long. Hubba.
