DANI PEDROSA
The diminutive Spaniard once shied away from a fight, but no longer, as he showed at Misano 2016 and Aragon 2015
“I prefer to ride on my own but now I feel more prepared when I have to battle. During my first few years in MotoGP I preferred far more to be alone, but now I’m more flexible to it, I’m happy to battle.
“There are two ways to win a race and they give you different sensations. When you win by a good margin, you feel dominant because you are calm and in control of the race. Having that domination helps you build more confidence. The other way, when you win at the last corner, is adrenaline and excitement at the maximum! Even when you are accelerating towards the finish line you dare not look back and you are thinking, is he there? Is he going to come out of my draft and beat me to the line?
“My favourite overtake was like that, when I battled for the win with Jorge at Brno in 2012. He came past on the outside into the final esses, then I went inside. It was a very important victory because we were also fighting for the championship.
“Winning at the edge like that is more exciting and the energy you feel back from the pit and from the fans is massive. To beat everyone by 20 seconds is more boring but it would give me more pleasure.
“My win at Misano this year felt very nice because I had to make up a lot of ground and pass all the top riders. It was a dream race, passing Marc and everyone. Some people said my overtake on Valentino was too close, but more or less Valentino invented this kind of overtake!
“For sure, one reason for the battles is that the bikes are so similar now and the electronics make everyone exit corners at the same speed. When you exit a corner the chap in front opens the throttle earlier than you, so you can’t catch him. Some years ago, this wasn’t so much the case, because if you were riding well you could open the throttle earlier than the chap in front.
“That’s why most of the overtaking is done on the brakes and into the turn: boom! But also you can make an overtake through a combination of corners when you prepare better and get better drive out of the first part of a sequence.
“Control tyres also make it harder to overtake because they narrow the window. But I do think it’s much better to have everyone on the same tyres because then you can focus on your bike and on your riding.
“Furthermore, there’s more fighting now because everyone is going faster, so the gap between the blokes at the front and those nearer the back is smaller. You can fight in a similar way with the top chaps and the middle-of-the-pack chaps because now everyone has a similar way of using the tyres, the brakes and the throttle. A few years ago, you might have two chaps fighting at the end of a race and there might be some controversy. Now you can find controversy anywhere in the race.
“I grew up watching Rainey and Schwantz have some amazing races. I watched them thousands of times as a kid and they were my inspiration. I was more in love with Rainey, with his way of pushing from the start with cold tyres, which is what I did it early in my career. Even now, if I see a clip I’m hypnotized!”