MICHELIN REVEALS MotoGP’s MOST COLORFUL TIRES Michelin got the season-ending Valencia GP off to a great start on Thursday night, October 26, with a party to mark the end of MotoGP’s 990cc era. During the event Michelin unveiled special multicolored display tires bearing the racing number and national flag of each of the company’s ten MotoGP riders, who all attended the party. The tires (not for track use, of course) illustrated two points: Michelin’s mastery of multi-compound technology and its policy of tailor-making tires to suit each of its MotoGP riders. The tires were made with different colored layers of rubber, which were then hand cut to form the flags and numbers. For example, the tire made for Valentino Rossi (Camel Yamaha Team YZR-M1-Michelin) featured the Italian tricolor and Rossi’s famous number 46, the tricolor formed out of three different compounds in green, white and red rubber. “These tires show how well we have mastered multi-compound technology because we can now use many different compounds in one tire,” explained Nicolas Goubert, Michelin’s outgoing director of motorcycle racing. “We started using 2-Compound Technology in 1994 and we now sell the Power Race and Pilot Power 2CT tires designed for street use. This is always our aim – to develop technology in MotoGP which we then make available to everyone. Our other message with these special tires is to emphasize how we tailor tires to suit the riding style of each of our riders. Riding style has a lot of effect on tire choice, much more so than in car racing.” The recent Portuguese GP victory of Toni Elias (Fortuna Honda RC211V-Michelin) proves the importance of Michelin’s tailor-made service. “I spoke to Nicolas after the Australian GP and asked for some help,” revealed Elias. “I told him I needed softer carcass rear tires, so he made a special program for me, bringing softer tires to Estoril. They helped me a lot, I won the race!” Nicolas Goubert also used the Valencia event to introduce his successor Jean-Philippe Weber and to review five MotoGP World Championships, all of them won by Michelin riders. “We are really proud to have dominated the five years of 990cc MotoGP the same way we used to dominate 500 GPs,” he said. “Not only has the first five years of four-stroke GP racing presented us with great technical challenges, it has also been a big challenge to stay ahead of our competitors. That is why we go racing – to fight our rivals on the track, hopefully to beat them, and to make better tires for the end user.”