The ‘Kentucky Kid’ is now the 2006 MotoGP World Champion. Nicky Hayden has taken on the best riders in the world and triumphed in what has been a gruelling 17-race season spanning the globe – the toughest task in motorcycle racing.
But here at Valencia, Spain the 26-year-old has achieved his life ambition and taken the greatest prize in two-wheel racing.
At the end of an emotional day Nicky said. “When you dedicate your life to something and the dream comes true it feels so good. This is a proud day for me, the team and my family. I want to thank everybody back home and I hope they’re partying back there in Owensboro. When I went down at the beginning of the Estoril race I thought the dream was over but I just didn’t give up. Anything can happen in racing and you just keep fighting until the end. I just believe good things happen to good people and this is a great day for me. I swear on the warm-up lap this morning I was riding round in front of a full house here and I had tears in my eyes because I knew this was the chance of a lifetime and I had to go for it. I’ve felt all year that this was my year – even at Estoril when Elias beat Rossi I believed it. I knew that, win or lose, I was going to sleep well tonight because I was gonna give it my all today.
Satoru Horiike, Managing Director of HRC, was quick to praise Nicky he said. “First of all I wish to congratulate Nicky and thank him for bringing the title back to Honda. He rode a good clever race today. I also have to thank Dani because he also did a good job for us today. During the season we had to put in a great effort and had to cope with some problems with the clutch but finally Nicky made it.”
Nicky’s two wins and 10 podiums, combined with his 16/17 points scoring finishes have made him the first American rider since Kenny Roberts JR in 2000 to lift the biggest prize in bikesport.
Nicky’s consistency has been his greatest strength this year. Even when the Repsol Team has struggled to adapt his development Honda RC211V to a certain track, his sheer grit and refusal to yield to circumstance has ensured he has scored points when a lesser rider might have crumbled.
Nicky’s competitive urge and the huge amount of experience he has gained over four seasons of premier class racing have finally come together to give the bike-crazy Hayden family it’s first World Champion.
For a kid who started riding when he was three and was telling his dad Earl he wanted to be a World Champion when he was five – this first World crown is the culmination of years of hard graft learning the craft of Grand Prix motorcycle racing.
Nicky’s dirt-riding skills gave him a head start over most of his rivals when he graduated to riding the big 990cc four-strokes and it was no surprise then that he secured the Rookie Of The Year title in 2003.
But further success then seemed a long time coming. His 2004 season was blighted by injury and it wasn’t until he won his ‘home’ race at Laguna Seca in mid-2005 that belief started to course through his veins. Nicky finished 2005 with four consecutive podium finishes and this was a pattern he would continue in 2006.
Hayden scored four top three finishes in Spain, Qatar, Turkey and China, then dropped to a fifth in France before regaining momentum with wins the Netherlands and again at Laguna Seca. But then success tailed off with a ninth in the Czech Republic, fourth in Malaysia and two fifth places in Australia and Japan.
He had to dig deep to get his title-winning season back on course with just two rounds to go and with only a 12-point lead over his nearest rival Rossi. But when he needed a big performance, he found it when it mattered most…
To dethrone a multiple MotoGP title winner in Rossi is a towering achievement and to do it while developing a second generation RCV machine for Honda puts Hayden’s 2006 performance among the best yet seen in the four-stroke era. This was one of the closest title contests in years with an ebb and flow to it that has gripped race fans for seven tense months.
Nicky is no stranger to winning, but now he has a World title to add to a string of American Championships. It’s taken this former US flat-tracker four years to fulfil a dream, and this success is without doubt the sweetest yet tasted for Nicky.
The approachable, amiable and supremely able rider formerly known as ‘Mr Dirt’ for his success on the cinders can now formally call himself ‘Mr MotoGP 2006’.
An ill-fated '06 season for Rossi - A year he'd rather forget...
The first sign of trouble was anything but subtle. A strip of rubber peeled off the left side of the rear Michelin on Valentino Rossi's Yamaha late in the Red Bull USGP. On the predominantly left-handed Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca circuit, the loss of left-side traction meant lap times would soar. Adding to his tire woes was a failure in his Yamaha M1's cooling system that led to the 990cc engine losing power and spewing clouds of smoke from its exhaust. Eventually, Rossi began a gradual retreat from a threatening third place to his retirement from the race less than two laps from the end. Up to that point, Rossi's season had already gone up in smoke, his worst ever year in Grand Prix racing seeming never to end.
"The situation is very difficult, and today could not have been worse," he said after the race was over. "All weekend we've struggled, and we didn't find the right way to go with the setting of the bike. In the race I started to lose all grip when the problem with the tire began, and then when I slowed, the problem with the cooling system arrived, so that was it. I saw the smoke and I knew I had to stop."
Rossi began his summer break in an uncharacteristic fourth place, 51 points down from Nicky Hayden, with Dani Pedrosa and Marco Melandri in between. In his tenure of four MotoGP world championships, along with one 250cc and one 125cc title, he'd never been that far down in the standings that late in the season.
"I don't know what to say about the championship, to be honest; we only have six races left, which is maybe not enough to make up the difference, but anyway, I want to try to have some fun and win as much as possible."
The deficit Rossi found himself in at Laguna Seca wasn't entirely his fault. He'd been knocked down by Toni Elias in the first corner of the first race of the season in Jerez, Spain. He'd had a front tire fail in China, something Michelin couldn't remember ever seeing before. An engine expired in France, while he was leading on lap 21 of 28. At the Dutch TT in Assen, he suffered hairline fractures to his right wrist and left ankle, along with contusions on his chest and right elbow in a nasty practice spill; nonetheless, he managed to finish eighth and salvage some points. Following Assen came a second place in Donington and a win in Germany, his fourth of the year to Hayden's one. Yet despite Hayden's second victory in Monterey, Laguna Seca reversed Rossi's momentum in a strange way. And he found it liberating.
"I think I am happy because from now to the end, for the first time, I don't race with the pressure of the championship, because with a 51-point gap it is very difficult," related the Italian. How could the previously omnipotent Rossi find himself in this position?
Jeremy Burgess, Rossi's crew chief, is widely regarded as the most successful premier-class crew chief of all time, with 11 world titles to his credit through three different riders. Burgess stated the team had had "great success in all of our testing, but then some quite serious problems raised their heads in Jerez," at a preseason test. "And these problems had to be solved from perhaps the lead rider down." The issue was with the chassis, specifically the front end. The '06 M1 chassis had the engine moved farther back, with the bike having a more centralized overall mass. The result was front-end chatter that became magnified with qualifying tires.
"We were pretty much on top of everything going through the...preseason testing; we were not at all in any sort of [trouble]," Burgess recalled. "We had a minimal amount of chattering [during testing] in Qatar and also Malaysia. But nothing that gave me or Yamaha any areas of major concern. That was then, of course. In hindsight, we might say, 'Shit, perhaps if we'd have been more aware.'" After thousands of kilometers of testing on three continents, why did the problem show up at the Jerez season opener?
"Good question. I have no idea," Burgess answered. "If I knew, I would certainly be more aware with experience that what's good in Malaysia may not be good in Jerez. It's one of those things [where we felt that] if it's not broke, don't try to fix it. Perhaps this is something we should learn from."
"It's two different problems," Rossi said after qualifying sixth in the second race of the year in Qatar. "Now we need to find which problem gives the chatter. We need to understand why every problem we have with our bike arrives the chattering. Extra grip and more corner speed equals vibration. Tire grip goes down and more sliding with less weight on the front vibration. Two different things, but at the end it's the same problem."
Yet Rossi surprisingly ended up winning the race. "I start with the chattering, and when I start to slide the chattering disappear and I was able to win. With the qualification tire, disaster, disaster," he said.
Valentino Rossi's crew chief Jeremy Burgess
Despite that victory, "We sort of struggled early in the season with Valentino up until Le Mans," remembered Burgess, when Yamaha delivered a revised chassis in France. The frame was similar to the '05 model and meant to cure the chattering. Burgess also pointed out that the newest-generation Michelin tires didn't suit the Yamaha. This is something of a seasonal occurrence; in 2004, the Honda riders complained that Michelin's new front tire upset the handling of the RC211V while favoring the Yamaha.
"The combination of our chassis problems-we couldn't get the best out of the Michelin tires, of course, because we had issues," Burgess said. "And when you're trying to change them to help you...in the end, actually we were just working against each other, in a sense."
Rossi suffered a DNF in France when his M1's engine expired, but he rebounded from that catastrophe to win three of the next five races. Then came the Laguna Seca DNF. The final six races would be a second season, a chance at redemption.
"Yes, it's true," Rossi said of the time after the USGP. "When you start after a lot of victories and a lot of titles in a row, is possible have some period not at the maximum. And when you don't have the period at the maximum, arrive also the unlucky. This period came for a lot of different factors, starting from the chattering at the beginning of the season. In Laguna, we touch the bottom with a very bad weekend, not just the race. Where we always fight with the bike, but we never understand why. But from that moment I think everybody focus better. This black period is just for two or three days. After I come back and I say, 'Anyway, we have a lot of races and is not impossible.'"
Even though Rossi was 51 points behind, he was still the rider Hayden feared most. "I've seen how much fight he's got and grit and how much he hates losing. I knew he was going to answer the bell and do something," Hayden said. "I've said I always thought Rossi was going to be bigger over 17 races. Even when he was that far behind, I knew he would be."
The front-end chattering problems that surfaced at the opening round of the season bedeviled the Yamaha team.
The summer break following Laguna was crucial. It gave Yamaha time to regroup, to find a solution to the chattering problem. When they showed up in Brno to begin the final stretch of six races, Hayden saw a different rider.
"Definitely after the summer break, he was a lot stronger," Hayden recalled. "And also once they got the bike working on qualifying tires, it made him even stronger. Give Yamaha some credit. They didn't pack it in and start working on the 800. They didn't take summer holidays. They stayed and worked. Give credit where credit's due. They did a lot of work to come back and make it hard on us."
Working in concert with Yamaha was Michelin. Stung by the early-season criticism and facing an increasingly serious assault by Bridgestone, the company rebounded. "Brno was a big, big step," Rossi said.
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