“All for one and one for all…”
– The motto of the Three Muskateers

I did a blog entry last year about how Honda has trouble retaining riders. Well, I think that losing Valentino Rossi isn’t the only challenge Honda will be facing this coming MotoGP season. It appears that Yamaha has upped the odds by bringing on board Colin Edwards as Rossi’s teammate stealing the best development rider on Big Red’s payroll. Honda still has a talented line-up and are also getting involved with testing earlier than they did in 2004, so they’re ahead of the game compared to last year, but I still believe they are still going to have a struggle on their hand because of two of the RC211V riders.

A racer wants to beat all their competition but no one moreso than his teammate. In this particular case, it is the teammates of Max Biaggi and Nicky Hayden that I think may cause Honda some difficulty. First, their riding styles are completely different. Nicky rides with the traditional US ex-dirt tracker style which favors squaring off a corner and then sliding the rear of the bike on the way out. Biaggi, because of his four titles in 250GP, prefers to carry high corner speed and use a wider arc through a turn. With Honda’s commitment to build their bike around the Repsol riders, this may point the engineers in two different directions. Perhaps input from Movistar Telefonica rider Sete Gibernau (the not-quite-official official rider) will help break any development gridlock.

However, the bigger problem is that even this early in the season it is apparent that Max and Nicky aren’t likely to be best buddies. Barros was apparently very generous with tuning information while teamed with Hayden at Repsol and even Rossi was rumored to have helped out his rookie team-mate while he still riding for Honda. Despite Nicky and Max being seen together at the opening AMA Supercross race of the 2005 season in Anaheim California, comments made by Hayden during a Two Wheel Tuesday interview on SpeedTV and in a printed interview on Superbike Planet show there is no love lost between the two riders.

It is bad enough that Honda may have trouble building a bike around two distinctly different riders but this chaos will be compounded if the riders can’t get along. Honda needs to have their riders communicating and working together. The MotoGP series will be visiting two new tracks in 2005, Laguna Seca in the US and Shanghai Circuit in China. Biaggi and Hayden will both be riding constantly changing bikes with revised suspension configuration,enhanced electronics and probably lots of other modifications as new parts are developed. Two riders working together, as Rossi and Edwards at Yamaha already appear to be doing, can adjust their bikes more efficiently in pre-season testing and come up to speed faster when visiting new circuits than two riders who are in competition with each other. In contrast to Edwards and Rossi’s work at Sepang, the biggest news from the Repsol camp was when their two lead riders crashed into each other on pit lane. Not good.

If these two guys are looking to be the best among equals rather than seeing the bigger picture of Honda’s goals, then perhaps the biggest challenge for Erv Kanemoto won’t be sorted out the RC211V but will be sorting out the relationship between his two riders.

[image from Honda Racing of UK web site.]