When approaching a Grand Prix weekend, there are many elements that are useful to have in mind, including old records, races from the previous year or the physical characteristics of the circuit.
To find out a little more about this last point, and go a little further than the number of turns or the length of the straight line, we wanted to interview professionals in order to try to find out the important elements that an experience of several decades allows them to bear directly in mind when arriving at a circuit.
Guy Coulon, the wizard of the Monster Yamaha Tech3 team, who was kind enough to answer our questions for the first circuits of the season, here addresses the Mugello circuit, nestled in the heart of the Tuscan hills….
Guy Coulon: “Mugello is a very, very fast circuit where speed matters, and therefore where power is needed; we are still at Ducati!
The other particularity is that you have to stop the bike at turn #1. This last point was still a real problem not long ago, before we moved to 340mm brakes.
The circuit is very technical, with its sorts of large, fast chicanes (turns 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 and 11), where to go fast, the driver must feel the balance between entry speed, which must be the best possible, but which must above all not deteriorate the exit speed, otherwise you will lose time in the stretch which precedes the same types of following turns. In fact, we must not enter at the maximum possible speed and it is up to the pilot to have the best possible analysis to find this entry speed which will give him the best possible exit speed.
Another particularity is that it is still a circuit that goes up and down a lot, and it is not recommended to fall in the fast turns on the descents. Because of these differences in altitude, there is a bit of antagonism in the settings of the bike, because it is a bit difficult to be perfect both in the downhill sequences and in the uphill ones. The motorcycle must therefore be very well balanced. This year, we'll see, but with the Michelins, we tend to be a little high-legged for it to work well. In fact, at Mugello the bike is not set up very differently from some circuits. However, we are not on the settings for Le Mans which is an On/Off circuit.
In fact, at Mugello, it's clear that you need a fast bike but it's still a brilliant rider who wins. The guy who wins there, it's not just because of his bike. This is what we call a real driver's circuit! »
Editor's note: The article dates from 2016, the figures provided by Yamaha are several years old since at the end of the straight line, the Yamaha speeds were 20 km/h faster than on this graph...
