After dominating the 2017 winter tests, Maverick Vinales clearly appeared as a title contender. However, after 3 victories in 5 races, it took no less than 29 Grands Prix between Le Mans 2017 for the Catalan to return to the highest step of the podium, at Phillip Island last year.
In the meantime, it was just a long alternation of ups and downs which not only put a strain on the Spaniard's nerves, forcing him to review his driving style... but also to seek a psychologist!
The excellent Mat Oxley has collected the very interesting confidences of Maverick Vinales for motorsportmagazine.com.
We can only advise you to devour this interview on the British site, but for those who are put off by the language of Shakespeare, here are some significant extracts which show the consequences and the work induced by a harder carcass of the front tire...
Maverick Vinales : “At the beginning of 2017, I could pick up a lot more speed with the old front casing. As soon as Michelin adopted a harder casing, my riding style changed: it became “brake late, stop the bike and go again”. Finally, during the last races, I had the chance to ride like that because we changed the settings of the bike a lot, which allowed me to achieve better times. I wasn't really losing the front, I was just widening. The front of the Yamaha is really good, so it's not easy to lose the front, but you end up going very far. Instead, you actually have to stop the bike to take the turn. Until I found this new setup, I couldn't start using my own riding style. Now it's really good because I'm confident and I can be fast. Confidence is very important to me because I like to be more aggressive on the bike. I tried to follow this path from the start of the 2018 season because I felt that was how the tires worked. But the bike wasn't ready to accept that, so I started to change my riding style a lot, to ride more gently, but I had a lot of difficulty with the front tire, because it wasn't pretty hot ".
From Aragon, Maverick Vinales gradually adapted the settings of his M1 to make it more efficient when braking, mainly by putting weight on the rear (editor's note: the M1s have a metal lifter of around 1 kilo in the rear saddle).
“I tried to concentrate on getting the rear to work really well. Now we use the rear brake and the rear tire to stop the bike and that really helped. If you can stop the motorcycle, you can turn, but if you can't stop the motorcycle, you can't turn. Now I can spin the bike faster, so I can get it going sooner, so the traction is better, which means the acceleration is better and the tire lasts longer.”
A setting which is however not shared by his famous teammate…
“Of course, our different heights and weights make a big difference. I brake later, but he enters the corners with more speed. I prefer to keep the brakes on until the go-around. It's more my style, so I try to make the Yamaha work with that style. We are more similar at the exit. Our settings were very similar, until Thailand. We now use very different configurations.”
Finally, in parallel with this technical work, Maverick Vinales also evokes the psychological side, put to the test by this long succession of disappointed hopes...
“I’m working really hard on this. I'm trying to find a sports psychiatrist, but it's not easy, because I have to find a good one, who understands me. Sometimes I'm not totally focused, so I definitely need to improve that. I'm the type of person who wants to improve every year and if I find a good sports psychiatrist I'll improve a lot, because last season when I did poorly in the races it was partly because I was unmotivated.”
In the end, thefull article by Mat Oxley is really very rich because it is rare for a pilot to take such a step back and express himself with such lucidity, honesty and frankness.
