MotoGP Rider John Hopkins Joins Factory Kawasaki Team - A Fresh Start

On May 4 on the outskirts of Shanghai, John Hopkins became the youngest rider to compete in 100 premier class Grand Prix. But there was little cause for celebration. In a race that was won by Valentino Rossi, Hopkins finished 14th. Rossi chose a rear tire in Bridgestone's medium range. Hopkins and teammate Anthony West along with Alex de Angelis chose the hard Bridgestone rear. West was 16th and de Angelis 17th and last.

Hopkins is only 25, but it seems like he's been racing Grand Prix forever. And in fact he has. Having joined the premier class in 2002, he's been in it longer than all but two riders, Valentino Rossi and Loris Capirossi. Like Rossi and Capirossi, he made the transition from 500cc two-stroke to 990cc four-stroke to now 800cc four-stroke, switching brands along the way. But his success has been more modest. While Rossi and Capirossi have numerous wins to their credit, Hopkins is still awaiting his first.

The '07 season was Hopkins' best. He scored his first podium in China and then followed up with a career-best second in Brno and third in the Valencia season finale. His lone pole came at Assen in 2006. He has two career fastest laps. He finished the '07 season fourth in points behind Casey Stoner, Dani Pedrosa and Rossi.

The hope was that it was the start of more to come. It wasn't. The GSV-R800 Hopkins and teammate Chris Vermeulen began the season with was essentially the same one they took to the Valencia finale. While other teams constantly upgraded their chassis and motors, the Suzuki remained unchanged. That the bike was competitive out of the box was a mixed blessing. The hope it gave them in testing and early in the season was only intermittently rewarded.

Hopkins left Suzuki amicably after five years. He felt that in order to join the class's upper echelon, he'd have to go elsewhere. Hopkins says Suzuki would "always get to a point and then they'd hit a barrier. And once they hit that barrier It's like what we came out with last year at the beginning of the year is what we would stop with. We didn't have any improvements. The only thing that we improved were the tires. I think Suzuki struggled to actually improve it midseason, and that was something that I always found with them, once they hit the barrier. As far as the engineers and that, I had a great, great relationship, and I left on good terms with every one of the engineers at Suzuki. It's basically just another fresh start for me. I've been at it for six years, and Kawasaki are really, really motivated and excited, and they've got a very, very strong budget. And they believed in me, so I've got to put in the work for them, and I'm excited to be working with them."

Kawasaki wants to win. Hopkins sees evidence of those intentions. The team had a new chassis at the third race of the season in Estoril, Portugal, and West was to use a new "screamer" engine at the fifth race in France. Hopkins is playing development catch-up after suffering a torn abductor muscle during a test early in the off-season. New teammate Anthony West has been of little help; his wet-weather skills are unquestionable, but he struggled to come to terms with the ZX-RR and has languished at the rear of the field.

"It's something I wish I could help him with or something I could do to make the situation better, because me and Chris Vermeulen, we always . . . we had an inside competition," Hopkins says. "I think me and Chris made the Suzuki a lot better than it actually was just because we really wanted to beat each other and were really pushing each other, and we were on equal terms and racing with the same tenths sometimes. I hope [West] can figure it out because it's difficult to [help] develop a machine when you're a couple seconds off [the pace] at the moment."

West is scheduled to race the screamer engine before Hopkins, but there won't be much of a delay before Hopkins gets it. The China race was the first of six in eight weeks.

"It's got a lot of good qualities in the way it gets into corners and the overall smoothness of the machine," Hopkins says of the screamer engine he tested following the Spanish Grand Prix at Jerez. "It's like you don't even have a bike underneath you, really. You don't feel the vibrations; you don't have the bike swinging around everywhere. Everything feels real calm and settled, more like the 500 when you're running it into the corners. It seemed to hold corner speed at Jerez when I rode it like a 500, pretty similar, and it didn't have the horsepower at all. So it still [needs] a lot of work, and the engine management just was all over the place. You'd have nothing off the bottom and some in the midrange and nothing on top, so they've just got to smooth the power and torque out."