Stoner And Hayden: MotoGP's Dream Team?

"Mainly, my gut instinct said this is where I need to be," Hayden said. "I was impressed with the team when I met them. The bike, I felt like Ducati had more potential. Could be either really good or really bad, as we've seen. And I thought it was a risk that I wanted to take to take if I really wanted to win races."

Now his task is to find the success that took him to the title, while proving that Casey Stoner isn't the only rider who can ride the Desmosedici 800. Was Hayden worried that he'd follow the pattern? "Well, now it's a little bit too late to really worry about it," he explained, "but, definitely, before I decided what I was going to do, it was something...some really good riders have struggled and struggled a lot. And to leave Honda--not that I had a choice to stay at Repsol, but I could have gone to a satellite team--I knew it was kind of a risky move. But I was confident that I could do it and felt like it was a risk worth taking if I want to ever win races again."

Stoner doesn't see Hayden's potential success as validation of the machine. "I think it is important for Nicky to succeed for him, nobody else," he said. Because Hayden rode for the same manufacturer for nine years, "it's just going to take him a while to get used to it and it's maybe what the last riders have struggled with to adapt and change their style, instead of trying to get the bike to suit them," Stoner believes. "Everybody is always trying to make a bike suit them, but sometimes it's the opposite, you have to change yourself to suit the bike to a certain degree. But Nicky is smart enough and capable enough of doing it."

And capable enough of helping Stoner sort through problems. Melandri was so far off the pace in '08 that Stoner was essentially on his own. For the team to be successful, "People have to actually work together, you have to help sort things out," Stoner believes that if Hayden were his teammate last year, "we might have figured out this problem with the engine a little bit earlier. But at the end of the day, it's nothing to do with your teammate after that because you go in different directions in that way." The adjustment period for Hayden didn't go smoothly. The Valencia test was an eye-opener and the next test in Jerez didn't start much better.

"I think the first day at the Jerez test [the Ducati engineers] were getting a bit nervous again, because the first day four Ducati riders and the test rider were on the bottom [of the timesheet]. You could start to see them burn some serious [cigarettes] out back. I think they were telling their bosses, 'No, it's not like last year, I promise.' And the last day everybody got going better, so I think it helped take a little pressure off some of them." Hayden tied for the fifth fastest time, a second off the benchmark set by Rossi. MotoGP rookie, Mika Kallio, was one spot back on the Alice Team Ducati.

The myth of the Desmosedici is that Stoner can get it to the apex and whack the throttle wide open. Not so, concur Stoner and Hayden. "Everybody is saying that I'm the only one who can twist the throttle hard enough to use the electronics, but you ask any rider who is going to friggin' tell you the truth: if you use electronics all the time you go nowhere. They are just a back up," he said. "They stop big high-sides, they stop big crashes, but that is about it." Hayden said the electronics are good, "but it's still not like people at home, how it looks on TV. It's not that easy at all. It's not just hit the switch and let the electronics take over by any means." Stoner continued the thread. "People think that the bikes are crash-proof now, but obviously not; people still have big crashes," he argued, and after thinking of Jorge Lorenzo's spectacular highsides in China and Laguna, you couldn't disagree. "I could sit there with the throttle wide open on the traction control, but you will go nowhere, sitting there spinning and you will be maybe 0.8 seconds a lap off just by sitting there on the traction control. So there is a long way that we have got to come I think; my data logger and electronics man is an absolute genius. He works very well with me and we work a lot on engine braking to get fuel consumption right, but at the same time to get the engine smooth."