On being fired by Ducati and hired by Ten Kate at the end of 2005:
I walked out of this paddock in tears at the end of the 2005 season. I had lost my world title after being the youngest ever WSBK champion at 24 the year before. I had finished fourth and that was a blow to me. If I had finished third I might have felt better, but Ducati fired me and replaced me with Lorenzo Lanzi and I had no ride and no future. No one was offering me anything. I got a helicopter ride back to England because I was playing a gig that night with my band and I don't think I played or sang very well that night. Then my manager, Roger Burnett, called me and said that I had this offer from Ten Kate to replace Alex Barros who had decided to go back to MotoGP. He started to explain the details of the contract and I said, "Just take it. I don't care what it says. Just send it to me and I'll sign it." I saw Ten Kate as my chance to reestablish myself and I saw that these guys believed in me.
Then came the first test on the Honda, which, with no traction control, was a complete disaster, 320 million brake horsepower from Ten Kate...my rear wheel was spinning 100 miles per hour faster than my front, the bike was sideways going in and sideways coming out... I didn't know what the hell was happening after riding the Ducati, but we had five tests and we won the first race of the season in Qatar, and that was the start of a fantastic relationship with this team and Honda. And it meant so much to me to have Honda welcome me back. I rode for Honda back in 1997 on the 600. I progressed with Ducati with HM Plant and then with Fila and Xerox on the factory team. And then I got this great chance to work with Honda again. I felt a little bit like I was going back home, to my roots, because I was so young when I was first with Honda. And all the familiar faces of Honda UK welcomed me back when I signed with Ten Kate, all saying they were glad to work with me again.
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On traction control:
To finish second last year with a difficult package and to compete for the title without traction control was quite an accomplishment for me and for the team. Without traction control theses days you are lost, unfortunately. Half of me thinks that it should be banned and we should just get on with riding the bikes without it, but in this day and age traction control is a massive, massive aid for any rider and a massive asset as well. This year our bike was more or less the same -- same power, a little more because this is Ten Kate, the same basic suspension package, but the difference is the electronics. From challenging for the championship last year without it, I knew the only thing missing, the only missing piece of the jigsaw, was the electronics. We got that this year and it made the difference between finishing second and first.
Of course Ten Kate never do things the easy way. They don't just go out and buy a system and a service. They sell most of their racing components so they need to develop them themselves. We started the season with the HRC electronics system but unfortunately we were getting no updates on that, so we were forced to... we were being left behind. When we went to Misano, the eighth of 13 meetings, we were just left behind. That was the first track that really highlighted that we were falling behind in electronics. So we had to go back to the PI system because we had a lot more scope with it to solve the problems that we had. To change electronic systems more than halfway through the season and still keep at the front is amazing in this game. I mean we changed to the PI system after Misano and went to Brno and won the very next race -- and that was after we were no better than sixth at Misano. I mean, I was fourth at Misano but that was only because Biaggi knocked Haga off. We were no better than sixth. The team saw the problem, listened to me and they changed from the HRC system back to PI.
