Michael Scott | July 21, 2021
Cycle News In The Paddock
COLUMN
The Teammates From Hell
The first person to beat is your teammate. It’s a cliché, but (like most clichés) deeply true.
Rivals will have machines with different characteristics. Nothing you can do about that. But your teammate’s on exactly the same bike. No excuses.
Wriggle room, to use another cliché, comes in the way you interpret the word “beat.” At World Championship level, for the most successful, there’s no room for kindness.
“Beating” means a great deal more than just reaching the checkered flag first.
In some cases, there is no doubt as to which of the pit-sharers is the senior. In such cases, if each accepts his role, it might even be possible to be friends.
Usually, given the competitive nature of anyone who gets to this level of racing, it’s not like that. Towering self-belief goes hand in hand with a pathological drive to prove it. And then the rules are simple.
Your teammate must be mentally pulverized. Humiliated, ignored, embarrassed, belittled, sidelined—and exposed as having feet of clay.
It can be done in a variety of ways. False friendship followed by betrayal is one favored route. Backstabbing another. Anything that works.
Properly accomplished, he’ll be beaten before the race begins.
And a true master of the art has by then made sure that his bike, while nominally the same, is several steps better.
Only when your teammate is no longer a threat can peace and bonhomie break out. On the surface, anyway.
Racing history is rich in riders justifiably nicknamed “the teammate from hell.”
Few more pungently than those bastions of British fair play, Phil Read and Barry Sheene.
Seven-times champion Read tricked his factory Yamaha teammate Bill Ivy out of the 1968 125 Championship so cynically that many blamed Ivy’s fatal crash in 1969 on his burning and unrequited desire for revenge.
Read happily defied team orders from the factory that the pair were to share, because, as he told me years later: “I’d realized that Yamaha were going to pull out of GPs at the end of the year anyway.” So why follow orders?
Read went on to insinuate himself with the MV Agusta factory team, undermining long-term incumbent Giacomo Agostini with Count Agusta and his family to such good effect that Ago felt compelled to leave. The eminent Italian got a measure of revenge when he took Yamaha to the first two-stroke 500-class title in 1975, ahead of Read’s MV.
Sheene, in turn, took pains in dismantling a series of Suzuki wannabes. His intelligence, charm and influence with the press made it easy to undo them personally; his forceful character and tireless attention secured the best bikes for himself year after year.
The greatest challenge came from American Pat Hennen, of whom Sheene said: “If you pay peanuts, you get a monkey.” In 1978, Pat was five points ahead of Barry after the first five races—though eventual champion Kenny Roberts was another eight points ahead of him. Sadly, Hennen suffered career-ending injuries at the non-championship Isle of Man TT before he could prove that this monkey had horns.
But then none of them were there to make friends.
Nor any of the most successful successors, smiling assassins everyone. Serial champions take no prisoners.
Wayne Rainey assessed all his teammates carefully and treated them accordingly. His major victim was John Kocinski, who joined him at Yamaha in 1991 as 250 Champion. Wayne set out from the start to undermine him at every step. And succeeded.
Mick Doohan made sure his Honda teammates never really got a look in. There was nothing overt, because the five-times champion had talent to spare by comparison. No need for knives out. But friendly advice certainly wasn’t on the table, and he never forgave Alex Criville for snitching two narrow wins in 1997. The Spaniard had to wait until Mick had gone before he could win the 1999 title.
Rossi, channeling Sheene’s charm and media savvy, expertly destroyed a series of rivals on other bikes, notably Gibernau and Biaggi. His teammates were easy meat by comparison, until Jorge Lorenzo arrived, going very fast.
Valentino’s hostility was open. He refused to share data, and he demanded a wall down the middle of their shared pit, ostensibly because they were using different tire brands, but the wall stayed when that changed.
Lorenzo got the last laugh. He drove Rossi to Ducati, starting the great champion’s slow decline.
Now it is Pol Espargaro’s turn to find himself subtly elbowed in the gut at every opportunity by Marquez. There’s the refusal to share information, and the clout with Honda to make sure he has first choice of the better bike, whether it be (as in the early races) an older model or now the latest modification.
It’s no compensation, but Pol should feel flattered. At least he’s being taken seriously.CN
