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Day of Champions Auction with Colin Edwards, Honda Laments over New Michelin Tires

Retired NGM rider Colin Edwards will take part in his final Day of Champions event in late August at Silverstone, joining the efforts of raising funds for the Riders for Health charity. The auction will be held at the Silverstone race track on Thursday 28th August, and Edwards will be offering his own set of racing leathers to the cause.
Rear tire of a Repsol Honda MotoGP bike 1 photo
Among others, 2-time World Champion Jorge Lorenzo will be also auctioning one of his helmets, alongside other signed memorabilia from other MotoGP stars. The Day of Champions will also include live music, stunt shows from the Tigers Motorcycle Display Team and world-class trial rider Dougie Lampkin.

Admission is free for children aged 15 and under, and adult tickets are €19 ($25). All the proceedings will go to the Riders for Health charity, which provides well maintained motorcycles and ambulances for medical personnel in Africa, delivering life-saving health care for around 14 million people in need. The Day of Champions event precedes the Herz British Grand Prix race on August 31.

With one and a half seasons of Bridgestone tires left, it looks like all the teams on the grid will have to make renewed efforts in finding the best setups for their bikes. As former Ducati Corse boss Filippo Preziosi said, the current motorcycles are being built for the tires, and not the other way around, and this requires that the bike manufacturers are forced to test a lot and understand the way tires behave in certain race conditions.

HRC Executive VP Shuhei Nakamoto spoke about the future of racing ahead of the 2016 MotoGP season, and lamented that the change of the tire supplier will also introduce a major spike in the development budgets. Nakamoto-san added that at the present time, HRC “understands” the Bridgestone tires at around 80 percent, and continues to develop its prototypes as Bridgestone develops new tires.

However, he says that things will change when the new Michelin tires arrive, with the lowest “degree of understanding” being 70 percent: “I think we understand 80% of the Bridgestone tire performance. At 70% understanding I think we can be competitive with Yamaha, but if it is only 50% we can’t beat Yamaha and the results we are getting now would change, even though Marc (Marquez) is a very good rider. If we can understand 70% of the new tire for 2016 we will be happy."

He basically says that the transition to the new Michelin tires will be exhausting and expensive, and racing results will also have to suffer, even though Marquez and Pedrosa are very good pilots. On the other hand, we’d rather say that the rest of the teams will see this as an opportunity to level out the differences on the race track, and we’re possibly going to watch a much closer competition.
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