After a long time in the top category, collaborating with the small teams in the championship must be another world, mustn't it?

JM:
The approach is very different. In many situations you have to learn from the riders that are already at the top, such as Valentino Rossi, Sete Gibernau and Mick Doohan, and any of them showed me a whole load of things. At the level of experience, in many things, they were ahead of me. Now roles have changed a little. The experiences and situations that these new riders have to face are situations that I have already experienced. And so my work is now to try and transmit to them what I learnt from others back then, so that they can get the same advantage or performance that the top riders managed to achieve.

Q:
What do you think about Esteve Rabat?

JM:
His best virtue is his enthusiasm and he is eager to do well in everything. This does not mean that the rest of the riders are not like him, but right now Tito, who is in his first full year of racing in the championship, has things very clear and the only thing he likes is to ride a motorbike and has no conception of anything that is not riding. Moreover he is a quick learner. Perhaps he had been lacking a good work method and he needed to think a little about why things are like they are. Being too eager made him make some mistakes at the beginning and these did not let him progress as quickly as he really could have done. For the time being I think that he is adapting very well and he is taking maximum advantage of the technical material he has. He is making the most of what we all are trying to transmit to him and he is taking advantage of that.

Q:
And Bradley Smith?

JM:
Bradley Smith, is the opposite to Rabat, he is a little colder. He has the same desire as him, but he controls it much more. Anything that he does is more with the head; before taking a step he has to understand very well why he does it. He is really a child with the maturity of an older boy. The fact that Bradley started in the MotoGP Academy means that he has already picked up a series of concepts that we are still working on with Tito.

Q:

And Shuhei Aoyama?

JM:
Shuhei at this moment in time is the big doubt because we were all expecting his performance to be much better than it has been this season. It is not very clear what he is going to be capable of achieving. Obviously for the Japanese riders it is much harder racing here because they have a different culture and they have had to move to Europe. Many of them cannot come to terms with this and that weakens their possibilities of top class racing.

Q:
And Julio Simón?

JM:
I think that he is a kid with a great talent. He has an innate and extraordinary capacity to be able to ride any sort of bike. This means that he has been able to take giant strides and miss out some steps that others have had to learn, so when he really needed some experiences and to understand why he has arrived where he is and so move up a level, he has been in a state of shock. That makes him nervous and that tension means he regresses a little, then he has to learn again what others knew at the start, because he had acquired it beforehand but does not know why. But when he can combine those two things, his innate talent with the knowledge of how what he is doing works, I think that Julián will be one of the riders of the future.

Q:
There is a lot of talk about traction control; those in favour say it is positive for safety, and there are those against as it has made sliding disappear and the role of the rider is diminished. What is your opinion regarding this?

JM:
I am in favour of anything that optimises the performance of the motorbike on the track. I think that in the end we all long for the past and there are those that say the old 500cc were more spectacular. There was also a time when only a few specific riders got access to a certain type of tyre and the people did not mention that. With the old engines, although they did not have traction control, also had an optimised power delivery, done by varying the ignition. Traction control is the result of technological evolution and we cannot be against that. If two bikes had traction control and the rest of them did not, I would be against, but if they all have it in the end the winner is the best rider on the Sunday. We cannot be against traction control or any type of technical improvement that arrives. Otherwise we would also be against today's tyres as they have much more grip that before. This is nonsense. What do we do? Do we go back and race with the bikes from 10 years ago?

Q:
The other subject for conversation is the rule concerning tyres and their limits in the top category. Do you think that this has made things more equal?

JM:
In principle it was to lower costs. What will happen in the long term is that there will have to be a proposal for the teams to get the possibility of having test tyres available, so that when they arrive at a circuit they have enough information to make the right tyre selection for the weekend. Because in the end what we want is for there to be tight close-fought races with everybody having a good chance of fighting for the victory, which is why we are all there. Personally I think that the tyre limit is not a bad thing. Bridgestone at the moment has an advantage, because the limit that affected the firm last year - they were obliged to use the same tyre many times because of the limited production capacity - has made them collect a lot of information about the behaviour of their compounds at many different circuits. Michelín does not have this, because it used to take a completely different compound suited to each circuit. Moreover, in Europe it had the capacity to make tyres from one day to the next.

Q:
Would you change any rule?

JM: