Foggy admits Pirellis caused problems.

Four times World Superbike Champion and Foggy Petronas Racing team owner Carl Fogarty believes that the new for 2004 control tyre rule hit his team harder than any other.

With the recent release of the exclusive competition for Crash.net readers to win two VIP holidays to the Monza WSBK round, we caught up with Fogarty as his team base to find out what he really thought of the Pirelli control tyre rule.

The FP-1, renowned amongst racers as one of the best handling bikes in the field, seemed to suffer last season when the one tyre brand rule was introduced - and Fogarty admitted that the new rubber probably hindered his team more than any other.

"We felt as soon as we put these tyres on we had problems we never had in 2003," commented Carl. "One of the strongest points of our bike is the chassis - and it is still probably the best chassis out there, we can carry a lot of corner speed with a lot of lean angle - but we lost all that on the Pirelli's.

"The others did (lose out) to a certain point, but it cost us more time because obviously our bike was not as fast as the others so we lost out more I think," he added.

However, in terms of competition and the championship as a whole, Carl was thankful the control tyre was introduced, saying: "It saved everybody really."

Meanwhile Pirelli, to their credit, worked with FPR to construct tyres that would suite the unique three-cylinder machine, but due to the rules - that allow any competitor to use any tyre - Carl believes his team still lost out.

"As the season went on last year Pirelli understood a few of our problems and started doing tyres we kind of made them do," he explained. "But every time they started doing a tyre that helped us out, because we've got a lot of good guys working for us who know what we needed tyre-wise, it helped everyone else out even more! Its frustrating really that they find something that would cure our chassis problems, then obviously they had to let other people use it and the others found it really good as well."

As to the future, Foggy is in no doubt what is required from his bike to get the most out of the tyres: "A bit frustrating really, but I think we need more power now to get the wheel spinning more to get the best out of the Pirellis."

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