Stoner's warmup lap strategy

[Jester]

This has nothing to do with his Valencia crash, but his strategy has always caught my attention.

Is the purpose of Stoner's coming in last on the warmup lap for keeping maximum heat in the tires prior to the start of the race or would the cool down time be so minimal that my thinking is way off here?  I always figured that was his strategy... running up to his grid spot last and therefore sitting the least amount of time, but would the tires really cool that significantly on the other bikes that sit there 10-15 seconds waiting on him?

Am I right or wrong?  Has he answered that question before?

[gm2]

whether or not it really matters is another thing but, yeah, that's why he does it.

[Speeddog]

Assuming:

Everyone's warmers are set to the same temperature.

They all remove the warmers at the same time, and thus the time delay between that and the green light is the same for everybody.

Everyone makes the one lap in roughly the same amount of time, so the heat put into the tires is going to be the same.

Then:

The only difference is that time delay between when the the others arrive and when Stoner arrives.
But, Stoner's tires are cooling down more at the beginning of the lap while he's poking along.
I can't see how it really makes a difference.

But Ducati could have had test riders doing all sorts of tests of this scenario, and they may have found a fractional difference.

IMO, it's a mental thing.

[Bizzarrini]

In F1 they sometimes do the same thing, but not only for tire heat. As long as you're driving, the air flowing through the engine cooling system provides some cooling. If your opponent is standing still, the engine cooling isn't optimal and could lead to overheating. I don't know if this is also the case for the bikes though, maybe their cooling is more than adequate.

[mitt]

In F1 they sometimes do the same thing, but not only for tire heat. As long as you're driving, the air flowing through the engine cooling system provides some cooling. If your opponent is standing still, the engine cooling isn't optimal and could lead to overheating. I don't know if this is also the case for the bikes though, maybe their cooling is more than adequate.

No, the bikes will overheat too.  There was a race a year or 2 ago, I don't remember what series, where several bikes were having problems getting back to the grid, or the light tree was having problems starting, and the waiting racers starting freaking out, and finally just took off and did a 2nd "warm up" lap to cool their bikes down.

mitt

[Greg]

I usually don't pay much attention to the warm up lap, but my brother is more of a fan and he says that Stoner's strategy is to let everybody by and then hammer the warm up lap so that he can put more heat in the tires. Having peeople maintain grid position would eliminate this strategy though.