For more than a decade Michelin ruled in Grand Prix and MotoGP. Then they didn't. image by wolf jay flywheel

When asked how he managed to stay on top in broadcast radio for so long, shock jock Howard Stern said that the key to his success was his own fear that if his crew did one sub par show they'd be iced out of existence by one of his many competitors. He didn't rest on his millions of listeners, exceedingly full bank account or any sign of his success. His fear of failure was the driving force of his professional life.

One could not in good faith apply the same fear of failure to Michelin's recent past in MotoGP racing. If anything, Michelin seemed almost at ease with their complacency and fall from grace in 2008.

The core of reality, the very marrow of motorcycle racing is that it demands the very best. The best engineering, planning and riding. You can't fake this, can't phone it in, at least not for very long, because the nature of racing means that there is always a rival who wants your success just as badly as you do.

In several short years Michelin went from being the powerhouse tire supplier in Grand Prix (teams once considered pulling out if they could not get Michelin tires) to being an also-ran and near laughingstock in MotoGP.

What most seem to concur is that in MotoGP Michelin was unable to adapt to the rule changes made in 2007 which limited the number of tires available to a rider and forced riders to pick the tires they would use each weekend on Thursday. Previously, Michelin was famous for compiling data on the Friday and Saturday of race weekends and then flying in special tires--or as rumor has it, building them at the track--on Sunday morning. The '07 rules completely changed the methodology Michelin would use in Grand Prix. Bridgestone adapted to the new longer-range focused rules almost seamlessly but Michelin's response was at time as listless as an old plow-horse.

Even with time to adapt and the tire regulations being slightly loosened up for 2008, Michelin still suffered several embarrassing race weekend attempts at what amounted to company suicide. First came Germany, where they would not allow teams to use the softer rain tire, then came the Laguna Seca debacle, where Michelin ignored the both common sense and the advice of top riders and shipped in tires for much hotter conditions than those forecasted for the weekend. This lapse in judgment can be pointed to as the tipping point when Bib, the former king of tires in MotoGP, began to seriously lose air.

This is not the first time that a long period of dominating success has allowed a racing entity to become complacent enough so that they essentially topple themselves out of the game. American Wayne Rainey won three 500cc world championships in succession while riding for Yamaha in early 1990s Grand Prix. Rainey's crash and subsequent career-ending injuries forced Yamaha to examine many of the issues Rainey's near superhuman riding had been compensating for years, and their response was nearly as lackluster as Michelin's. Yamaha didn't win another GP/MotoGP world championship until Valentino Rossi's 2004 crown.

While Michelin enjoyed their domination of the GP and MotoGP series, in other sectors of the racing world, seismic change occurred on another front: the adoption of spec-tire manufacturers in many two and four-wheeled national and world championship series. The sale of the tire rights to a world championship racing series was unheard of in the 1970s and 80's but World Superbike adoption of a spec tire supplier for 2004 and F1 in '06 was a game-changer for all racing series the world over.

While no one could be more responsible than Michelin for MotoGP to consider a move to a spec tire rule, in the end Michelin refused to bid for the position, saying via press release, The MotoGP Championship organizers have decided to use a single tire supplier for the coming seasons, which effectively eliminates the competitive environment that has led to so much progress.

Didier Miraton, a top exec at Michelin summed up how Michelin felt about many global racing series selling the tire rights to their series by saying, "Unfortunately, the current top forms of motorsport seem to be focusing more on entertainment than competition."