Congrats to Kenny
by Mick Doohan

I couldn't do enough to catch Kenny on Sunday, so he won. It's great having
him up with us. He's riding really well now, and he rode really well when
he was on the Modenas, so it's good he's now on a bike that's capable of
winning. Anyone watching closely last year could see he was on it and could
do the business. But if Kenny wasn't on the Suzuki this year and only the
other guys were, everyone would still be saying the bike is a pile.
One thing's for sure, it's us that need to do some work now - the biggest change we made for 1999 was a new paint job.

We had a '99 chassis to test again at Motegi but we didn't have
enough parts to be confident about running it in the race - anyway it was
still behaving too fickle. We'll probably test it again at Valencia after
Jerez but it's going to be pretty tight because it's a holiday in Japan
this week, so they've only got a week to build stuff. It's a shame we
didn't get into it earlier.

I started out at Motegi with three bikes - one running the '99 chassis and two with '98 chassis. I rode all three on Friday morning, but if you run three bikes together you don't get any of them working properly, so we got the two '98s to a base setting so we could get them consistent and get on the front row.

I think there's definitely something in those bikes that's
different to last year. I hope it doesn't take too many races before the
guys at Honda admit there's something different, because we want to finish
races, we don't want to throw it down the road and then tell them 'we told
you so'. They've done this a few times before, like in '94 when they said
they hadn't changed the forks, and when we fitted '93 forks, I went 1.5
seconds faster.

We've got different forks this year too but we've also tried the 98
forks and the character of the bike stays the same, so there's something
somewhere in the bike that has been put together different.

I'm looking forward to getting back to Europe and racing week in,
week out, that's what I really enjoy. We're better off than we were this
time last year, after I DNFed at Suzuka. I'm still enthusiastic about my
racing and I still only think about finishing in one position; I'm not out
there to make up the numbers.
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Mick Doohan's column is brought to you in part by the Parts and Accesories department at American Honda, and Pro Honda Oils & Chemicals.