Lol - Yep, that comment gets used a lot about anyone who is great (Rossi, Marquez, F1 drivers, etc), however the reality is if the machine has some major issues with it then there's only so much that the very best riders/drivers can do to make up for that deficit, and even their brilliance can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. They can make the sow's ear achieve things that it shouldn't have any right in achieving, but there's a limit.

The trouble is people expect a top rider to perform miracles, and then get the hump when they can't get the garden gate to do a sub 17 minute lap.

From the outside looking in, and not knowing anything about the inner workings of MD, he reminds me of people who decide to work for themselves because they can't stand being told what to do by others, hence being their own boss is the only way to go about things. I wonder if that's true of MD and working with other teams? He certainly likes to run his own show, so when he gets into a big team, maybe having to do things their way doesn't suit him? That is in no way a dig at MD, just an observation, and perhaps one that some of the big manufacturers should think about - i.e, give him the tools/backing, but let him run it the way he wants it to be run. I'm sure he'd deliver, and I'm sure he'd end up working with one manufacturer for a long time; it's been done before with Joey - he did things with a handshake and insisted on working on the bikes himself, much to Honda's reluctance to start with, but they did come round to his way of thinking.

As for the Yamaha thing - MD did say that the issues with the bike had been known for a long time, and had been present at the NW200 (and I'm guessing at the Cookstown races as well), so they would have had time to try and sort these out. However I know that Yamaha Europe are nowhere near being ready to release mega horsepower engines to race teams as they're still developing/testing them for reliability.