Analysis

It was a good day for attention-grabbing headlines at Mandalika. Pol Espargaro ended the day with a scorching lap which took him under the WorldSBK Superpole by four tenths of a second. There were six different manufacturers in the top six. The lead on the first day changed hands time after time in the last couple of hours.

But the headlines don't really mean very much. Times were dropping because the track started off filthy and only really started to clean up in the last hour or so of the day. This is the first outing at Mandalika for MotoGP, so the teams and factories have very little data to go on, with teams working on such basics as figuring out the best gearing for the track.

The track was incredibly dirty, because it is still in the middle of a building site and has not been used since WorldSBK left the circuit back in November of last year. There has been plenty of building work done, the pit complex is much closer to completion than November, but the combination of building work and torrential tropical rains left a lot of dirt and mud on the track.

With Ducati hogging all of the technical limelight with their latest gadget, it is easy to overlook what was going on elsewhere in pit lane at the Sepang MotoGP test. Yet there was plenty of interesting tech on display, some of it working well, other parts not quite so much. So here's a look at what the other MotoGP manufacturers were up to in Malaysia.

Aprilia – lighter, slimmer, but more chatter

Aprilia face a major challenge in 2022. For the past two years, their rivals have been unable to develop their engines, engine design having been frozen during the pandemic. 2022 is the first season where the factories without concessions have been able to bring updated engines. So the Noale factory is about to find out whether it has done enough over the past two years to close the gap and be competitive.

The evidence so far points to them being successful. Aleix Espargaro and Maverick Viñales topped the first day of the official test, and finished second and fifth respectively on the second day, Viñales just 0.130 behind Enea Bastianini, and on the same time as fourth-placed Alex Rins.

With the bikes all crated up and shipped to Indonesia, and the entire paddock flown to Mandalika on the island of Lombok (bar those stuck in quarantine in Malaysia after testing positive for Covid-19), there is time to look back at the Sepang MotoGP test. Because this year is so different to previous years in a number of ways, I am breaking it down into two parts. First, some general points that apply to the test itself and across several or all manufacturers, and later in the week, a breakdown manufacturer by manufacturer.

The first and most obvious conclusion which can be drawn from the Sepang test is that it is hard to draw any clear and general conclusions from the Sepang test. There are a number of reasons for that. Firstly, though the temptation is to look at the headline times, they are even more deceptive than ever.

That is in part because the simple classification, the best lap of each rider, ranked, makes for some juicy headlines. Enea Bastianini, a rider starting his second season, riding a bike from last year, slashes over a tenth of a second off the lap record. The Aprilias, long MotoGP's whipping boy, take a 1-2 on the first day, and end the session second and fifth overall, with everyone expressing their admiration for the speed of the RS-GP. The defending MotoGP champion Fabio Quartararo down in seventh. The top eight nearly within two tenths of a second of each other (eighth-placed Marc Marquez is 0.201 behind Bastianini), thirteen riders with half a second, eighteen within a second.

The one near certainty coming into the Sepang MotoGP test was that Ducati would have found a new way to push the boundaries of vehicle dynamics. We have seen it before with the wings, with the rear swingarm spoiler, with the holeshot and ride-height devices, and more. The only question for onlookers was what exactly Gigi Dall'Igna and his team of engineers had dreamed up this time. After a tip by French MotoGP tech guru Tom Morsellino, I set out to investigate.

The answer to that looks like it is at the front of the GP22, instead of the rear. Ducati have installed a new holeshot device on the front of the Desmosedici, which appears to double as a front ride-height device. Where the old holeshot device was a simple latch, the new one is much more sophisticated, and looks like it is being used on corner exit, as well as at the start.

First, a quick look at the old holeshot device. Like the units fitted to most of the bikes on the grid, it is relatively simple. There is a catch on the bottom of the fork, and a latch mechanism operated by a cable. The rider loads it by compressing the forks, then rotates a butterfly switch on the top triple clamp to engage it. When the rider brakes for the first corner, the latch releases and the front comes up again.

Walking down pit lane, I took the following photo of the mechanism on Fabio Di Giannantonio's bike. (As it's old tech, mechanics are a lot less paranoid about it.)