MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

In 2021, Ducati came close to fulfilling their dream of winning a second MotoGP riders' championship after Casey Stoner in 2007, Pecco Bagnaia falling just short of holding Fabio Quartararo from the title. That came after an impressive second half of the season, in which the factory Ducati rider won four of the last six races, and finished on the podium in a fifth.

That is quite a turnaround for the Italian. Bagnaia's first season in MotoGP was dismal, finishing fifteenth in the championship with just three top ten finishes and six DNFs, including four in a row between Jerez and Barcelona. But he had shown promise in the preseason test in 2019, ending in second place behind Danilo Petrucci with a lap of 1'58.302. That time was just 0.037 slower than Bagnaia managed on the second day of the Sepang test at the start of February 2022, with three years of experience and a much improved Desmosedici underneath him.

The man who has guided him in this transition is crew chief Cristian Gabarrini. The Italian engineer is no stranger to success: Gabarrini was crew chief to Ducati's only world champion, Casey Stoner, from 2007 to 2012, and worked briefly with Marc Marquez on his arrival at Honda before returning to the fold at Bologna.

Gabarrini is a quietly spoken, intense, thoughtful man, who weighs his words carefully. He wears his razor-sharp intelligence lightly, listening carefully and giving precise and thoughtful answers in clear and easily understood language.

After a prolonged absence, Casey Stoner returned to the paddock at Portimão, where he gave an extensive press conference to the media present on site and via zoom. Just as when he was still racing, his observations were well worth listening to, and without the pressure of race weekend and an endless string of media commitments, was even more thoughtful and insightful than usual.

One subject which he was particularly interesting on was the question of competition, why people race, and what drives them, and especially, what drove him. The pursuit of perfection, of wanting to do everything just right to extract the maximum performance from themselves and from the bike is one of the most important motivations for most motorcycle racers, and indeed, most elite athletes.

That pursuit of perfection explains their obsessive attention to detail. The many rituals you see riders go through before they get on the bike and leave the pits is part superstition, but also a way of eliminating errors. By doing everything the same way on each exit, it makes it easier to ensure they haven't forgotten anything: boots, leathers, gloves, helmet are all securely fastened, correctly fitted, and not causing discomfort, and therefore distraction.

The devil is in the detail

This attention to detail can become quite compulsive. Andrea Iannone's nickname "The Maniac" was not given to him for his wild riding, but for the obsessive way he would arrange everything, in his pit box, in his motorhome, in every aspect. At media debriefs on site, Valentino Rossi would carefully arrange the various voice and memo recorders placed in front of him to for a neat configuration, rather than the chaos created by journalists flinging their recorders onto the table at the last moment.

Casey Stoner has made a return to the paddock. He turned up at the Algarve round of MotoGP for a number of media appointments, which included a press conference in which he discussed several fascinating subjects at length. Although I will be posting the entire transcript at a later date, I want to highlight one or two of his statements to discuss.

Despite the fact that he hated talking to the media – we did not help him go any faster, so we were wasting his time – Stoner was always one of the best people to ask about technical aspects of riding, or machinery. He had both a deep understanding of bikes and riding, and the eloquence and clarity of thought to be able to explain it deeply. It helped that English is his first language, of course (at least for those of us with the same mother tongue).

So it is worth highlighting some of the things Stoner talked about, and examining it a little closer. First up is something he said about adapting to the bike, rather than adapting the bike to you. He was asked why it was so difficult for MotoGP riders to switch bikes. Jorge Lorenzo took a year and a half to adapt to the Ducati after he left Yamaha, and Andrea Dovizioso is finding it similarly challenging aboard the Yamaha, after so many years on the Ducati.

The Australian started off with a proviso: "I’m not inside that person or their mind or anything like that." But went on to explain the way he saw things. "Everybody has their way and their system of getting to grips with things. Lots of people like to do lots of laps and get their feeling. They want this feeling to sort of come to them."

Working with the bike

Radio Ocotillo, the podcast from the Cinta Americana website featuring the Spanish-language work of Dennis Noyes, spoke to Ramon Forcada, crew chief to Franco Morbidelli of the Petronas Yamaha team. Veteran journalist Noyes was joined by Teledeporte commentator Judit Florensa and journalist Cristian Ramón Marín Sanchi, and spoke to Forcada for some 90 minutes. Noyes translated that fascinating conversation into English for MotoMatters.com readers, and split it into three parts.

In part one of Radio Ocotillo's interview with Ramon Forcada, he explained how he and Yamaha had managed almost an entire season on just two engines. In the second part, Forcada talked about all of the bikes he has worked on over the years compare, and what he thinks of MotoGP's current set of technical rules.

In the final part, Forcada talks about some of the riders he has worked with over the past thirty one years. From Casey Stoner to John Kocinski, from Alex Barros and Carlos Checa to Franco Morbidelli, Forcada explains how each of them were different and how he learned to understand them and collaborate. And he talks at length about what sets Franco Morbidelli apart from the rest.

Radio Ocotillo: After so many years in the paddock, you have worked with so many riders with such different personalities, if you had to choose the three riders whose company and character you must enjoyed, who would they be?

In the first part of the interview with Andrea Zugna, the former Honda and Yamaha engineer told the story of how he came to MotoGP, brought in by former Yamaha racing boss Masao Furusawa. Zugna talked about the different roles he played at Yamaha. And he gave an engineer's view of the MotoGP technical regulations, and rules in general.

At the end of 2009, Zugna left Yamaha to join Honda. As Head of Performance at HRC, his role expanded to include the entire bike, and not just the electronics. "In general, performance analysis is where you look at the whole package - rider, bike, tires and everything - and you try to figure out where to work, what works and what doesn't, and so on," Zugna explained.

"I think now every company, every manufacturer has kind of a performance analysis group, also because we are at the point of refinement where you don’t make big steps. It’s more about refining, analyzing deeply and so on. So objective numbers are getting more and more important. But, at that time in 2010 it was just starting," the Italian told me.

Things have changed a lot over the last decade, however. "Now, maybe ten years later, it’s common practice. Not only in MotoGP - you have data science, whatever, machine learning, cloud computing… all these terms that are now normal, weren’t ten years ago. So maybe that was more of a general process in how you tried to get the maximum out of the data you had."

An ocean of data