MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

As the most populous nation in the world, and one that is absolutely mad for motorcycles, India deserved a motorcycling grand prix. And as a successful economy, it had the capacity to organize one. On Sunday, it got a proper MotoGP spectacle. The racing for the win in all three categories wasn't particularly exciting – three races, three runaway victories – but there was spectacle and sensation up and down the field. Surprises, and championships blown wide open. What more could you want?

Initial fears of disaster proved to be overblown. The track was as safe as most European tracks, with some room for improvement. The asphalt could do with being repaved, but the same is true for half a dozen circuits on the calendar. The facilities were generally outstanding, the crowds were decent for a first race with little promotion (making it happen mattered more than packing the grandstands to the rafters) and incredibly passionate. The standard of marshalling left something to be desired, though it was not outright dangerous, just not up to world championship standard.

The proof of any pudding is in the eating. And the proof of any MotoGP event is when the rubber hits the road for real: when the racing starts. The Grand Prix of India has been through a real rollercoaster in the past few months, from doubts that the circuit would be ready a few months ago, to worries that the track wasn't safe enough a couple of weeks ago, to the circuit being embraced by the riders yesterday after they finally got a taste of the Buddh International Circuit on a MotoGP bike.

But practice is practice, and only racing is for real, and the first ever grand prix motorcycle race to be held at BIC exposed a few weaknesses in the circuit's preparation. And it once again exposed the rather worrying state of MotoGP in 2023. There was a long delay due to the rain, the sprint race starting at 5pm, 90 minutes after the originally scheduled start. And there was yet another first-corner pile up, with another rider forced to miss Sunday's race due to injuries sustained in the crash.

What was the verdict on the first day of a historic Indian GP? "So fun," Jorge Martin said, speaking for pretty much everyone on the grid. "I really enjoy riding here. It was so, so fun." That fun translated into outright speed as well. "Straight away in the morning I felt good. then in the evening I was super competitive trying to improve some problems I had. The pace is good. the lap time was great also. So I’m very happy."

The Pramac Ducati rider wasn't the only rider to be impressed. "Really good," Marc Marquez agreed. "Better than everybody expected." The fears about safety had been allayed, which allowed the riders to get on with figuring out how to go as fast as possible without worrying about the consequences. "I think they did a very good job the last two months, and it’s true that we can improve a few things for next year but as riders we can give thanks because we can be in a normal way and just think about riding."

There are days when you are reminded that racing is not quite as important as we like to think it is. Saturday was one of those days. The news that Mike Trimby, IRTA CEO, had died on Friday night affected everyone in the paddock. To say that Trimby was a giant of the sport is an understatement. The only person who has had a greater impact on the shape of MotoGP and motorcycle racing in its current guise is Carmelo Ezpeleta.

And arguably, Trimby did more to make motorcycle racing safer than Ezpeleta, because he was elected by the riders as a safety representative, and went on to form IRTA, which had the political clout to improve safety because they had the power of collective bargaining. And Trimby had the moral courage to use that power to force race promoters and circuit owners to make drastic changes to make the racing safer. There are riders alive today who probably wouldn't have been if Mike Trimby hadn't taken the stance that he had.

As I wrote in my preview for the Austrian Grand Prix on Thursday, something always happens at the Red Bull Ring. It is impossible to have a race here without some kind of unexpected drama unfolding. Although, if it always happens, is it still unexpected?

This Saturday's drama revolved around Jorge Martin and the first corner. A massive pile up there at the start of the sprint race saw Marco Bezzecchi, Miguel Oliveira, and Johann Zarco crash out. Martin got the blame, and was handed a Long Lap Penalty to be served on Sunday.

Was Martin really to blame? Yes and no. A little bit perhaps, though others played a role too. Mostly, though, the causes of the Turn 1 incident run much deeper, and are more troubling than the question of whether a particular rider's approach to the first corner was overly ambitious or not. And they highlight some of the underlying problems with MotoGP.

I am not a fan of the Red Bull Ring at Spielberg. It is an overly simplistic circuit – a bunch of straights with an omega in the middle to prevent it from being a basic trapezoid layout, stuck up against a hillside. Because it is basically three long straights and an extended left hander, speeds reached are high, and there is very little runoff. Add in a couple of blind crests where riders have a tendency to crash – the exit of Turn 1, the exit of Turn 3 – and you have a recipe for disaster.

That recipe came terrifyingly close to completion at Turn 3 in 2020. Johann Zarco clipped the front wheel of Franco Morbidelli's Yamaha on the way up the hill toward Turn 3. The bikes were traveling at such a speed that both Zarco's Ducati and Morbidelli's M1 shot across the track at Turn 3, Morbidelli's bike passing in between the Yamahas of Maverick Viñales and Valentino Rossi, Zarco's Ducati flying just over the head of Maverick Viñales.

This piece will perforce be as brief as I can make it (regular readers will know that "as short as I can make it" is usually code for "longer than I intended"), as I will be riding my motorcycle home tomorrow, and sleep beckons. One of the reasons for not doing the flyaways (apart from the crippling expense) is that the schedule is just too punishing. Triple headers are tough enough when they are in the same time zone, let alone when they are spread across thousands of kilometers of Pacific Ocean.

There is plenty to write about, of course, and some of it will have to wait for later. This weekend felt like a turning point for Marc Marquez and Honda, something we will come to later. That is a story which will develop over the coming months, but the Sachsenring is the race we will look back at as the turning point.

The race itself was good, tense and with a fair amount of overtaking. With several riders complaining on Saturday that it was impossible to pass other riders, it was good to the lead change hands five or so times throughout the race. Passing isn't impossible, it just needs care to line a pass up, and planning to see it through.

With three races on three consecutive weekends, MotoGP writers such as myself don't get much time to mull over events. As soon as one MotoGP round finishes, we are already looking ahead to the next. So the Sunday subscriber notes will be necessarily brief, though I hope to add a few more observations in the next day or so.

But a weekend like Mugello cannot pass without mention. In the end, it turned out to be a glorious Sunday, the sun blazing down and igniting the crowds, which were larger than we had expected and feared. The sun also meant track temperatures were higher than Saturday, when clouds had spared the asphalt the scorching Tuscan sun. That meant data collected from Saturday's sprint race was suddenly less useful than hoped for, confounding tire choice and forcing teams to choose between playing it safe with the medium, and risking the soft, which worked better for many riders. Like all gambles, it paid off for some, and not for others.

Yesterday, I wrote about the stupendous crowds at Le Mans for the 1000th motorcycle grand prix. The circuit and event were the right place to celebrate such a memorable occasion. But the fans who packed the circuit at Le Mans got their money's worth in terms of racing too. The MotoGP race was spectacular and tense in equal measure.

It was also a very messy affair. Of the 21 riders who lined up at 2pm on Sunday – Raul Fernandez had tried to ride after arm pump surgery, but that had proved impossible – only 13 made it to the checkered flag. It was a war of attrition.

Why all the crashes? A lot of reasons. There's a lot of hard braking at Le Mans, and more right than left corners. Temperatures can be relatively cool, and tires can cool off quickly. And riders found themselves caught between choosing a softer front tire and suffering in braking, and going for the medium or hard front and nursing the left side of the tire through Musée and Chemin aux Boeufs.

Perhaps the sprint races are starting to calm down a bit. Sure, there were only 17 finishers – Raul Fernandez withdrew on Friday because of his arm pump surgery, and Jack Miller, Augusto Fernandez, Jonas Folger, and Fabio Quartararo all crashed out – but there were no injuries, no riders taking each other out, no excessively enthusiastic attempts at a pass ending in collisions. It was hard, close, clean competition.

Surprising, then, that once again all of the drama is around the standard of stewarding. After the meeting the Stewards had on Friday with the riders, explaining how each contact would be punished and laying out the guidelines they use to assess which penalty to apply in which situation, they went on to apparently throw their own guidelines out of the window and – correctly – not penalize any of the several riders who touched other riders while making hard passes. This left half the riders furious, the other half delighted, and everyone dismissing the role of the Stewards as pointless. It felt like they span the great Wheel O' Penalties again, and we all got lucky when it came back saying "Free Pass".