MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

When the 2023 MotoGP season is over, the Motegi round is likely to be seen as one of the turning points. Either because this is the place where Pecco Bagnaia and his team fixed their problems with the Ducati GP23 and stopped Jorge Martin's momentum in its tracks, or because he couldn't, and Martin would go on to sweep the title.

It is still too early to say which of those two versions of events will transpire, and the sprint race at Motegi did little to clarify the picture. Jorge Martin was unstoppable, shattering the pole record, beating the race lap record by over a second (though the sprint races don't count toward setting race lap records), and leading from start to finish, after shaking off a brief challenge from Brad Binder. But Pecco Bagnaia looked a lot better than he has done in recent races, finishing third and limiting the damage to Martin.

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.

With just two days of testing during the MotoGP season, track time outside of race weekends is like gold dust. Just over halfway through the season, teams and riders find themselves with a lot of questions needing urgent answers. Factory engineers have their own agendas, with prototypes and new ideas to collect data on in preparation for the first post-season test at Valencia, to give themselves enough time to get bikes and engines ready for 2024.

Michelin, too, have things they want testing. New compounds for 2024, and very early work on the 2025 front tire which is meant to solve the current woes with tire pressure caused by ride-height devices and aero. That tire is reserved for test riders, however. The MotoGP regulars won't get their hands on it until Valencia or Sepang at the earliest.

So there was an awful lot to test on Monday at Misano. A new engine, chassis and aero for Yamaha, a new bike (sans engine) for Honda, carbon-fiber frames for KTM and Aprilia, and experiments with suspension and setup and bike geometry to work through.

MotoGP championships are hard to win and incredibly easy to lose. Yesterday, Pecco Bagnaia rode a stupendous race to finish second behind an unstoppable Aleix Espargaro in the sprint race. Today, Bagnaia took off at the start, and saw his race finish after just two corners. He highsided in front of a storming pack, lucky that his teammate Enea Bastianini had messed up the first corner and wiped out five other riders, clearing out the field somewhat and putting the rest on a state of high alert.

The fates smile on Bagnaia on Sunday at Montmeló. Brad Binder was unsighted by Maverick Viñales and Miguel Oliveira, and so had no warning that Bagnaia had crashed in front of him. Yet he managed to deflect his bike just enough that he merely clipped Bagnaia's leg, rather than hit the Italian. Amazingly, though Bagnaia was removed to the medical center by ambulance and examined both there and in a local hospital, he came away with no fractures, just a lot of bruising.

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.

It has been a long and eventful weekend, and there will be much to write about this coming week. Including an interview with Lin Jarvis, talking about the decision to sign Alex Rins instead of Franco Morbidelli, what Yamaha is doing to address their problems, and what type of concessions would really make a difference for Yamaha and Honda.

But first, some initial thoughts after a fantastic day of racing, across all three classes. It made a nonsense of British national broadcaster ITV's decision not to show the MotoGP race live, preferring to broadcast a meaningless soccer game. That was bad for ITV, but also bad for MotoGP. Silverstone is one of the tracks that produces fantastic racing, which needs to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. Today's race was the kind of race that will bring in new fans if casual TV viewers get to see it.

Assen has always been an important race on the MotoGP calendar for a lot of reasons. It is a historic venue, where victory carries a symbolic value as well as counting toward the championship. There may be the same 25 points on offer as every other race, but at Assen, as at Mugello, Phillip Island, Jerez those 25 points feel more precious, gilded. They are 25 points that sparkle just a little more.

In 2022 and 2023, they carried even more weight than usual. Assen was the last race before an unusually long summer break, so a strong result at the Dutch TT gives riders momentum to carry in to the five-week stretch before Silverstone.

Last year, Assen felt like it had an outsized effect on the title chase. It was the place where Pecco Bagnaia ended his streak of unforced errors and posted a flawless performance to win. Fabio Quartararo, on the other hand, crashed into Aleix Espargaro, then crashed out a second time. After Sachsenring, Quartararo held a 91 point lead over the eventual champion. A week later at Assen, Bagnaia had cut the gap to 66 points.

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.