MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

Five weeks off is quite the gap for MotoGP. The memories of the first half of the season have faded, so before I start to look ahead to Silverstone, here's a quick refresher on how we got here.

Previously, on MotoGP 2023...

MotoGP's season opener at Portimão turned into carnage. The cause? Added to the hypercharged levels of adrenaline present at the first race of the season each year – some riders seem to believe they can win the championship in the first corner of the first race, judging by the kamikaze energy with which they throw themselves into it – was the fact that Portimão is no Losail. A tight and difficult circuit, which had the added benefit of a couple of days of testing, with the concomitant rubber laid down, added extra grip to an excess of enthusiasm and dangerously sharp gravel, all of which took their toll.

Making things worse was the new schedule, with the addition of a sprint race on Saturday. With both practice sessions on Friday deciding who went through to Q2, riders were pushing for fast laps pretty much from the first moment they left the pits on Friday morning. And things went downhill from there.

It is no secret that Honda and Yamaha are struggling in MotoGP at the moment. The first rider in the championship on a Japanese motorcycle is Monster Energy Yamaha's Fabio Quartararo in ninth place with 64 points, less than a third of the total of championship leader, Ducati Lenovo's Pecco Bagnaia. Honda and Yamaha are in fourth and fifth place in the manufacturer standings, the Monster Energy Yamaha team are in sixth in the team standings and the Repsol Honda team are dead last, behind the CryptoDATA RNF Aprilia team and the GasGas Factory Racing Tech3 team, both of who have been missing their best riders for most of the season. Things are not going well.

This is bad for MotoGP in a number of ways. To start with, it makes the sport look very lopsided. Ducati have been very successful so far this year, but the lack of competitive Hondas and Yamahas only exaggerates the extent to which the Italian factory has dominated. Ducatis have won all but one of the grand prix, and all but two of the sprint races. They have taken 34 of 48 possible podium places, or 71%, and nearly 52% of all places in the top ten.

The MotoGP test riders finally got a pretty much fully dry day of running on the final day of the shakedown test at Sepang. Michele Pirro, Cal Crutchlow, Katsuyuki Nakasuga, Lorenzo Savadori, Jonas Folger, Dani Pedrosa, Stefan Bradl, and GasGas rookie Augusto Fernandez managed to get some real work done. How much more? Fernandez did 47 full laps on Tuesday, where he had managed only 34 and 26 on the two days previous.

What did we learn? Not much more than we already knew from the previous two days. The more subtle changes will only be obvious once journalists and photographers can get into pit lane and take a proper close up look at the bikes. If you are interested in seeing the times, check Peter McLaren's report from day 3 over on Crash.net.

There were still one or two interesting points to note, however. KTM rolled out another aerodynamics update, though it is not yet the full package. This included a version of the fat lower ground effect side section which the Austrian factory tried at Valencia, following the lead of Aprilia earlier in the year.

What have we learned from the first two days of the MotoGP shakedown test at Sepang so far? Well, the first thing we have learned is that it can still rain quite a lot in the tropics. The test riders and GasGas rookie Augusto Fernandez have not had a great deal of dry track time over the past couple of days.

Combine a damp track with the fact that it is test riders out there – Cal Crutchlow for Yamaha; Michele Pirro for Ducati; Lorenzo Savadori for Aprilia; Stefan Bradl for Honda; and Dani Pedrosa, Mika Kallio, and new signing Jonas Folger for KTM – alongside GasGas rookie Fernandez, and it means the times don't mean much. Fernandez gets extra track time by dint of being a rookie, compensation for the reduction of official testing time which has taken place over the last five years or so.

The rumors of former Suzuki boss Ken Kawauchi moving to Honda raised many eyebrows in the MotoGP paddock. Engineers switching factories may be commonplace for European manufacturers, but it is almost unheard of, and unthinkable for Japanese factories. As Japan's leading MotoGP journalist, Akira Nishimura his his insight into what the news that Kawauchi is moving to HRC for the 2023 season means.

Ken Kawauchi, Suzuki's long-time technical boss, will become HRC's new technical manager for the 2023 season following the Hamamatsu company's withdrawal from MotoGP. Below is my brief insight into this bombshell news.

It was January 10 when I first heard about Kawauchi-san’ joining HRC. I was chatting with a fellow European journalist by text when the subject came up. I understood it was likely to happen, because I remembered a casual exchange with Kawauchi-san during our season review interview last December.

After the interview, I stopped the recorder, and we left the interview room. Then, I joked to him, “why don’t you move to, say, KTM, after your company’s withdrawal from MotoGP? I believe they will hire you with a very high salary.”

For the past few years, Ducati have been the manufacturer pioneering the direction of development in MotoGP. Ducati will come up with a new idea, which the other manufacturers will hastily copy, with a greater or lesser degree of success. Holeshot devices, ride-height devices, winglets. The latest example of this are the tail fins, the four winglets sticking up from the tail of the Desmosedici, which have suddenly also sprouted from the tail of the Honda RC213V and the Yamaha M1.

(As an aside, what do these tail winglets do? Riders report they give better stability, especially under braking. They are too tall to be purely vortex generators – which would reduce drag by smoothing the boundary layer of air on the tail. A possible explanation is that they are directing the airflow coming off the rider, the least aerodynamic part of the motorcycle. But they could also be helping to keep the tail of the bike straight under braking once the load disappears from the rear wheel and shifts to the front. But I digress.)

Over the next week or so, I will be taking a deep dive into what I saw at the test, with the help of photos from Niki Kovács and having talked a few things over with Peter Bom. But examining all of the photos and thinking about what I saw has been an intensive affair, as I tried to figure out what was going on.

But we'll start off with Honda. For a lot of reasons. Not just because Marc Marquez expressed disappointment at what HRC had brought to the test, but also because two new riders switched to Honda, including the 2020 MotoGP champion Joan Mir and the winner of the Valencia MotoGP race Alex Rins.

I gave my first impressions from the test on Tuesday evening after the test, but the trouble with working quickly is that you don't notice what you have missed. There are so many small changes that you don't really have time to absorb them all. And sometimes, there are so many eye-catching changes that you miss out on other big changes, which is certainly the case with Honda.

One complaint has consistently run through the past couple of MotoGP seasons, it has been the pressure of the front tire. Pick just about any race and you will find riders saying that rising pressures and therefore (Boyle's Law) temperatures of the front tire cost them a better result. At Jerez, for example, Fabio Quartararo had been unable to do much more than follow Pecco Bagnaia home because every time he got into the Italian's slipstream, the temperature of the front tire would rise, as would the pressure, making it impossible form him to outbrake the Ducati.

At Motegi, it was Bagnaia who was struggling with increased front pressure as he followed Quartararo around, eventually contributing to his crash. Enea Bastianini had similar issues that race. In Aragon, where Quartararo had real trouble in 2021, the Yamaha rider was planning his tire pressure around his starting position, not that it ended up mattering much after he crashed into the back of Marc Marquez.

Marc Marquez was hoping to make an impact on his return to MotoGP at the Motorland Aragon circuit. He made an impact alright, but not quite the one he was intending. A lightning start, collisions with Fabio Quartararo and Takaaki Nakagami – much, much more on that later – and a withdrawal due to having a chunk of Quartararo's fairing stuck in the back of his bike. Marquez had come up short on his objective: "Try to get kilometers, try to finish the race, and we didn't get the target. I just did one lap," he said after the race.

We will come to apportioning blame for the Quartararo-Marquez crash later, and how Enea Bastianini came to the championship leader's aid at the end of the race. The race itself was in some ways a repeat of last year: a waiting game, with a burst of excitement settling the outcome in the last couple of laps.

Bastianini's victory wrapped up the manufacturers championship for Ducati again with five races to go. There is no doubt that the Ducati is now the best bike on the MotoGP grid. But the halfhearted celebrations in the factory Ducati Lenovo garage betrayed just how much more the riders championship matters to Ducati.