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Michelin's Piero Taramasso: Martin's Crash, The Medium Rear, And Why The Rules Tie Their Hands

By David Emmett |

Jorge Martin's crash in the first hour of the Sepang MotoGP test has caused tension between Aprilia and the official tire supplier Michelin. Martin suffered a huge highside in the first hour of the test, when his rear tire let go in Turn 2 and flicked him over the bike. He landed very heavily, fracturing a metacarpal bone in his right hand and three metatarsal bones in his left foot.

Martin has since had surgery to fix the metatarsal with a screw, and is set to miss the final preseason test at Buriram. He hopes to be fit for the opening round of MotoGP at Buriram to be held from February 28th to March 2nd. But that means he will start the 2025 MotoGP season and attempt to defend his title with just 13 laps under his belt so far this year, and having played almost no role in developing the 2025 Aprilia RS-GP he will be riding this season.

On the Wednesday evening, Aprilia CEO Massimo Rivola came into the media center to explain to journalists what Aprilia believed had happened. Though he did not accuse Michelin directly, he left little room for any other conclusions. "It was a bad crash for no reason, with no mistake on his side and no mistake on the bike’s side," Rivola said. Nor was it a cold tire. "The tires were in the right temperature and the right pressure. But we have no explanation in fact."

Out early

Martin had gone out with the medium rear tire, the harder of the two options Michelin had brought to Sepang. He had gone out on the bike he had first used at the Barcelona test, then come back in at the end of his run. Then he had gone out for a second run on the 2025 prototype, and come back in at the end of a run.

Martin had gone out for a third run on the same bike and same tires, and crashed at Turn 1, a harmless lowside. He had returned to the pits to have the bike checked, then gone out for his next run. On that lap, when he flicked the bike left for Turn 2, the bike reciprocated by flicking him off and fracturing his hand and foot.

The loss of Martin was a massive blow to Aprilia, and Rivola's statements are clearly an attempt to protect the rider from criticism and deflect any blame people may try to put on him. But the statement by Rivola did not sit well with Michelin.

2025
MotoGP
Sepang, Malaysia
Aprilia
Jorge Martin
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Comments

I'll be renewing my subscription. Great explanation David. I'm puzzled why Martin didn't try to protect himself before he landed, my son took Aikido for years and they teach you how to roll before landing.

At a guess, the bike rider has just been punched off the bike, a fast slap upwards from the seat and tank. The suits aren't the best for movememt to begin with and at that point it inflates like an inversed balloon pop becoming even more difficult. The rider has also suddenly gone from his known path and orientation to a sometimes complex trajectory and rotation. The brain takes a little time to figure any of that. Watching Martin's flight at full speed, he figured out his orientation when he felt the track smack him in the face...always a good reference plane. 

There's a huge difference between something chaotic and something repeated, often in a similar fashion, many times. Or, a huge difference in acceleration, Martin was fired out of a gun. Also, in general, we are very fast at understanding linear motion with a stable orientation. Throw in some rotation or a curved path and we're a lot slower. 

The only replay I saw was in slow mo. In reality Id wager the whole thing happened in nearly an instant. Plus there was no way for him to roll, he pretty much fell straight down from 2m or so in the air. Frankly he was lucky to escape with the injuries he got.

Maybe Rivola shot his mouth off, but the other side explained by this excellent article is that Taramaso states quite plainly that the carcass temp is "the important one" for tyre performance.  These tyres if not at full temp can eject riders and break bones.  But the "important" temp is not visible to teams or riders, only available afterward.  Worse still, the data that they do have (surface temp) and is displayed to the rider in real time is therefore actually wrong or at least misleading.  Not ideal.

But...professional teams and riders should (and I expect most do) know this.  A tyre on a bike that has had an off-track excursion or small crash such as Jorge's will cool and then come back up to temp (on the surface temp data) but the good guys will know "but take it a bit easy for two laps till it's fully hot again".  You don't need sensors for that, just sense.

Bottom line, sounds like mistakes were made and Taramaso is probably quite justified in saying that none of them were by Michelin.

Would 10/10, or even 15/15, solve the problem? (and, does a problem even exist, if it was just a crash?)

Additional allocation of the existing tires can't cost much more can it? Why not let the teams use all the softs Michelin can bring?

The issue is the way Dorna/IRTA make rules and decisions. It takes years, and in many cases a unanimous consensus. Even if JM's crash had nothing to do with the tires, having to use anything but the best tire during every minute of testing has huge consequences for the manu's next two years of racing, where the engine is locked in, and they will be stuck with many other parts for 2025. 

There clearly were not enough tyres of the preferred allocation to suit the conditions that they encountered for the test. But that isn't the fault of Michelin, they have to make and ship tyres weeks in advance with compounds and constructions selected to anticipate the environmental conditions that the test or race is likely to be help under. Tough job unless you have crystal balls. So they have to spread as wide a net as they can to cover that window. Sometimes not all the tyres are ideal. So it's really the rules to blame and its the limits on the amount of tyres that's the obvious culprit to point the finger at. That's heavily influenced by logistics and cost, but it probably should be weighted more in terms of safety of riders. Obviously no one wants to see a tyre fall apart in a GP so they have to be sure they have a tyre that will last up to 30 laps or so. But during testing that shouldn't be a factor so why such a strict limit on how many they are allowed? Is it a green thing to limit the carbon footprint? The most important carbon footprint is that credit-card sized patch of rubber between bike and asphalt!

The reason for the limit on tire quantity is cost. In testing, teams and riders want to use a new tire to see how much grip the bike has. And so if test tires were unlimited, they would do maybe one or two long runs, then maybe 10 runs of 2-3 laps and 5-10 runs of 5 laps. So instead of using +- 3 sets of tires a day, they'd use 15 or 20. And those tires would then be thrown away. 

That is costly both in pure financial terms, but also in environmental terms. Those tires have to be manufactured (a material and energy intensive process), shipped, stored in climate controlled conditions. To then throw away a lot of perfectly good tires because nobody wants to use them (and only MotoGP riders can use them, as they require 300 horsepower and the extreme ability of a MotoGP rider to push them to the limit to get them up to working temperature) would be incredibly wasteful. 

Articulates excellently the predicament of MotoGP riders. Have we already forgotten what happened to probably the fastest rider ever? A very astral Marc Marquez had his stellar career upended and almost ended, through a series of unfathomable disasters --bad star influence. It comes with the lot.