MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

By rights, the Italian Grand Prix should be the biggest event on the MotoGP calendar. Arguably the most spectacular track in the most spectacular setting on the calendar (though Phillip Island might rightly want to dispute this assertion), in the middle of Tuscany, one of the most beautiful parts of the planet.

It pretty much was once. In 2016, over 100,000 people turned up to watch Jorge Lorenzo pip Marc Marquez at the line to win the race. The following year saw a crowd of 98,000. These were among the biggest attendances of those years.

So it came as something of a shock last year when I was able to drive straight into the track on Sunday in 15 minutes. Gone was the customary 45 minutes spent sitting in traffic, slowly crawling toward the narrow two-lane country road which inexplicably serves as the main entrance to the legendary Italian circuit. Gone too were the masses of fans thronging that access road, swarming toward the track with chairs, ice boxes, and backpacks. Worst of all, the packed hillsides were also gone. At 43,661, the crowd was not exactly sparse, but it certainly wasn’t the same seething yellow mass that it was in previous years.

Local hero

Will the crowds return to Mugello? The first signs are not good. When we left the paddock on Thursday evening, there was a handful of tents on the hillside, and the only noise was a lone two-stroke chainsaw engine being tortured at full blast. Much later, sitting in an osteria in Borgo San Lorenzo (the food in Italy is always good, but here it was exceptional, and cheap too), the waiter told us he didn't expect the crowds to be up to much. "Ten years ago there was a river of yellow from the autostrada to the circuit, 20 kilometers," he told us. "And now?" He shrugged.

It will be a shame if attendance is once again low, because as I wrote last night, it promises to be a spectacular event. The field is back at full strength, in numbers if not necessarily in fitness. Pecco Bagnaia is still limping from the heel he fractured in his crash with Maverick Viñales at Le Mans, though he insists it will not cause him much trouble. "I’m not 100%, but I'm struggling more with walking than riding," the factory Ducati rider told the press conference. "Because after four days without knowing that, I broke my ankle I was riding here just to train. I was feeling pain, but nothing that with a bit of focus was impossible to ignore and think just about the riding so I think that it will not affect my race weekend."

We feared rain, but it did not come. Instead, Friday brought spectacular weather, Mugello bathing in the warm sunshine which leads press release writers to wax poetical about circuits nestling in the Tuscan hills. The action was spectacular too, both good and bad. In addition to a frantic and thrilling final 10 minutes of Practice 2 for the MotoGP class, there were some terrifying crashes.

Rory Skinner gave a masterclass in destroying a Kalex Moto2 machine, bringing out the red flags while the marshals removed the debris from the track. Syarifuddin Azman had a huge highside in Moto3, which left him hanging in the air for long enough to write the first chapter of his autobiography. Aleix Espargaro chucked his Aprilia in the gravel in Practice 1, Fabio Di Giannantonio tried a very ill-timed pass on Alex Rins into San Donato at the end of P2, and Joan Mir got flicked off at Biondetti 2 to bring his day, and indeed weekend, to an early end.

Are sprint races exciting? The Mugello race was perhaps the first one which felt a bit flat, which felt like something was missing. Despite the fact there was plenty of action, it seemed a little more random rather than planned, the result of a brief shower at the southern end of the circuit starting on the second lap, and ended a lap or so later. That concertinaed the field together, scrambled it up a little, before the MotoGP riders realized the rain was not setting in, and they put their heads down and pushed. At that point, the race was tense, but not exciting. After lap 5 of 11, the first four places were set, and though the times stayed relatively close to the finish, nobody ever really got close enough to attempt a pass.

On the other hand, perhaps the contrast with qualifying was just too great. Qualifying had drama, action, and controversy. Marc Marquez needed a tow, couldn't get one from the rider he wanted, and accidentally ended up getting the best tow available, thanks to the concerns and anger of Pecco Bagnaia.

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.

With only one factory seat up for grabs in 2024, MotoGP's Silly Season – the frantic period in which riders, teams, and managers haggle over contracts and rides – has been relatively quiet so far. But all that changed on Sunday night at Mugello, after Franco Morbidelli dropped a quiet bombshell to Dorna's cameras. "Do I want to secure another year with Yamaha?" the Monster Energy Yamaha rider responded to a question from Jack Appleyard about beating his teammate, answering the follow up question with an enigmatic "Ask Lin," referring to Lin Jarvis, Managing Director of Yamaha Motor Racing.

Morbidelli's answer both kicked off a round of speculation, as well as highlighting the scale of the problem facing Yamaha. We had all assumed that Morbidelli would want to hang on to a factory seat, to have direct input into the bike he will be racing. But it appears that the appeal of a factory seat at Yamaha is declining. Not quite as fast as at Honda, perhaps, but still declining.

So where are we in the process of finding riders for seats in 2023? Here's what we know based on rumor, gossip, speculation, and insider information.

Departure imminent?

It is hard to imagine two more different tracks that Mugello and Sachsenring. The Sachsenring is nearly 1600 meters (about a mile, if you must) shorter than Mugello, and the top speed at the German track is just over 304 km/h, or 62 km/h down on the speed Brad Binder was clocked at through the speed traps at Mugello. Mugello is big, wide, and with a lot of left-right and right-left combination corners. Sachsenring is tight, twisty, and is mostly just variations on ways to turn left. Mugello has 15 corners, while officially, the Sachsenring has 13. Considering the bikes barely get off the left edge of the tire between Turns 4 and 7, and again between Turns 8 and 10, you could almost as fairly say that Sachsenring has 8 corners.

So to go from Mugello, where speed and bravery is everything, to the Sachsenring, where managing the front and nursing the rear for as long as possible is what makes the difference, is quite the transition. At Mugello, both sides of the tire get a pretty good workout. The Sachsenring eats the left side of tires.

The first day at the Sachsenring always tends to be a bit messy. A lot of crashes, as riders struggle to remember that if they don't warm the their front tires properly, Turn 11 or Turn 1 will bite them, and badly. And when the weather fails to cooperate, like on Friday, that makes it doubly difficult.

The cold track temperatures and the aftermath of the rain left the riders caught between two suboptimal choices: use the soft front in the certain knowledge it won't last the 30 laps of the race on Sunday; or use the medium front and try to strike a balance between pushing the tire to get heat into it, and being cautious into right handers because if you aren't, things will end badly for you.

It ended badly for a lot of riders on Friday. There were 23 crashes at the Sachsenring on the first day of practice, compared with 15 last year and 18 the year before. 15 of those crashes were at either Turn 1, Turn 3, or Turn 11, which just happen to be the three right-hand corners at the Sachsenring. And in the MotoGP class, pretty much all of those crashes happened on the medium tire.

Broken in half

The summer weather in Saxony is unpredictable, and especially, it is highly localized. I rode into the track this morning through the rolling landscape and sweeping roads, it was dry pretty much all the way to track, until I hit Hohenstein-Ernstthal, where the Sachsenring is located, where the roads were soaking from a heavy local downpour. A lot of water can fall in a short time, and in a very small area.

(Incidentally, I cannot recommend Saxony – and all of Germany – highly enough as a place to ride motorcycles. Not spectacular, but possessed of a bucolic charm, the sweeping roads largely empty and well paved, passing through villages and towns oozing with character. It's tempting just to keep straight on past the car park and go explore the region, and return in time for the rider debriefs. But duty calls.)

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.