MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

It certainly felt like there were a lot of crashes during the 2023 MotoGP season. That impression was reinforced by the fact that 2023 did not see a single MotoGP race on Sunday with a full grid. At all 20 of the Sunday grand prix races, there was at least one, and usually multiple riders missing, with replacement riders getting a lot of extra work.

Impressions are one thing, but do the numbers really reflect that? On Tuesday, we received a neatly formatted report on all of the crashes which took place in the three grand prix classes in 2023, and comparison charts with previous seasons. The 2023 Final Falls Report, as it is called, seems to bear out that, yes, there were more crashes in the MotoGP class last year than usual. And the rise appears to be confined to the MotoGP class.

One of the bigger changes for the 2024 MotoGP season is that the penalties introduced from the middle of 2023 for racing below the minimum tire pressure set by Michelin will be much more severe. Instead of the sliding scale per offense used in 2023, anyone found to be riding with underinflated tires for more than half the race (or 30% of the sprint race) in 2024 will face automatic disqualification for violating the technical regulations.

That, of course, immediately begs the question, how different would the 2023 MotoGP championship had looked if riders who had violated the tire pressure rules had been disqualified instead of given a warning for the first offense, and a time penalty for further infractions.

To do that is slightly more complicated than it looks. You can't just deduct the number of points scored by each rider penalized for tire pressure infractions. After all, the points they scored are a result of the position they finished. If a rider is disqualified, all of the riders behind them move up one position, and have their point scores increased accordingly.

It was a moment we have been waiting for for a while. The team launch of the Gresini Ducati team, and the first chance that English-speaking (and Italian-speaking) journalists would have the chance to speak to Marc Marquez about his first ride on the Ducati Desmosedici GP23, which he will be riding in 2024, with brother Alex on the other side of the box.

Did we learn anything? A bit. Less than we hoped, more than we expected. The problem is that Marc Marquez was in the factory Honda team for a long time, and has long since learned how to talk without giving away very much real information. It may take him a while to loosen up to satellite team standards, where riders will give you much more detail about the bike and their situation, not having the factory media department clamping down on their every word.

In 2023, Ducati won the MotoGP riders title, the MotoGP manufacturers title, and the Pramac Ducati squad – a private team with full factory bikes, full factory support, and riders with factory contracts – won the team title. The top three places in the championship were occupied by Ducati riders – Pecco Bagnaia, Jorge Martin, and Marco Bezzecchi – and there were six Ducati riders in the top ten. Oh, and Alvaro Bautista won the World Superbike title for Ducati, and Nicolo Bulega dominated World Supersport on a Panigale V2.

How do you improve on that? The risk is that you have more to lose by changing than to gain. But change you must, for your rivals spend every waking hour working on trying to dethrone you. And so Gigi Dall'Igna, Technical Director Davide Barana, and the team of Ducati Corse engineers have found ways to give the Ducati Desmosedici GP24 more power without compromising power delivery, and new aero to help with acceleration.