MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

Championships are about consistency. Casey Stoner used to say that if you look after the wins, then the titles look after themselves. The counterpoint to that is that you can't win every race. So to if you really want to be sure of your championship, you have to grab as many points as possible on the days that you can't win.

That has proven to be difficult in recent years. Since 2022, the main championship contenders have made a specialty of falling off or finishing well down the order. That year, Pecco Bagnaia had four DNFs and finished outside the points in another race, while Fabio Quartararo, the rider Bagnaia beat to the 2022 title, had three DNFs, finished outside the points once, and was all too often outside the top five.

If anything, 2023 was even worse. Bagnaia once again racked up four DNFs and finished outside the points once in a sprint and once in a grand prix. Jorge Martin, who took the title down to the final race at Valencia, also had four DNFs, including in that last race. But where Bagnaia was taking podiums when he couldn't win, Martin was finishing outside the top five, especially in the first part of the season.

Mugello is the most Italian of racetracks. Set against the stunning backdrop of the Tuscan hills, it is a bucolic location. And the 2024 Italian Grand Prix took that to another level: held on June 2nd, the day Italy celebrates the foundation of the Republic, which created the modern iteration of the country after the Second World War. On the grid, the famous tenor Maurizio Marchini belted out Il Canto degli Italiani, Italy's boisterous and rousing national anthem, while Eurofighters of the Italian air force flew so low over the circuit that we saw the hat of someone up on the VIP deck at the top of the building flutter past, blown off as they passed.

On the second row of the grid stood two blue Ducatis. Yes, blue. The factory Ducati Lenovo team were kitted out in the colors of the Azzurri, Italy's national sporting teams. On the backs of the shirts of riders, mechanics, engineers, and managers, their names were displayed in white letters. The Ducati Lenovo team were Italy's national team in MotoGP, was the message they conveyed. And just like Italy's national soccer team, when they turn up for a contest, they come to win.

By the time you read this article, there is an 80% chance that the information contained within it will have been superseded. We are in the middle of MotoGP Silly Season, and in the run up to the series resuming in Assen after a short break, announcements are being made. As we saw with the news that Aprilia have signed Marco Bezzecchi to a "multiple-year deal", which is the latest fad in contract press releases, and is code for a two-year deal with options to extend. And usually, options to terminate early, though those are almost never invoked.

So where does the Bezzecchi announcement leave us? As I have written previously, and we have discussed on the Paddock Pass Podcast, Bezzecchi was part of a chain of rider (and team) movements expected to take effect before the next summer break ends and MotoGP reconvenes at Silverstone. There are more moves in the pipeline, and some may even come this week.

First, an overview of what is available and what isn't. The signing of Bezzecchi leaves just two factory seats (tentatively) open. Bezzecchi will partner Jorge Martin at Aprilia, Marc Marquez joins Pecco Bagnaia at the factory Ducati Lenovo squad, and Pedro Acosta and Brad Binder are KTM's new Red Bull Factory Racing superteam.

Open seats

Between 150,000 and 130,000 years ago, as the great glaciers retreated north at the end of the Late Saalian ice age, they left a trail of all the dirt, sand, and rocks they had picked up and ground down strewn all over Northern Europe. Part of that mixture of glacial garbage, which geologists call boulder clay, formed an area of the northern Netherlands known as the Hondsrug, literally the "Dog's Ridge", but probably named after the Hunze, the river which runs to the east of the formation.

To the west lies the city of Assen, and its geological history explains why it sits at the dizzying height of around 12 meters above sea level, and why it was mostly spared the unending cycle of flood and inundation which nor' wester storms and rivers bursting their banks which makes up most of Dutch history.

That geology also helps explain what makes the TT Circuit Assen one of the greatest motorcycle racing tracks in history. The mixture of sand and clay created marshes and creeks, which the peoples which came to live in what is now Drenthe built their roads along. Those roads were not quite straight, following the meanders and kinks as the water flowed away towards the sea.

Councils taxed

If a week is a long time in politics, as the saying has it, then three weeks is an absolute eternity in MotoGP. There may only have been 24 days between the rained off test after Mugello and the paddock assembling again at Assen, but it feels like there has been a massive shift in the balance of power in MotoGP. A lot of things have happened in the intervening period.

There have been a bunch of contract signed, obviously. Jorge Martin to Aprilia (provoked by Marc Marquez getting the factory Ducati seat alongside Pecco Bagnaia) kicked off something of a chain reaction. Maverick Viñales and Enea Bastianini to KTM Tech3. Marco Bezzecchi to factory Aprilia. And it looks like Pramac will finally make the switch to Yamaha, and Alex Marquez is close to renewing with Gresini Ducati.

Things have happened on track as well. The Yamaha riders have had a busy schedule. A test in Valencia, then a visit to Silverstone for a special Monster Energy media day (energy drinks make so much money they can afford to fly stars in on private jets just to put on a glorified track day), then back to Valencia again for another test, to try out a new engine. One which is significantly better, and gives the M1 back some of its strong points, making the bike much easier to turn again.

The first cut is the deepest

Fridays at Assen are always exceptionally busy for me. Being based in The Netherlands, it's my home race, and so I have a number of obligations which come on top of my normal duties of trying to encapsulate what just happened at the race track. So today's round up will of necessity be shorter and more perfunctory than usual.

So let's start with the most obvious thing: Pecco Bagnaia is clearly the fastest at Assen. He is in the groove, and everything is going his way. "For me, it’s just because I started with a good feeling. The others will improve for sure," the Ducati Lenovo rider told us.

The work done during the season, the lessons learned and refinements made to setup, are all starting to pay off. "All the work done from the start of the season is starting to give us more feeling to start on Friday," he said. At Jerez, they had made a big change to the setup, and since then he had found the right feeling with the bike. "I wasn't able to feel well with the bike and what we did in Jerez was a big change and from that moment we started to be always competitive from the Friday."

Lessons from the past

This was an improvement over 2023, Bagnaia explained. "Last year I was starting behind every time, every time starting with big things to do on the bike. It was not easy. So these kind of things is helping a lot to start in a weekend and already know which way to take."

There are tracks which riders like, there are tracks which riders love, and there are tracks where riders become one with every corner, every brake point, every bump and every rise. For some reason, a particular layout will suit the riding style of a specific rider. If that rider is fast enough, and if their bike is good enough, they can reign supreme, make it look effortless.

Think of Marc Marquez at The Sachsenring. Or Valentino Rossi at Mugello in the early years of this century. Or Casey Stoner at Phillip Island. Places which become so intertwined with a particular rider that it becomes almost impossible to imagine anyone else winning there. That the result of the race is a foregone conclusion, even before they even arrive there.