MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

If the MotoGP riders thought Friday was a complicated day on the new surface at the Motorland Aragon circuit, they hadn't reckoned with Saturday. Heavy rain fell overnight at the track, starting as I was leaving the circuit around 8pm, and kept falling on and off throughout the night. It left the track damp in the morning, but above all, it left the track filthy.

The region around Alcañiz, Bajo Aragon, is arid and dusty. So when rain falls, it sucks the dust and dirt from the air and deposits it on the ground. In this case, on the surface of the Motorland Aragon track. The Friday night rain had a double effect. It washed the rubber laid down on Friday off the track. And it washed the dust out of the atmosphere and onto the asphalt.

The grip, which had been improving through Friday, was completely gone on Saturday. Times in FP2 were not much to write home about, as the track dried out. Riders picked up the pace in qualifying, but even Marc Márquez' breathtaking pole time - a 1'46.766 - was nearly a whole second slower than the time he set on Friday afternoon. And Márquez was over eight tenths faster than Pedro Acosta and Pecco Bagnaia, beside him on the grid.

In the summer of 2023, Marc Márquez began to ponder taking the biggest gamble of his career. It had been three years of misery. First, breaking his arm in that fateful crash at Jerez at Turn 3 in July 2020, when MotoGP returned after the start of the pandemic. Then trying to ride again just three days after surgery to plate the humerus he broke.

That was one of the worst decisions of his life, nearly ending his career and leaving him in pain for the best part of two years. Three more surgeries followed, each one of which risked damaging the nerves which run down the humerus, which could have ended his career. He had a new plate fitted, then another surgery to deal with an infection in the bone, and finally one last radical operation to try to fix the issues caused. Surgeons would break the humerus again, and rotate the lower part through 30 degrees, back to its original position, and fix it in place again.

Marc Márquez' return to victory and the collision between Alex Márquez and Pecco Bagnaia ate up a lot of attention at the Motorland Aragon GP. Understandably so. Márquez winning after 1043 days and leaving the safety of the Repsol Honda factory team for the impoverished Gresini Ducati squad is huge. And the 13 or 16 points Bagnaia lost as a result of the crash could potentially end up making a difference in the championship.

But there was a lot more happening during the MotoGP race at Aragon. Pedro Acosta returned to the podium during a sprint race for the first time since Mugello, and for the first time since Austin in a Sunday grand prix. Though Acosta earned his sprint podium, his Sunday podium was gifted to him when Bagnaia and Márquez crashed out ahead of him.

Yet this podium is significant. It is the result of reverting to a setup with which Acosta had booked so many successes earlier in the season. A disastrous outing at their home GP at the Red Bull Ring had convinced KTM that something needed to be done, and by abandoning the changes which offered potential advantages for a setup they understood and knew would be more consistent allowed Acosta to ride like he wanted to again.

Back to the future

It is quite the contrast, going from Aragon to Misano. Aragon was always a little low grip, and the weather conditions made it a thousand times worse. Misano, on the other hand, is a track with a lot of grip. So much that Michelin are going a step harder again with their front tires, after everyone used the hard for the race last year. Since then, the bikes have only gotten faster, and are stressing the front even more.

Aragon is also a flowing circuit with a lot of long corners, Misano is much more stop and go, with a lot of tight corners and short straights. Aragon is in the middle of a high arid plain, miles away from anywhere. Misano is next to one of the busiest stretches of holiday coast in Italy.

It is also home to the vast majority of the Italian riders and Italian denizens of the paddock. The area around Misano - the Emilia-Romagna region, and parts of Marche - and the valley of the river Po, which flows from the Alps in the west down to the Adriatic between Venice and Ravenna, hold one of the densest concentrations of motorsport engineering in the world, rivaling Silverstone's F1 Corridor.

Familiar territory

The problem with back-to-back races for journalists is that the Thursday of the second race feels pretty flat. We all spoke to the riders four days ago, and not enough has happened in the intervening period to make it interesting. Perhaps we journos are a little too jaded (which comes with the territory, to an extent). But there is a case to be made that there really isn't an awful lot to say.

Not a lot is not nothing, of course. There were a few things to talk about ahead of the Misano round of MotoGP. The fallout from the Alex Marquez/Pecco Bagnaia crash rumbles on, albeit relatively gently. Miguel Oliveira was announced as the first rider for Pramac Yamaha (and presumably Jack Miller will be announced later this weekend). There were some thoughts on the tire allocation and the grip of the track, as well as a few riders looking toward the test. And Dorna and the FIM announced a further extension of their current contract to organize the various motorcycling world championships under their control.

An apology of sorts

So let's start with the Marquez/Bagnaia collision. The pair had met on Sunday night in private to give their opinions of the crash. They parted having shared their thoughts, but without having reached an agreement.

"The feeling of the first five laps was super strange," That's how Marc Márquez characterized the transition from a track with zero grip at Aragon to Misano's high grip surface. "Coming from Aragon here everything was stiffer, the bike, the tires, and especially a narrow track with hard acceleration. But at the same time, the reaction of the bike was much more aggressive, and it was pumping more. So it looks like you have the grip, but then you have to control it."

It took the riders a little while to get their heads around the completely different conditions they had come from five days ago, but they were up to speed soon enough. And the choices made on Friday morning told you a lot about their expectations. In FP1, everyone, and I do mean everyone, spent the entire session on the soft front/medium rear tire combination. Because everyone is saving their medium fronts for qualifying and the race, and most were saving soft rears for the same purpose.

Managing a race is about managing expectations. You have to have a plan for the race. But you also have to have a plan for when your original plan goes to pieces, usually on first contact with reality. You can start the race with the desire to execute your plan as perfectly and precisely as possible. But it is good to have an idea of how to handle things when the plan goes wrong.

That is easier at some racetracks than at others. If, like Pecco Bagnaia at Misano, your plan after taking pole is to get away at the start and lead for the entire race, then you need to pull it off. If you don't, then everything about your bike will work against you, making any alternatives you might have had in mind look pretty forlorn.

It has been a long ten days with two surprising and exhilarating rounds at Aragon and Misano, and there's a test here on Monday. So instead of a full report, a couple of notes on the things that really mattered at Misano. There is plenty of time in the next two weeks to take a deeper look at some of the other things.

So let's start at the beginning. On Saturday night, a frisson of excitement ran through the paddock as we all received severe weather warnings on our phone for the next day. Would a massive summer storm lash the Misano World Circuit and create a topsy-turvy result? Not once you realized the warning was for all of northern Italy, which is quite a big place. The chances of heavy rain at Misano around race time were vanishingly slim.

The heavy rain didn't come, but from around 1pm onward, the leaden skies over the circuit were doing their best to convince the paddock and the packed crowds at Misano that it might. Drops of rain spattered on screens, truck roofs, umbrellas, but it never seemed to get worse than that. The race started with everyone on slicks, though a few riders had scrubbed in wets on the sighting lap.

For the past four years or so, there have been growing complaints about issues with Michelin's front tire. The increasing loads put on the front by the ride-height devices and by aerodynamics have raised temperatures and pressures, and the increasing size of aerodynamic wakes have made harder and harder to find fresh air to cool down the front tire by pulling out from behind the rider in front of you.

To address that, Michelin have been working on a new construction front tire. Initially, Michelin had planned to test it in 2020 and introduce it in 2021. The Covid-19 pandemic put a stop to that, with testing halted during that year, and by the time a normal testing schedule resumed, the bikes had changed so much, the role of ride-height devices and aerodynamics increased so much, that Michelin had to go back to the drawing table and redesign the front for the massive loads it now had to endure.

The Misano test on the Monday after the first of two rounds at the Italian track was a busy time for most riders and teams. In addition to spending half an hour on Michelin's new front tire (widely welcomed as an improvement, with some reservations) and some time on a new communications system (which met with a very mixed reception), riders had two sessions to work on preparing Misano 2, finding improvements for the remainder of the 2024 season, and for some of the factory riders at least, a first taste of some of the ideas for 2025.

As a rule of thumb, if you were a satellite rider your main focus was Misano 2, and a little bit of the rest of 2024. If you were factory rider leaving for a different brand at the end of 2024, it was a bit of Misano 2 and a lot of the remainder of 2024. And if you were a factory rider that was staying, it was a little bit of 2025 and a bit of Misano 2, and a lot of 2024.

Then there are riders like Marc Márquez, who will be staying with Ducati and moving to the factory team for 2025, but is currently riding a GP23 in the satellite Gresini squad. Márquez worked solely for this year, and did not get a look at the 2025 machine. "We tested some things that we already tested in the past races. We reconfirmed a bit our direction, and that's it," he said.