MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

If there is a lesson from Sunday's MotoGP race at Mandalika, it is not to get too excited about the apparent swings in the championship. Jorge Martin entered the weekend leading Pecco Bagnaia by 24 points. The Pramac Ducati rider crashed in the sprint race, which Bagnaia won, which meant the Italian halved Martin's advantage.

On Sunday, Martin led lights to flag, his hopes of victory only ever faltering when Pedro Acosta got close, and from a brief moment of self doubt. Problems at the start and then having to wait for the rear tire to come in meant that Pecco Bagnaia had to be patient for his podium, but it came at the end.

After two days of commotion, Jorge Martin leaves with an advantage over Bagnaia of 21 points, having lost just 3 points from what seemed like major swings back and forth. And if Enea Bastianini hadn't crashed out while chasing down Pedro Acosta, Martin would have lost nothing at all.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that during the months it is warm enough to race at Motegi, there is a very good chance of absolutely torrential rain (see last year, when the GP was red flagged after just 12 laps), and during the months it is dry it is too cold to race. The paradox of a racetrack on an island situated next to a vast ocean. (See also: Phillip Island.)

MotoGP has known torrential rain at Motegi back when it was run during the northern hemisphere spring, and now it is run in October. So rain is likely to fall at some point this weekend, though the forecast at this point in time is for it to fall mostly on Saturday. Whether that is just overnight, or during the sprint race we will see when the time comes.

Rain isn't the only issue at Motegi. Situated up in the hills between the coastal town of Mito and the central valley containing Utsunomiya, fog can be an issue too. When conditions are just right (or just wrong, depending on your point of view), the fog can linger over the circuit, preventing the medevac helicopters from flying, as well as the TV helicopters responsible for the overhead shots.

It has been hot and humid at Motegi. Humid enough to rain in the morning, chasing everyone back into the garage for 20 minutes in FP1. That disrupted everyone's practice plans, forcing a rethink of the afternoon session and leaving a lot of questions unanswered.

Questions such as, will the soft rear go the distance on Sunday, or should we use the medium? A lot of riders used the medium during the limited running in the morning, but the tire just didn't want to work for most people in the afternoon. "If you see everyone that put a medium tire in PR, they make 3 laps and come in and put a soft," Pedro Acosta said. "This is not easy to understand. And even the soft is going to be difficult to finish the race with."

That puts a lot of pressure on Saturday morning, to work out whether the medium rear is a better tire for the race. "Last season with this tire they made the whole race and they were fast, and it was not an issue," Acosta said. "But I don't know why, but this soft tire will not finish the race. But the medium, I don't know how is the level of grip, you know?"

The forecast was for rain at Motegi on Saturday, and rain certainly fell. Fortunately, most of it fell overnight, leaving MotoGP qualifying and the sprint race dry. Well, almost. The constant threat of rain hung in the air, spots of rain hitting visors in enough numbers to plant the seeds of doubt into the minds of the riders. And sometimes, hard enough to actually suck some of the grip away from the track.

If you are going to end up in those fickle conditions, where the track might be a little damp or it might not, then Motegi is the place to be. It has superb grip in the wet, riders managing 1'55s in absolutely torrential rain here in the 2023 race that was eventually red-flagged. But that doesn't make it any easier for riders to wrap their heads around, when drops start to spatter on their visors.

Those spots of rain ended up having a profound effect on qualifying. And they even had an impact on the race, perhaps denying Pedro Acosta his first sprint victory, though Acosta took all of the blame on his own shoulders.

At the height of his domination of the 500 grand prix era, when the only question in everyone's minds was who would finish second behind him, Mick Doohan was asked by a journalist if he was worried his stranglehold on the sport was making motorcycle racing boring. "What do you want me to do, slow down?" Doohan retorted.

Sunday's Japanese Grand Prix at Motegi would have been immeasurably improved if Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin had slowed down. Apart from the first seven or eight minutes, as the grid assumed its natural order, the race was utterly processional. Watching Bagnaia, Martin, Marc Márquez behind them, was like watching Doohan at his peak.

These are riders controlling a MotoGP machine at the highest level imaginable, putting a 300+ horsepower motorcycle in almost exactly the same place for lap after lap. Of the 24 laps of Motegi which Pecco Bagnaia completed, 10 were within one tenth of a second of the lap before, and another 7 were between one and two tenths difference to the previous lap. That is astonishing, metronomic consistency, and a sign of a truly great rider operating almost as close to perfection as is humanly possible.

After the race weekend at Motegi, a few loose ends remain to be picked up. Though the race was hardly captivating, there were several things worth noting in Japan. So here's a quick rundown.

Champ

We have to start with the 2024 Moto3 champion. David Alonso showed the kind of speed and maturity in winning the race that brought him the title. He kept a calm head, stuck in the front group, and worked his way forward when it counted. There was never any real doubt he would win the race once he hit the front.

There is good reason to believe that Alonso is special. Winning 10 races in a season is impressive. Doing it in the space of 16 races even more so. Joan Mir and Fausto Gresini managed the same number of races in a Moto3 or 125cc season. Mir took 17 races to get to 10 wins in 2017, the year he won the Moto3 title. Gresini won 10 races in a row to win the 1987 title, though it was actually 11 in a row, counting the last race of 1986.

There are many wonderful racetracks on the MotoGP calendar, but only two great ones. We can argue over whether Mugello or Phillip Island deserves the title of greatest circuit on the calendar, but that is just splitting hairs. The things that make them great are the same, so we are only arguing about their differences.

What makes Phillip Island such a wonderful racetrack? It is a natural circuit, snaking across the terrain by instinct rather than design. It feels as if it was laid down by a lost ancient people who built it as a place to worship the gods of speed, and was later unearthed and restored after the invention of the racing motorcycle. It fits motorcycles better than almost any other place on Earth.

The reason for that is simple: it flows. The track is fast, flowing, with few spots decided by braking or sheer acceleration. At Phillip Island, courage, skill, talent, and an innate understanding of the mysteries of riding a motorcycle at high speed are what make the difference. It helps if you are on a good bike, but here, the rider makes the difference.

Phillip Island can be counted on to deliver two things: great racing, and big surprises. This weekend is no different, with the wildcards being the complex interplay between the weather, the new asphalt, and the tires. The new surface is going to be both fast and very hard on rear tires. Michelin have three rear tires to choose from: a soft rear with the normal construction, and a medium and a hard using the heat-resistant construction used at Mandalika.

At any other circuit, the soft would only be used for qualifying with the riders choosing between the medium and hard for the race. But this is Phillip Island, and the forecast is for low temperatures - highs of 15°C on Saturday and Sunday - allied with strong winds. "The harder one I don’t think we will even test," Aleix Espargaro said on Thursday.

So the task for the riders is to decide whether they think they can make the soft last race distance, or are better off using the medium. Normally, they would spend Friday working on this, especially the Friday afternoon practice session. The trouble is, it is raining in Phillip Island, and it looks set to be wet all day. Testing tires is going to be nigh on impossible.

Damp squib

Friday was almost the most quintessential Phillip Island MotoGP day. It started off cold and wet, then the rain eased off during free practice for Moto2, then it started hammering down again. The rain got so heavy during the the last 10 minutes of Moto2 FP that MotoGP FP1, which was supposed to start directly after Moto2, was delayed. Then delayed again. And again. And eventually, after two hours, canceled.

By the time MotoGP took to the track for timed practice, however, the track had dried out. "Already this morning when I went out from the hotel, I understood that it was difficult to ride in the morning," Pecco Bagnaia told reporters on Friday afternoon. "But then this afternoon it was maybe the best conditions I ever tried in Phillip Island. It was sunny, no wind, the grip was very high."

The fact there was no wind was the only thing missing from the stereotypical Phillip Island day. Never fear, that is scheduled for Saturday, when it will at least be dry. And FP2 on Saturday morning will be 10 minutes longer than normal, to compensate for the loss of Friday morning.

Will Phillip Island prove to be the decisive round in the 2024 MotoGP title? That's probably a bit premature, but the momentum definitely swung back again in the Sprint race on Saturday. Helped in no small part by the weather, a wet FP2 making it impossible for the riders to test the soft and medium tires or work on setup. They headed into qualifying and the sprint race pretty much blind.

Phillip Island dries quickly, though. Especially when the wind is as brisk as it was on Saturday, and despite the cold. By the end of FP2, a dry line was starting to appear and some riders switched from soft to medium wet tires. Ten minutes later, at the start of Q1, the majority went out on medium wets for their first run, before joining the four who started out on slicks.

Q1 was fascinating. The lap that took Raul Fernandez to the top of the timesheets was 5 seconds faster than Johann Zarco's best lap at the start of the session. Timing was everything. Being out at the end on a set of slicks you had gotten up to temperature was a ticket to Q2. Raul Fernandez and Enea Bastianini got it right, while Luca Marini just missed, finishing just too early.