MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

If you thought Saturday's sprint race at the Austrian GP in Spielberg was a bit of a snoozer, just wait until you see the Sunday GP. Saturday's 14-laps sprint races saw the top ten separated by 16 seconds. The gap from first to tenth in Sunday's GP was 30 seconds. The sprint race podium was covered by 7.5 seconds, on Sunday, it was 7.35 seconds. This is a far cry from the spate of closest ever top 10 and top 15 finishes of just a couple of years ago.

The racing in MotoGP is once again reminiscent of the dark days of the 800cc era, when passing was impossible and your finishing position was pretty much determined by where you qualified. I remember that period very well. Because I had to write about it every Sunday.

There are more parallels with that time. In the 800cc era, there were four riders who were a cut above the rest battling it out, with Casey Stoner, Jorge Lorenzo, and Dani Pedrosa sometimes laying down a pace that was so punishing, riding with such precision and perfection that nobody could follow. (To his credit, Valentino Rossi still tried to make the racing watchable whenever he could, but it was hard up against three riders who were his match in terms of talent.)

At this point in MotoGP history, it is Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin who are stinking up the racing with displays of such sublimely perfect riding that it is mesmerizing to watch for a lap or two. But the race on Sunday was 28 laps, and once Bagnaia got his lead over a second, it was clear he was unstoppable. The race was a foregone conclusion, watched more out of a sense of duty than a sensation of joy.

And yet the strategy behind it is fascinating. Pecco Bagnaia had seen Jorge Martin's pace in warm up on a reheated medium rear tire and had realized the Pramac Ducati rider would be very strong at the end of the race.

Martin ended warm up 21st, as clear an indication as it is possible to have that the position in warm up is pretty much meaningless. But he had started the session on a medium rear that already had 23 laps on it, and did a 1'30.7 on the 28th lap - race distance - of the tire. That is roughly the pace that Bagnaia expected to be doing in the middle of the race, with still some tire left.

That session tipped Martin's hand to Bagnaia, and helped him and his team set out their strategy. They knew what Bagnaia had to do to beat him. "I was quite confident about my pace, but this morning I saw that Jorge with very used tires, cold tires, they rewarmed the tire, he did a very, very good pace in the warmup. So I said, okay, in the last part of the race he will be very strong, for sure. At the moment, I’m always very confident and I’m always saying that Jorge will be there fighting. At the moment we are doing the difference between the rest and I was sure that it was a race between us," Bagnaia told the press conference.

The plan was to get into the lead as quickly as possible and build an advantage in the middle of the race and make it big enough that Martin would not be able to come back at the end. And to do that, Bagnaia's team eased off the traction control, giving the reigning world champion more control in his right wrist, and less from the electronics. They let Bagnaia manage the throttle, and the rear tire.

That played into what is one of Bagnaia's greatest strengths: his patience. As the adrenaline of fear and excitement floods your nervous system, every instinct is to react aggressively and suddenly. But the key to being fast is to wait until precisely the right moment to apply the brakes or open the gas, and do that smoothly and with incredible precision. That requires that you can harness the adrenaline for the hyperawareness it brings, but channel it through an inner calmness to use it to its most devastating effect.

"I was just trying to wait with the throttle until I was finding good traction, because if not, the rear was sliding, was spinning a lot," Bagnaia explained in the press conference. "On the exit of Turn 3 and Turn 10 it was difficult to manage it. I think we worked a lot with the electronics on the weekend, and we did a step back removing a lot of traction control just to have more on my hand. It was easier to manage."

That gave Bagnaia control in the middle of the race. "Today I just had this advantage in terms of pace in the middle part of the race, knowing that in the last part I could have a margin. Pushing like this in the middle means also that in the last part you are without tires. This happened, but having two seconds meant it was difficult for him to recover in the same, or more or less similar situation. It was a good strategy."

The brilliance of both Bagnaia and Martin is how they are able to find this speed when the track layout is working against it. Enea Bastianini, normally a master of saving his tires until the end of the race, could not manage to do the same as his Ducati Lenovo teammate and Pramac Ducati's Martin, despite being on identical machinery. Which is how he ended up finishing third, 7 seconds behind Bagnaia.

"This track is not like the usual track," Bastianini explained. "It’s strange because we have to brake many times and also a lot of braking straight. When you have to do an acceleration, you spin like other riders. You can do nothing to save a bit the tire."

Unless you are Pecco Bagnaia or Jorge Martin, that is. "These two riders are so different, their riding styles are so different," Bastianini said. "Pecco sometimes has an incredible braking point. Sometimes he can brake very late compared to the other riders of Ducati. Jorge is incredible sometimes in the middle of the corner. He has a lot of speed. Sometimes with less angle. It’s strange."

This only goes to underline the point I made at the beginning. Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin are producing some of the most incredible riding we have ever seen on a MotoGP bike. They have pushed each other to stratospheric levels of performance, forcing each other to be incredibly precise and to remain mistake-free for as much as the race as they can. They have to hit the same spot on the track with the same speed, the same lean angle, the same brake pressure every single lap for 110km. They then have to compensate for fuel loads as they drop, brakes and tires as they wear, and physical exhaustion as the race goes on.

Martin and Bagnaia have to keep being so precise because they cannot afford to make a mistake. The slightest slip up will hand the advantage to the other, and likely cost them the race. And the margins are so impossibly tight that they cannot allow the tiniest crack in their performance to appear. Jorge Martin arrived in Austria with a championship lead of 3 points. Pecco Bagnaia leaves with a lead of 5 points. After 11 grand prix, 11 sprint races, and a possible total of 407 points.

Add in the current state of MotoGP, where the ride-height devices and aerodynamics are overloading the front tire, despite Michelin's best efforts to keep up. (And thwarting Michelin's attempt to remedy the problem by moving the goalposts so that the new front Michelin is designing has been made obsolete before it has even been tested.) The bikes are getting out of corners better and arriving at corners faster, needing bigger and better brakes to stop them. And all that energy is going into the front wheel, heating the front tire, and making the pressure much more difficult to manage.

At the hardest braking circuit, this is even more of a problem. And the increasing emphasis on even the smallest details of aerodynamics makes this even worse. Aleix Espargaro complained that he ended up with no front brakes, because the brake discs and pads were reaching temperatures outside their operating temperature.

"Yesterday we were on the limit with free air, but today behind them, apart from the pressure and the temperature of the front tire, the temperature of the carbon was completely over the limit with the biggest discs, we set a new record," the factory Aprilia rider said. The RS-GP is particularly bad in this respect, with a very large front fender playing an important role in channeling air onto the side of the fairing and increasing the ground effect, improving turning. But it also covers up a large part of the disc and blocks cool air from getting onto the brake calipers.

So the brakes are overpowering the front tire, the aerodynamics are overpowering the front tire, and the aero is creating a huge wake which is preventing riders from finding cool air to reduce the temperature in the front tire. The Red Bull Ring then exacerbates that to an enormous extent, with few places to get out of the draft and into free air, and one line through a large section of the circuit.

The riders are left to manage the locking of the front wheel as best they can. For anyone who has ever ridden a motorcycle, locking the front wheel is a nightmare, because it is so difficult to control. Lock the rear and it will slide, but you can still steer the bike. Lock the front, and the tiniest wrong movement will drop you on the floor. Which is why ABS has been compulsory on motorcycles in the EU since 2013. (Though human nature responds by simply shifting the risk to other areas.)

If you've ever locked the front at, say, 30 km/h, you'll know how scary it is. Now imagine doing it at 300 km/h. And doing it lap after lap. MotoGP riders are trying to find ways to manage that locking, smoothly modulating brake pressure just off maximum to allow the tire to roll again and grip, before ramping it up again to find the maximum stopping power. For a rider such as Bagnaia, who can slide the rear to help slow the bike, that takes pressure off the front. But even Bagnaia has to deal with front locking.

The higher the tire temperature, the higher the front pressure, and the more the front is likely to lock. So riders can't follow too closely because the front gets too hot. So they have to leave more room to the rider ahead. Which makes being close enough to attempt a pass on the brakes very difficult. And the combination of ride-height devices (lower center of mass) and improved brakes means braking zones are getting shorter, with less margin to pass.

Then there's the supremacy of the Ducati GP24s. This year's bike is a significant step ahead of the GP23 in terms of performance, which was already the best bike on the grid. Aprilia and KTM have improved to the extent that their bikes are as good as and sometimes better than the GP23, but there is still a gaping chasm to the GP24.

Gigi Dall'Igna and his team have done an incredible job to gain more performance from this year's Ducati. But it has had a terrible effect on the racing, especially as the current state of MotoGP technology places a much greater premium on bike performance than in the past. Engineers have worked incredibly hard to reduce the impact of the most unpredictable part of the performance package (the rider) from the equation as possible. Every gain here is to the detriment of the spectacle, and of the fans.

Fortunately, the riders still make a difference, if less than previously. The GP24 is the best bike on the grid, and so its riders are leading the championship. But Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin are head and shoulders above Enea Bastianini, mainly because of their consistency. And while Franco Morbidelli has made great steps forward in competitiveness, he is still clearly a step behind the leaders. Which is why he will be keeping a GP24 next season, unlike his prospective teammate Fabio Di Giannantonio.

The one rider who can clearly still make a difference is Marc Márquez. The best of the GP23 riders, he has shown he is capable of taking on the GP24s and matching them while on inferior machinery. It may be impossible for most riders to pass in MotoGP, but that does not appear to apply to Marc Márquez. After a horrible start, the Gresini Ducati rider fought his way through from thirteenth to fourth, making passing look almost easy.

Márquez' problems started half an hour before the race was due to start, when his team discovered that the valve on the rim that held the medium front tire he had saved for the race was broken. With no more medium front available, the only option Márquez' team had was to take the front he wanted to use off one wheel rim and onto another.

The problem there is that to move the tire from one wheel to another, they had to take it out of the warmers. And that allowed the front to cool down significantly, without enough time for the warmers to get it completely back up to temperature before the start of the race. So Marc Márquez started the warm up lap on a front tire which he wasn't sure would be warm enough.

And so Márquez started his warm up with a focus on getting as much heat into his front tire as possible. And on the straight, as he returned to his grid position, he concentrated on loading the tire with the brakes, and as a consequence, first engaged and then released his front holeshot device. "On the last straight I braked and I engaged the front device, but then I braked again and disengaged it," he explained.

By that time, he was going too slow to engage his front holeshot device again before he reached his grid slot. The process for engaging it is to arm it by rotating a switch on the handlebars, and then braking hard so that the pin on the front forks slips past the catch which will hold the front forks down. But again, the layout of the Red Bull Ring intervened.

Not so bouncy

The trick to engaging the device in Austria was to brake harder to overcome the stiffer springs needed to cope with the braking forces at the track. "Harder front suspension, so you have to be more smooth, to be more aggressive but smooth when you release brakes," Pecco Bagnaia explained. "So it’s very easy to engage and release in the same moment."

Getting it right is notoriously difficult. "Yesterday before the sprint race I tried to engage three times, because I didn’t engage three times. Today two," Bagnaia said. "It's a scary moment because you know that you don’t have much time." Márquez always engages the front holeshot later, Bagnaia said, which is part of the problem. "He does every time in this position in the grid and I’m scared for him every time. But for me this weekend was more difficult. In Silverstone was much easier because was different." Silverstone is a much more flowing track, and the springs and damping is not set up to be so harsh.

Without the holeshot device, Márquez had wheelie off the line and everyone shot past him, the Spaniard then getting hit by Franco Morbidelli on the way into Turn 1. The Stewards investigated that incident, but rightly concluded that no blame applied to either rider. The blame, if it lies anywhere, is with holeshot devices, and the way they have taken control out of the hands of the riders. Even more so with the data the engineers get from the practice starts at the end of FP1 on Friday afternoon. "You start four tenths slower," Pecco Bagnaia said in the informal chat while waiting for the podium ceremony.

Márquez more than made it up, and once he got past everyone apart from the podium riders, he was faster than anyone else on track, showing he had the pace for the podium, at least. That gave him confidence, and the Marc Márquez who came to talk to us after the race was looking much more satisfied and less frustrated than we expected.

"You know, as I said in Spanish, in Catalunya we finished second and second in the sprint race, but it was one of the worst weekend for us," Márquez told us. "This weekend was one of the best, the feeling with the bike, the speed on the practice, on the warm up, on the qualifying practice. But zero points yesterday and a fourth place today. But I enjoyed a lot the real speed this weekend, and that speed is there."

That speed is all that matters to Marc Márquez. He has no hopes of the title - he sits 83 points behind Bagnaia in fourth place, with Enea Bastianini and third place just 22 points ahead - but he is building for a real shot at the championship in 2025. "I know that this year is a year to build and I'm building. I tried to build that confidence. And this second part of the season we need to keep building and try to be on the podiums, and the victory, if it's not this year, next year it will arrive."

This is why Marc Márquez risked everything, gave up a well-paid contract with Repsol Honda to ride a year-old bike in a satellite team. Marc Márquez loves nothing more than winning, and after the long misery of the injury sustained in 2020, and Honda's slide into irrelevance, he has a plan to get back to winning. And he has the patience to wait for that plan to unfold. 2025 will be another story.

The MotoGP race at the Red Bull Ring may have been a snoozefest, but more worrying than the race was the big drop in attendance. Austria was always one of the better attended GPs - rightly so, the event is genuinely impressive, there is loads of entertainment, and everything is incredibly well organized - but this year, crowds dropped from 93,000 last year to 67,000, a drop of 26,000. This mirrors the drop at Silverstone, where attendance was poor.

Are there obvious reasons for this drop in two races in a row? Perhaps the Olympics happening in Europe took attention away from MotoGP, and more importantly, persuaded race fans to attend the Olympics rather than the races in Silverstone and Spielberg. Maybe the big rise in ticket prices over the past few years at the Red Bull Ring is driving spectators away.

Or maybe it was just the specific circumstances of the summer of 2024. Austria has been lashed by extreme weather all summer, with heavy rain and thunderstorms causing flooding, washing out roads, and even costing people their lives. Perhaps the storms dissuaded people from traveling, with public transport in Vienna being hit by torrential rain and flooding, and roads being closed. If you aren't sure of getting there, and can't be sure of getting back, maybe you choose not to travel at all.

I had first hand experience of just such a storm. Massive storms hit the track on Saturday night, the track opening the grandstands to allow fans to shelter and take cover from the conditions. A couple of days previously, as I rode my motorcycle through the mountains near Garmisch Partenkirchen, a storm struck worse than anything I have experienced. Torrential rain, hail, standing water on the road, the storm arriving in minutes almost without warning. Perhaps a little too much excitement for an old man on a motorcycle. Certainly more excitement than Sunday's Austrian GP.

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