MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

There is no better setting for Round 1 of the Superbike season than Phillip Island. With the Bass Strait dominating the horizon it offers a truly unique setting. It also all but guarantees that we’ll have classic battles with the drive to the line, a slipstreaming battle separated by thousands of a second...it was just a shame that Nicolo Bulega didn’t get the memo.

Toprak threatens to walk away from WorldSBK

As ever the WorldSBK paddock is centred around Toprak Razgatlioglu. Last year it was for his stunning championship winning upset. This year it’s because the Turkish star is upset.

Coming to Australia it was clear that BMW would be on the back foot. A late change, mid-January, in the regulations saw them unable to capitalise on their former Super Concession status and upgraded chassis parts. The change in regulations was small but incredibly significant; a manufacturer developing a new bike can only use Super Concessions if they are still eligible. In the past BMW would have been able to continue to use the upgrades with their new homologation.

There are two schools of thought about the British GP. There are the old school fans who went to Donington Park and sat on the grass slopes overlooking Craner Curves and loved the experience. And there are the fans who love the fast, flowing layout of Silverstone, and the close racing it brings.

I am firmly in the Silverstone camp. Donington is fantastic for spectators, and for the ease of getting close to the track. But it is too small and too tight for MotoGP. The 800cc bikes were already struggling around the track, and the current generation of MotoGP machinery would get nowhere near their potential at the circuit. And unlike the Sachsenring, another track that is too small for MotoGP, it has nothing to keep the bikes bunched up, as we saw with the way the WorldSBK field was spread out when they visited a few weeks ago.

Silverstone, though, is a proper MotoGP track. Big, fast, wide, flowing, a place where the bikes can be given their druthers, where when the throttle is opened in sixth gear, the electronics are not trying to hold the bikes back. It is not quite Phillip Island or Mugello, but it is on a par with Assen. And because of the layout, where rider skill plays a bigger role than just pure bike performance, the racing tends to be closer.

High and flat

Credit: Dorna

Fans and media have been waiting for the 2027 MotoGP technical regulations with a mixture of hope and trepidation. Though the racing has been close the past couple of years, and even exciting, the unstoppable advance of aerodynamics paired with the sudden ubiquity of ride-height devices has changed the sport enormously.

On Monday, Dorna and the FIM announced the details of the new rules. It was, by and large, as expected: 850cc engines with a maximum of 75mm bore, with less fuel and fewer engines. To the delight of many - including many fans, MotoGP insiders, and no doubt also riders - ride-height devices and holeshot devices have been completely banned, and aerodynamics has been severely curtailed (for the moment, at least, but more of that later). For the full details, read the story posted earlier today, which lays out the exact changes so far.

At the end of the first day of the shakedown test at Sepang, Dorna sent out a press release and a small selection of photos to media outlets. You can read the press release below, but the photos provided a few interesting clues to what the factories have been working on. So here are the photos, with a few things I noticed.

Pedro Acosta (above), in pristine leathers on a clean Tech3 GASGAS RC16 (well, a KTM actually). Given the amount of dirt on the track (see below), this must be one of his early laps on the bike. More significant was the Spanish rookie's best time. His lap of 1:59.385 after a single day on a dirty track at Sepang is three tenths faster than Augusto Fernandez was after nearly six days of testing at Sepang in 2023. Fernandez had set his best time on a track that was well rubbered in, and with six days of testing under his belt. For Acosta to be this quick straight away is a sign that he might just live up to the hype.

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.

The MotoGP test riders finally got a pretty much fully dry day of running on the final day of the shakedown test at Sepang. Michele Pirro, Cal Crutchlow, Katsuyuki Nakasuga, Lorenzo Savadori, Jonas Folger, Dani Pedrosa, Stefan Bradl, and GasGas rookie Augusto Fernandez managed to get some real work done. How much more? Fernandez did 47 full laps on Tuesday, where he had managed only 34 and 26 on the two days previous.

What did we learn? Not much more than we already knew from the previous two days. The more subtle changes will only be obvious once journalists and photographers can get into pit lane and take a proper close up look at the bikes. If you are interested in seeing the times, check Peter McLaren's report from day 3 over on Crash.net.

There were still one or two interesting points to note, however. KTM rolled out another aerodynamics update, though it is not yet the full package. This included a version of the fat lower ground effect side section which the Austrian factory tried at Valencia, following the lead of Aprilia earlier in the year.

What have we learned from the first two days of the MotoGP shakedown test at Sepang so far? Well, the first thing we have learned is that it can still rain quite a lot in the tropics. The test riders and GasGas rookie Augusto Fernandez have not had a great deal of dry track time over the past couple of days.

Combine a damp track with the fact that it is test riders out there – Cal Crutchlow for Yamaha; Michele Pirro for Ducati; Lorenzo Savadori for Aprilia; Stefan Bradl for Honda; and Dani Pedrosa, Mika Kallio, and new signing Jonas Folger for KTM – alongside GasGas rookie Fernandez, and it means the times don't mean much. Fernandez gets extra track time by dint of being a rookie, compensation for the reduction of official testing time which has taken place over the last five years or so.