The problem with having two races at the same track within a couple of weeks of each other is that by the time the riders line up for the start of the second race, the bikes are so dialed in that it is hard to make much of a difference. Each team and rider has reached the level they are at, and the result shows it. Second races tend to be a bit of a bore.
Doubly so at a track like Misano. "This track, it's particularly difficult to overtake, sincerely," Luca Marini told us after spending the second half of the race stuck behind Jack Miller. And so the result of Saturday's sprint race was a very close reflection of the qualifying results.
If you check the lap chart PDF on the MotoGP.com website, you can see that of the top ten, six riders finished the race in the position they crossed the line at the end of the first lap. And of the four that didn't, Pedro Acosta got past Brad Binder for fifth on lap 2, and Pecco Bagnaia passed Jorge Martin for the lead on lap 7.
Close, but no cigar
It would be harsh to call the sprint race at Misano 2 tedious. It had tension, but for the most part, that tension went unfulfilled. It felt like something might happen throughout the race. But in the end, very little did.
That's not to underestimate the incredible talent that Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin have. They are quite clearly a cut above the rest of the field. Sure, Enea Bastianini can match their pace once he gets underway, but that 'getting underway' is precisely where the Italian's problems start.
And sure, if conditions throw a wildcard into the race, then Marc Márquez can capitalize and snatch victory from Martin and Bagnaia. But under normal circumstances, the combination of Michelin's new rear tire and Márquez' continuing adaptation to the Ducati GP23 means his is at a disadvantage.
Aborted launch
Pecco Bagnaia was fairly clearly the fastest man on track, fractionally faster than Jorge Martin. But Bagnaia's one weakness is the start. He gets off the line cleanly and very well - the Misano media center affords a great view of the starting grid - but at the point where Bagnaia releases the clutch, he starts to lose ground. So it looked like Bagnaia had the race under control from the start, but it was Jorge Martin who entered Turn 1 in the lead, and Brad Binder fired past the Ducati Lenovo bikes of Bagnaia and Enea Bastianini to snatch second.
The starts are becoming something of a problem for Bagnaia. "Honestly, the last two Grands Prix, we don't know why, but my bike wants to wheelie," the reigning champion told us. "It's true that we are we are removing anti wheelie every time to control more the bike. But for the start maybe we have to do a step because it's not possible to lose positions every time and in that case it's super important to be at the front for the tire pressure. So we will try to improve a bit for tomorrow and to understand why my bike is wheelying."
If Bagnaia wants to know how to get the perfect start, he needs to study Brad Binder. "I don't know how, Brad was always the number 1 in KTM for the starts," Pedro Acosta said. "Don't ask me why, because I don't have an answer for this. He's a master in these things. We will try to copy him."
Rocket launcher
Binder credited his bike with his speed off the line. "The front start device and the bike being a dragster into Turn 1, I love it," the South African told us. "Because it doesn't wheelie, the thing doesn't wobble, it's great."
There are disadvantages too. Binder's holeshot device got stuck on as he avoided Martin and Bagnaia, as he didn't quite brake heard enough to release it. He had released it by braking harder at Turn 2.
This wasn't dangerous, however, Binder explained. "It's not that you do anything stupid or strange, it's just that instead of pulling maybe 6 bar on the front brake, you just kind of go 6 bar, and then you go harder for just a split second, just so it makes the stroke. So you don't necessarily see anyone doing anything crazy, it's just that you have to do it to make damned sure it's up."
Cooler temperatures
Binder's fantastic start went for naught, however. His front tire took a couple of laps to get up to temperature, and that opened the door for those chasing him. "I lost the front in Turn 6, and I couldn't stop, because it was just locking the whole time," Binder said. That front lock forced him to run wide, allowing Pecco Bagnaia past, and also gave Enea Bastianini the space to line up a pass at Turn 8, Quercia.
The first pass through the high-speed Curvone also saw Binder nearly come a cropper. "Then I lost the front in Turn 11, went off the track, and it took me two laps for the tire to come up." The incident at Turn 11 allowed Marc Márquez through to relegate Binder to fifth.
"So when the tire came up, I could all of a sudden ride the bike again, and after that my rhythm was OK," Binder said. "Not fast enough, but at least I had a good feeling." By this time, Pedro Acosta had also bundled his way through at Tramonto.
Getting the tire to 'come up' - waiting for the tire to reach its optimum operating temperature - was a problem for multiple riders. The issue is now not so much the rear, as the front, hence the front-end washouts. Part of that is down to the fact that Michelin have the exact same tire allocation for Misano 2 as they had two weeks ago, but the temperature is 5°C cooler than it was for Misano 1. Add in the rain that has scoured the track at the start of the week, and the grip of the front is balanced on a knife edge. The medium front works, but you have to be patient and work it just right to get it into the operating window as quickly as possible.
Distracted Driving
It wasn't tires that allowed Pecco Bagnaia to pass Jorge Martin. The Pramac Ducati rider had been given a warning for exceeding track limits in the final sector on lap 7. (Martin was not the only rider to do that: 14 of the 21 riders were given a track limits warning.) The message for that warning popped up on his dashboard just as he was leaving Tramonto and heading down toward the Curvone section. That was enough to distract him and cause him to run wide.
Pecco Bagnaia, who had closed the gap to Martin and was starting to put pressure on the Pramac rider, did not need a second invitation. The Italian fired underneath Martin to take the lead. And once past, he would not be bested by Martin again.
"I did a small mistake that I paid heavily, because I just lose a bit]the concentration, I just received a track limits warning in a bad place, I think," Martin explained. "And then I started looking at the dash in a bad place and then I missed the line for 2 meters and then I let Pecco pass. Until that moment, I think I was really in a good position, even if he was close, I was having everything under control in a really good pace."
Martin believed that he had still had a shot at the race, even after that mistake. "When Pecco overtook me I thought I was gonna lose one second, but then I was able to close the gap," he said. "So I think maybe two or three more laps I could even attack. So I'm confident for tomorrow that even if he overtakes me I can fight back."
Light Signals
Martin believed that Race Direction needed to be careful about when and where to send such messages. The dash messages come up in yellow, a color that is set for warnings, and draws the eye. If you notice that in the middle of a corner, it is very distracting. "I just looked at it for a millisecond, but I missed the line," Martin said. "So for sure also maybe we need to speak with Race Direction to have some place on the track to send these messages, because if not. It can be a problem."
Martin's friend and mentor Aleix Espargaro felt much the same way. "It's very important to understand where we're gonna send the message. I can't be a fan or hater of the radios because we didn't test enough to understand. But sometimes yeah the radio can be can be distracting, but also the dash, the lights in the dash, because you can think there is some engine problem or whatever. So we have to be precise and tell the Race Direction where we want to send the message," the Aprilia rider opined.
Pecco Bagnaia profited from Martin's mistake, but told us he was already lining Martin up for a pass in a few laps' time. "My pace was super good, so I was able to close the gap and I planned to overtake him from six to four laps to go," the Ducati Lenovo team rider said. "And as soon as I saw him go wide I just said, OK, I go. And as soon I was leading, I didn't have any other moments with the front. The front was working super good, so it was much easier to control the gap."
The long race on Sunday looks like being a carbon copy of the sprint race. Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin are a cut above the rest, and Enea Bastianini is the next fastest rider on the grid. But Bastianini's perpetual weakness, a slowness to get going in the opening laps, is likely to hold him back.
No room for interlopers
Who wins between Bagnaia and Martin? On the evidence of today, Saturday at Misano, you have to say Bagnaia. The Italian has a fraction extra. Martin is capable of chasing, and pushing hard, but whether he will be able to dethrone Bagnaia remains to be seen. With this victory, Bagnaia closes the gap to Martin to just 4 points. The margins here are super thin.
Can Marc Márquez do anything about the GP24s? The answer to that is no, and Márquez was careful not to point to the bike, but to his own shortcomings. He had crashed in FP2, then again during qualifying, simply because he is still not completely comfortable with the Ducati and with Michelin's new rear tire with the additional grip.
"I feel uncomfortable with the new tire during all the season," Márquez told us. "When the tire has six or seven laps, in some corners I am faster than with the new tire. So it's there where I need to understand why, where we need to try a few things."
Try, try, try again
The new rear Michelin merely exacerbate the Gresini Ducati rider's problems, made further worse by the fact the conditions had changed. "There is more grip, you can use more torque, you can use more banking, more speed, and these are the conditions where I'm struggling more," Márquez explained. "If you see Aragon, it was super low grip. And it's there my strong point. When it's very very high grip, it's where I'm struggling more."
Márquez had also crashed during the morning warm up, before the qualifying had even begun. Then he crashed again in qualifying, which cost him at least one row on the grid. And though he recognized that crashing during qualifying was costly, it was the only way forward.
"Because life is like this!" Márquez replied when I asked him why he kept crashing during qualifying. "Try, error, try, error, try error." The problem, he explained, was that all of his trial and error was done on live TV, in front of an audience of millions. That wouldn't change his approach, however. "We need to accept that, but I will keep trying. I feel uncomfortable, but I need to understand why I feel uncomfortable. If it's because I don't put enough load, too much load. And it's like this, and luckily for me, I crashed in Turn 3 in the qualifying practice, because in the race I also had a moment there. But as I said, life is like this. And I will try and I have the confidence of the victories and then I will try in Malaysia. Maybe I will finish again in the gravel. We will see. But I hope to improve for the future."
Speed without sacrifice
Behind the two KTMs - Pedro Acosta beating Brad Binder again, the Spaniard cutting his deficit to Binder to just 8 points - Fabio Quartararo was once again having a good race. Yamaha's MotoGP project is starting to show returns on the massive investment the Japanese company have made in the sport, and the pouring of resources into testing and development. Yamaha were slowly taking away the horsepower the bike had had in the early stages of the year, and swapping rideability for outright top speed.
What Quartararo needs is to keep the agility of the current bike with less power, but also have the horsepower from the beginning of the 2024 MotoGP season. "I'm not an engineer, so I don't know how much margin they have to improve the power on this bike without losing the agility," Quartararo said.
"At the beginning of the year the bike was much faster, I was able to stay with the KTM on the straights, but step by step we went with less, less, less, less power but more agility, more turning," Quartararo said. "So now we have to get back the power but keeping the agility. So I think the engine has the possibility to go fast. But if it's possible, with the agility."
What will Sunday bring? More of the same, most likely. But most likely isn't a racing certainty. Anything can happen on a Sunday, as the late great Nicky Hayden once told me. That's why they line up on Sunday.
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