MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

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.

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.

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.

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 looks like this season is a championship of mistakes," Pecco Bagnaia said after the sprint race at Mandalika. "My idea is that it's arrived from the performance of the tires. The rear tires did an enormous step in front, but we are braking so hard because the rear is also helping a lot in the braking, but the front has more issues. Because we are entering much, much faster in all the corners. So the performance that Michelin improved this season is incredible. All the season, all the circuits we improved a lot the pace. But when you are at this limit is easy also to have a crash."

Marc Márquez was open to that idea as well. "Mistakes, because they are super fast and then everybody is riding on the limit. I feel fast but even like this they are faster. So when you are riding on the limit, every lap from the first to the last … I remember just five years ago the races were quite different. It was like, pushing some laps. Now you are pushing all the laps. And yeah, everybody can be super fast, but easier to do mistakes."

The start of the Asia-Pacific MotoGP tour is supposed to throw up surprises. When MotoGP arrives at tracks that the teams and factories don't know as well, the field should be leveled. The established order should be shaken up, and outsiders get a look in.

At the end of the first day of the Indonesian Grand Prix at the Mandalika International Circuit, the first of MotoGP's so-called flyaways (though that depends on where you depart from), the fastest four bikes are the four Ducati Desmosedici GP24s, the dominant machine of the 2024 season. A Ducati GP23 is in fifth, with two more GP23s in the top ten. Only Alex Márquez, who crashed trying to set a fast lap, languishes outside the top ten.

Normal order very much restored, then. Enea Bastianini just edged out Jorge Martin by four hundredths of a second, after Martin became the first rider to smash the lap record. Franco Morbidelli took a solid third on the second Pramac Ducati, while Bastianini's Ducati Lenovo teammate Pecco Bagnaia fired in a last desperate fast lap to take fourth.

For the third race in a row, the Sunday MotoGP grand prix race has had us saying, "this is the moment the championship changed". Pecco Bagnaia left Austria with a lead of 5 points over Jorge Martin. Then he crashed out at Aragon after a collision with Alex Márquez, and Jorge Martin finished second behind Marc Márquez, giving Martin a comfortable-looking 23 point lead.

Was that the moment the momentum in the championship changed? Well, for seven days perhaps, as Jorge Martin entered the pits when rain was falling at the first Misano race, only to exit pit lane onto a dry track with wet tires. Bagnaia came second to (you guessed it) Marc Márquez, and cut the points gap to just 7 points.

Had the momentum changed for good this time, perhaps? You might think that, right until the moment that Bagnaia folded the front at Turn 8 on lap 21. Jorge Martin finished second to Enea Bastianini this time, controversially, and leads by 24 points again.

Momentum swings