MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

"The feeling of the first five laps was super strange," That's how Marc Márquez characterized the transition from a track with zero grip at Aragon to Misano's high grip surface. "Coming from Aragon here everything was stiffer, the bike, the tires, and especially a narrow track with hard acceleration. But at the same time, the reaction of the bike was much more aggressive, and it was pumping more. So it looks like you have the grip, but then you have to control it."

It took the riders a little while to get their heads around the completely different conditions they had come from five days ago, but they were up to speed soon enough. And the choices made on Friday morning told you a lot about their expectations. In FP1, everyone, and I do mean everyone, spent the entire session on the soft front/medium rear tire combination. Because everyone is saving their medium fronts for qualifying and the race, and most were saving soft rears for the same purpose.

It is quite the contrast, going from Aragon to Misano. Aragon was always a little low grip, and the weather conditions made it a thousand times worse. Misano, on the other hand, is a track with a lot of grip. So much that Michelin are going a step harder again with their front tires, after everyone used the hard for the race last year. Since then, the bikes have only gotten faster, and are stressing the front even more.

Aragon is also a flowing circuit with a lot of long corners, Misano is much more stop and go, with a lot of tight corners and short straights. Aragon is in the middle of a high arid plain, miles away from anywhere. Misano is next to one of the busiest stretches of holiday coast in Italy.

It is also home to the vast majority of the Italian riders and Italian denizens of the paddock. The area around Misano - the Emilia-Romagna region, and parts of Marche - and the valley of the river Po, which flows from the Alps in the west down to the Adriatic between Venice and Ravenna, hold one of the densest concentrations of motorsport engineering in the world, rivaling Silverstone's F1 Corridor.

Familiar territory

If the MotoGP riders thought Friday was a complicated day on the new surface at the Motorland Aragon circuit, they hadn't reckoned with Saturday. Heavy rain fell overnight at the track, starting as I was leaving the circuit around 8pm, and kept falling on and off throughout the night. It left the track damp in the morning, but above all, it left the track filthy.

The region around Alcañiz, Bajo Aragon, is arid and dusty. So when rain falls, it sucks the dust and dirt from the air and deposits it on the ground. In this case, on the surface of the Motorland Aragon track. The Friday night rain had a double effect. It washed the rubber laid down on Friday off the track. And it washed the dust out of the atmosphere and onto the asphalt.

The grip, which had been improving through Friday, was completely gone on Saturday. Times in FP2 were not much to write home about, as the track dried out. Riders picked up the pace in qualifying, but even Marc Márquez' breathtaking pole time - a 1'46.766 - was nearly a whole second slower than the time he set on Friday afternoon. And Márquez was over eight tenths faster than Pedro Acosta and Pecco Bagnaia, beside him on the grid.

It really seems like nobody wants to win a championship any more. The trend started in 2020, with Joan Mir beating Franco Morbidelli despite the pair crashing out of three of fourteen races. 2021 was a little better, Fabio Quartararo and Pecco Bagnaia dominating for most of the year, before giving the how-can-I-find-a-way-to-lose-this approach a proper go in 2022. Bagnaia fell off in the first half of the year, Quartararo fell off in the second, and the factory Ducati rider emerged triumphant with a slim 17-point margin over the Frenchman.

But the new approach to championships - trying to fall off slightly less often than your rival - really stepped up a gear in 2023. Jorge Martin and Pecco Bagnaia fought a thrilling battle all season long, rode some fantastic races, but kept throwing away points like disposable cutlery. Martin ended the season with four no scores, Bagnaia with seven. But Bagnaia was smart enough to crash out of sprint races, while Martin was scoring zeroes in the much more lucrative full-length grand prix races.