MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

There were very few pundits giving KTM much of a chance at the start of the 2023 MotoGP season. The RC16 had not made much of an impression at the Sepang and Portimão tests. At Sepang, Pol Espargaro was the fastest of the RC16 riders, the GasGas Tech3 man 13th 0.9 behind fastest rider Luca Marini. At Portimão, Brad Binder led the Austrian charge in 9th, half a second off the quickest man Pecco Bagnaia.

How wrong we all were. Brad Binder has won two sprint races, and Binder and Red Bull KTM Factory Racing teammate Jack Miller have a handful of podiums between them, Binder missing out on another couple of podiums at Assen thanks to track limits infractions. Binder is fourth in the championship, and KTM are second in the manufacturers' standings.

That big step in performance has come from adapting to the way that MotoGP has changed in the past couple of years. The RC16 is stressing the front tire less, and is able to turn and brake better as a result. KTM found a way to address the radical changes the sport has seen, with aerodynamic and ride-height devices altering the way the bikes behave, and how they use the tires.

At Assen, I spoke to KTM's Technical Director of MotoGP, Sebastian Risse about how the project has changed over the years. Risse has been with the project since the start, and has built up a deep understanding of what it takes to make a MotoGP bike competitive over the years.

In the first part of this interview with Carlos Ezpeleta, Dorna's Chief Sporting Officer explained the political challenges of putting together a calendar for MotoGP. In the second half of our conversation, Ezpeleta discusses the contractual and logistical constraints on the MotoGP calendar. He gives us a peek into the 2024 calendar, and talks about balancing the input from the teams against the requests from the circuits.

Q: Coming to logistics, which is one of the most interesting factors. Races in Europe can only be held at a certain time. So for example, even though Finland was canceled, you could only race at the KymiRing in the summer. How do you slot all of that together? You’ve also got not just weather but also travel.

Carlos Ezpeleta: Yes. Let’s say that we know what events are going to be in the calendar for the year that we’re designing the calendar for. You start to sort of make a rough draft of that. Number one is your contractual obligations, which for example could be Qatar starting the calendar as the first race, and Valencia currently ending it. So, that’s pretty clear.

There is nothing quite as frustrating as the MotoGP calendar, to those inside the sport as well as those outside. Each time MotoGP's schedule is published, it is met with a mixture of excitement about the coming year, and irritation about the inevitable back-to-back races, gaps, clashes, and choices of venue. Fans are thrilled to see MotoGP at their favorite track, or disappointed that the series is going back to their least favorite track. And different fans will have diametrically opposite views of which tracks are best, and which should be ditched.

That is hardly surprising. You can't keep everybody happy, not least because putting together a calendar of 20+ events is an incredibly complex task. There are so many different factors to balance, many of which people outside the process are not even aware of. There's the logistics of getting from one circuit to another, weather, track availability, medical facilities.

You want to avoid clashes with F1 – something which gets harder as the F1 calendar expands – and try not to schedule races in the same country too close together. And there are only a limited number of circuits which are safe enough to hold a MotoGP race. Adding new circuits can be a process of years, and slotting them in means making space elsewhere.

Juggling act

In short, it is a complicated process fraught with a million headaches. The devil is indeed in the detail, and the details run deeper than most people realize.

Interviews are precarious things. A hundred things can happen between arranging the interview, actually speaking to the person you want to interview, and then publishing it. Sometimes you get lucky, and the rider you want to speak to wins a race the week before your scheduled appointment. Sometimes they break a leg and are absent at the race you had arranged to speak to them. And sometimes something major happens between the time you interview someone and the publication date.

When I arranged to speak to Joan Mir, I got lucky. The 2020 MotoGP world champion arrived at Mugello fit, healthy, and in an open and talkative mood. That was not a given, after the miserable weekend he had at Le Mans, finishing down in 14th in the sprint race and crashing out of the Sunday grand prix.

Mir spoke openly about the unexpected difficulties he had faced since joining the Repsol Honda team, and the low point which Honda finds itself in. He spoke about how he handles such difficulties mentally, how he tries to put bad experiences behind him and where he finds the mental strength to keep grinding away, trying to make progress. And he spoke about the problems facing MotoGP, how the current state of technology has taken control away from the riders and made the bike a much, much bigger part of the overall performance package.

Cristian Gabarrini (right) celebrating with Pecco Bagnaia after winning the Dutch TT at Assen in 2022

It is hard to overstate just how big the turnaround of Pecco Bagnaia's season was in 2022. Going into the Dutch TT at Assen, Bagnaia trailed championship leader Fabio Quartararo by 91 points. Ten races later, Bagnaia clinched the championship at Valencia with an advantage of 17 points. The Italian had clawed back 108 points in ten races, an average of nearly 11 points a race.

The man who helped Bagnaia achieve that incredible comeback has experience winning world championships. Ducati Lenovo Team crew chief Cristian Gabarrini already had two MotoGP titles under his belt with Casey Stoner, first at Ducati, then at Honda. He oversaw Marc Márquez' first championship in 2013, as technical advisor in the Repsol Honda team, before returning to Ducati.

He is a quiet, modest man, softly spoken, who weighs his words carefully. That meticulousness is also apparent in his work as a crew chief: Pecco Bagnaia's garage is well organized and well run, the bike always ready for Bagnaia when he needs it. He is thoughtful, his responses to questions revealing a very sharp intellect indeed.

At Sepang, I had a long and very in-depth interview with Cristian Gabarrini. We spoke about the pressure of defending a championship, how sprint races will change MotoGP this season, how Pecco Bagnaia turned his season around, and the change Gabarrini saw in the Italian.

The CEO of Ducati Corse, the racing division of the manufacturer that won the jackpot in the 2022 racing season, sat in the snow during the launch of Ducati's 2023 season, with a glass of prosecco in hand, for a personal conversation and ... engineered

Luigi, or Gigi as everyone calls him, Dall'Igna always dreamed of working in racing. He graduated in mechanical engineering at the University of Padua with a thesis on carbon monocoque chassis. Almost straight out of university he moved to the Aprilia factory in Noale, Italy. Over more than two decades, he led Aprilia to championship titles in World Superbikes and the 125 and 250 cc categories in MotoGP, with riders such as Valentino Rossi, Jorge Lorenzo, Alvaro Bautista, Marco Melandri, Manuel Poggiali, and Max Biaggi of course.

Then Dall'Igna surprised the world of motorsport when he accepted an offer from rival manufacturer Ducati. Since graduating, he has only worked for Aprilia, except for a very short time in 2005 when he worked for Derbi. For the 2014 season, Dall'Igna was on his way to try to make the difference, as he did in Aprilia, only this time for the factory in Bologna.

Gigi is considered a legend, a magician, a brain, and Ducati was very excited by the arrival of someone who later made radical changes in the racing department. Ducati were in a crisis, after a long decline which had started shortly after winning their first title with Casey Stoner in 2007. The culmination of the crisis was the failure with one of the greatest riders ever, Valentino Rossi. Ducati knew that in order to come back and win, replacing riders would not be enough this time.

Being the official tire supplier to MotoGP has a lot of benefits. The data gathered from 300 bhp bikes which can reach over 60° of lean angle and brake at well over 1.5G is an invaluable resource for Michelin's R&D department, and technologies developed in MotoGP go directly into the French manufacturer's consumer tires.

But it also means being the first port of call when riders feel the need to point the finger of blame. With factories imposing harsh penalties on riders for criticizing their bikes, it is often cheaper and much easier to blame the tires. Whether justly or not.

That was also the case at the Sepang test, where riders were complaining about the limited number of tires they had at their disposal. "We had to test many things and we didn’t have many tires for this test so basically today we had to use the tires that we didn’t really want and it was not easy," said Fabio Quartararo on the first day of the test, his complaints typical of the riders.

Enough tires?

During one of the rain delays of the Sepang Test, I asked Piero Taramasso, Michelin's manager of two-wheeled motorsport about this. Did riders only have ten sets of slick tires for the test? "Yes, this is regulation," Taramasso told me. "It's always been the same since 10 years or more. So no change compared to previous seasons."

Ten sets of tires should be more than enough for a test, Taramasso said. "They can use 10 sets of slick tires, so with 10 sets of slick tires it means 260 laps. So they can do 260 laps in three days. That's 80 laps per day."

Diego Gubellini talking to Fabio Quartararo on the grid at the Red Bull Ring in Austria

Fabio Quartararo missed out on the 2022 MotoGP title by a handful of points. The advantage Pecco Bagnaia had going into the final round was too great to overcome at Valencia. Given the lack of horsepower the 2022 Yamaha M1 had, it was impressive that Quartararo took the championship down to the final race.

Quartararo's feat was down in no small part to his crew chief, Diego Gubellini. The Italian, who was paired with the Frenchman in what was then the Petronas Yamaha satellite squad and moved up to the factory Monster Energy Yamaha team with him, helped Quartararo extract every ounce of performance from the M1.

I spoke to Gubellini on the Thursday before the final race, looking back at the 2022 season and how he and Quartararo worked to get the best out of the Yamaha M1. He talked about his role as crew chief, maximizing the speed of the Yamaha, and his role in the development of the 2023 machine.

Suzuki's MotoGP activities finally came to an end with the Valencia GP, the final round of the 2022 season. Since the bombshell news of Suzuki Motor Corporation's decision to withdraw at the end of the season hit the world this May, every venue and every racetrack has become a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for all the team members of Team SUZUKI ECSTAR. On Thursday afternoon, before Team SUZUKI ECSTAR's final race at the Circuit de Valencia Ricardo Tormo, we spoke with Shinichi Sahara, the project leader who has been leading the team for twenty years.

In the second part of this two-part interview, Sahara-san discusses how Suzuki's decision to withdraw at the end of 2022 compares with 2011, when Suzuki paused participation in the premier class. He talks about what will happen to the team at the end of the season, the chances of a return, and the joy of Alex Rins' victories at Phillip Island and Valencia.

Q: Your withdrawal is inevitably compared to that of 2011, but in 2011, it was an announcement of “suspension of activities".

Shinichi Sahara: In that sense, it is different from this time. Although it was a suspension, returning to the racing was very tough. And after returning, it needs a lot of effort to become competitive and fight at the top level. Therefore, even at that time, we did everything to persuade them not to suspend racing activities. In that sense, this is the second time we have worked like this. Although there are some similarities, suspension and withdrawal are different things. Anyway, I think once is enough for this experience!

Suzuki's MotoGP activities finally came to an end with the Valencia GP, the final round of the 2022 season. Since the bombshell news of Suzuki Motor Corporation's decision to withdraw at the end of the season hit the world this May, every venue and every racetrack has become a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for all the team members of Team SUZUKI ECSTAR. On Thursday afternoon, before Team SUZUKI ECSTAR's final race at the Circuit de Valencia Ricardo Tormo, we spoke with Shinichi Sahara, the project leader who has been leading the team for twenty years.

In the first part of this two-part interview, Sahara-san discusses in depth how Suzuki's decision to withdraw at the end of 2022 affected the team's season, and how the team handled it.

Q: This weekend must be very emotional for you. First of all, I would like to know what you are feeling now.

Shinichi Sahara: It is true that this is our last race, but to be honest, I try as much as possible not to think about it. I told my team members ‘let's do things as we always do to make a solid weekend’ because it is the best way to win the race, and this is what we always do in every race weekend. In the final part of the season, not only the engines but also a lot of chassis parts already have a lot of mileage on them, so we have to avoid any possibility of small troubles in order to have our riders give their 100% to demonstrate their potential and our bikes'.

Q: Do you feel that your last race has finally come?