MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

Friday was almost the most quintessential Phillip Island MotoGP day. It started off cold and wet, then the rain eased off during free practice for Moto2, then it started hammering down again. The rain got so heavy during the the last 10 minutes of Moto2 FP that MotoGP FP1, which was supposed to start directly after Moto2, was delayed. Then delayed again. And again. And eventually, after two hours, canceled.

By the time MotoGP took to the track for timed practice, however, the track had dried out. "Already this morning when I went out from the hotel, I understood that it was difficult to ride in the morning," Pecco Bagnaia told reporters on Friday afternoon. "But then this afternoon it was maybe the best conditions I ever tried in Phillip Island. It was sunny, no wind, the grip was very high."

The fact there was no wind was the only thing missing from the stereotypical Phillip Island day. Never fear, that is scheduled for Saturday, when it will at least be dry. And FP2 on Saturday morning will be 10 minutes longer than normal, to compensate for the loss of Friday morning.

That track time will be sorely needed. Everyone got time on the soft rear, with half the field or more putting the sprint race distance on the rear. But whether it will last the distance on Sunday is still open to question. That is the work that will have to be done on Saturday morning, weather willing.

Given the ever changing nature of the track, it should come as no surprise that Marc Márquez was fastest on Friday. "We can say that they were my conditions," Márquez told reporters. "Especially one of my strong points is to adapt well and quickly to the conditions, and the fact that we didn't ride in FP1 and went straight away to the practice, the grip of the track was improving a lot. Then you need to adapt quickly to the conditions." He didn't think his advantage would last, however. "I feel good, but I expect that tomorrow the step of the others, especially Martin, will be bigger."

It also helped that this is one of his favorite tracks, Márquez acknowledged. The bike was working well around Phillip Island as well - the fact that there were three GP23s at the top of the timesheet made that much clear.

The trouble the GP23 has is that the rear can push the front, and Phillip Island was no exception. Márquez' choice of the medium front didn't help, he explained, particularly when he was chasing his best laps at the end of the session. "For the first time attack it was OK, but for the second one it was already moving too much." It was good to know, in light of qualifying. "It's important information also for tomorrow. On entry to the fast corners where you use a lot of banking, you just miss the turning."

We should not read too much into the fact that there were three GP23s at the top of the timesheets, Marco Bezzecchi warned. "The GP24 bike is better. For sure," he said. There was no logical explanation why the top three should all be on last year's Ducati. "I don't know, but it's just a coincidence."

It helped that Ducati has setup data for the GP23s from last year, but that wasn't why they took the top three slots, Pecco Bagnaia said. "It's just because they did a better job, I think."

Doing a better job meant getting out in time to beat the yellow flags which came out in the last couple of minutes, after crashes by Lorenzo Savadori, Pedro Acosta, and Jack Miller. Those came just as a lot of riders were about to embark on their second flying lap, which would probably have been faster than the first.

"Normally here in the second lap you can improve a lot, because the rear tire is more ready," Bagnaia said. "Normally here you remove three or four tenths in the second lap." That gave Bagnaia confidence, as he did a 1'28.013 on his first flying lap, and so a time much closer to Márquez' 1'27.770 would have been possible, he believed. But the important thing on Friday is that he was through to Q2. "I think the potential was to be leading or be in the top three, but it doesn't matter, today it's OK to be in the top 10."

Losing out on FP1 meant less time to work on tires for most of the grid, but it was a particular penalty for Pedro Acosta. The rookie ran into the fact that Phillip Island really is a lot more challenging on a MotoGP bike, and you need time to get your head around how to ride it, just because it is, as MotoGP pit lane commentator and 500 GP winner Simon Crafar said, the most daunting circuit on the calendar.

"It was quite difficult because all these things like mistakes, learning the lines I make in FP1," Acosta explained. "The problem now is that I go directly to PR, one hour, without trying the track, trying a new aero, not trying any lines and not seeing anyone on track. Everything was a bit more difficult."

What made Phillip Island so difficult? "For sure the lines," Acosta told reporters. "Phillip Island is not an easy track so you understand that if you don’t enter Turn 3 well then you lose a lot of time. If you don't start to flow well in Turn 7, 8, 9 then you lose massive time, and if you don’t accelerate well in the last corner then you are dead because you lose the whole straight."

The new surface had more grip, but the bumps from the previous surface remained. And hitting those bumps on a MotoGP bike was a very different kettle of fish to Moto2. "In T3 and T4 it improved a lot, but in T1 and T2 there are a lot of bumps. To hit these bumps at 200km/h in Moto2 was OK. To hit it at 300km/h changes quite a lot you know!" Acosta joked. "Normally I am not holding the bike like this, and it was tough to understand in a short session. If I had FP1 to understand this then PR would have been much easier." Acosta ended up in thirteenth.

The loss of FP1 also meant that very few riders spent much time on the medium rear. Though plenty of riders put more than the sprint race distance on the soft rear, nobody did any significant distance on the medium, and only Alex Márquez, Marco Bezzecchi, and Luca Marini put any laps on the medium.

The verdict was not overwhelmingly positive in the cold conditions at Phillip Island. "I tried the medium rear, but it has a little bit less potential, less performance, less grip," Luca Marini said. "It’s a safety tire. For sure if we have problems with the soft in the Sprint we’ll have that tire as a back up. We’ll try it in the warm-up. But no problem, I’m quite comfortable with the soft rear. Michelin is doing a good job."

Saturday morning will see more riders trying the medium, however. "I think the soft is a good tire for the sprint, but tomorrow morning I would like to make more laps on it, or if we decide to go with the medium, try to put more laps on the medium," Pecco Bagnaia said. "Today just three riders tried. Looking at the lap times they were fast with it, but it's difficult to know if it's better or not than the other tire. If I did every session in the wet and I had to decide for the sprint race, I would go with the soft."

Enough riders did laps on the soft rear to get a sense of who has genuine pace. Marc Márquez was not only fast over a single lap, but he looks to be strong over race distance, posting a 1'28.5 on a tire with 14 laps on it. Jorge Martin is not far behind, doing a 1'28.6 on tire with 18 laps on it. Pecco Bagnaia seems to be a couple of tenths off that, while Jack Miller surprised on race pace, despite missing out on Q2.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was Johann Zarco, who dipped into the 1'28s on a very used soft rear. "I didn't expect to begin the session as good as I did," the LCR Honda rider said. "During all the session I was controlling the lap time, the pace, I could try things on the bike that I was always in the good group. Just a pity to don't have a better lap time on the last run, because I missed the first lap for different reasons. And the second lap I got the yellow flag."

The new aero and chassis on the Honda have given him confidence in the front end, Zarco told reporters. "I think here the bike gives a good front feeling, good confidence," the Frenchman said. "We are still missing some performance in acceleration, so when you need to extract the best of the new tire, you cannot do it. So we have not a big difference between the new tire and the used tire, which can be good for the race. But for this reason we miss a good qualifying to then enjoy a good race. But the balance of the bike is really similar to what we have in other tracks. But the improvement we did in the fast corners really helps to give an extra push and get the lap time."

It was a decent day for Yamaha as well as Honda. For Alex Rins, at least, who got through to Q2 directly, just beating teammate Fabio Quartararo by fifteen hundredths of a second. "You know, it was an acceptable day for me, but looking at how it went the last month or last months, it was a good day," Rins said.

Quartararo struggled with clutch problems. At one point, the cameras showed a super slowmo shot of Quartararo going into Turn 4, with his rear wheel bouncing off the asphalt. "It was the clutch," the Monster Energy Yamaha rider explained. "So this is why we tried the new medium, it was jumping. We went back to the box, we thought it was the tire. We changed to the soft, it was doing the same. So at this moment we decided to change the bike, it was the new bike we never tested. Was pretty good, but you know we missed a lot of laps to really be at 100%."

The weather wasn't the only problem at Phillip Island. Friday saw two sessions red flagged due to geese on the track, and a hare darted out in front of Jorge Martin just as he was on a fast lap. The presence of wildlife is a pretty terrifying prospect, but something that Martin said riders include in their calculations.

"For sure a lot of wildlife here on Phillip Island," the Pramac Ducati rider said. "This will be interesting for Sunday, or even for tomorrow. If we have some animals at the end of the race maybe it’s stopped. It’s important to always be in a good position."

The problem, of course, is that for a large part of the year, race tracks are ideal refuges for wildlife. Large areas of land with few people about for most of the time, and noise which animals quickly learn to ignore. Swallows nest in the beams of grandstands, and at tracks like Assen, terns and oystercatchers will next in the gravel traps.

While hitting a tern may be unpleasant - terns are smaller than the seagull which Andrea Iannone hit at Phillip Island during the 2015 race - a goose is a very different matter. They are large and heavy enough that if a rider hits it, bad things are going to happen. And we have even seen wallabies on the track.

This is not an entirely insoluble problem, as Simon Patterson points out in an article on The Race. Though the situation is slightly different at airports, they manage to deal with the threat posed by wildlife. The Phillip Island circuit's location, at the edge of the Bass Strait, poses some unique problems. But the organization really needs to find a better way to deal with this. We may not always be as lucky as Iannone was in 2015.

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