MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

The final preseason test is a strange creature. Most of the work has already been done at the first test at Sepang. Parts have been tried, and either accepted for use or sent back for scrap. (The parts may be scrapped, but the ideas will be laid aside and the results used to make something better next time.) So there really is a lot less for the teams and factories to test.

Looking at pictures from Buriram, you would be hard pressed to see any new parts compared to the bikes used at Sepang. Or indeed new parts compared to the Barcelona test. As I wrote after Sepang, we are at the stage of MotoGP bike development where designs are converging on the most efficient aerodynamic shape. And we probably won't see any major changes until the new technical rules arrive in 2027.

The WorldSBK paddock decamped to the Iberian Peninsula for four days of winter testing. Unfortunately, rain and wind followed the paddock from Jerez to Portimão. Teams were severely hampered with running at both tests and the majority could only use two days of running to try and get ready for the start of the coming campaign.

While the tests wasn’t as efficient as manufacturers would have hoped it certainly wasn’t a waste of time. The majority of the field felt that enough was done to be ready for Phillip Island, because we’ll have two days testing at the thrilling Australian venue, and a mid-March test at Portimão will allow them to get fully ready for the start of the European season at the Portuguese venue.

BMW’s talisman is back on track

After missing the Jerez test a week previously Toprak Razgatlioglu was back on track at Portimao. The Turkish rider arrived mid-afternoon on Monday and was immediately the centre of attention. Speaking to him as he left the garage he was relaxed but obviously concerned about his finger injury.

After the disaster of the first day of the Sepang MotoGP test, we got through the second day without losing another rider, reducing the rate of attrition to just 1.5 MotoGP riders out through injury a day. No doubt the massive crashes of Jorge Martin, Raul Fernandez, and Fabio Di Giannantonio had served as a useful warning of what is at stake in this preseason. But the conditions helped too.

It was a lot hotter on Thursday, and the sun drove air and track temperatures up much closer to what we would normally expect in Sepang. Yesterday's 38°C track temperatures were replaced by a much more usual 55°C. And also, nobody was much interested in using the medium rear, concentrating instead on the soft.

"I think the medium here is the same as Silverstone and Barcelona, but we struggle a lot to make it work," Fabio Quartararo told us. "The gap between the soft and the medium is too much and the drop is the same as the soft. So, I’m not using the medium any more, and I think everybody is using the soft."

A day relative free of drama - there were still more than a few crashes, including both Ducati Lenovo riders, though nothing serious - and a day on which the riders could focus on working. The heat kept a lot of riders in the garage for a couple of hours around 2pm, then a very brief rain shower chased everyone off the track again, but 15 minutes later work was underway again.

It has been quite the day at the Sepang International Circuit. The first day of the official MotoGP test at Sepang and we are already three riders down. For the second consecutive year, Raul Fernandez has crashed during testing and ruled himself out of the remainder of the test, fracturing a metacarpal bone in his left hand, as well has his little toe. Fabio Di Giannantonio had a silly crash, landing a wheelie badly at the end of the day after doing his practice starts, and breaking his left collarbone.

But the biggest news is that Jorge Martin had a massive highside at Turn 2, after completing just a dozen laps. The force of the crash was so severe that he fractured the fifth metacarpal of his right hand and the third, fourth, and fifth metatarsals of his left foot. The injury on his right hand is to the head of the metacarpal, where the bone in the hand joins the bone of the little or pinky finger. The metatarsal bones are the long bones in his foot joining his ankle to his toes.

The injury to his right hand will probably rule the reigning world champion out for the Buriram test, which takes place next week, and will leave him to ride the fully homologated 2025 Aprilia RS-GP for the first time at the opening round of MotoGP in Buriram at the start of March.

The Blame Game

In four weeks time the lights will go out at Phillip Island and the 2025 WorldSBK season will start. The campaign is already underway, as WorldSBK is in the middle of the Iberian Winter Test season. Two days at Jerez followed by two days at Portimao are ideal for getting ready for the new season. Four days of running will be complimented by two days of testing in Australia before the first race of the season.

It’s hard to find a better way to prepare for the year. The south of Spain offers the promise of good weather and the Algarve almost guarantees it. These winter sun destinations are popular tourist traps at the time of year. What could go wrong?

Quite a bit it seems. Two days of rain-interrupted testing saw the value of the Jerez days questioned by teams. WorldSBK regulations limit teams to just ten days of testing throughout the season for their race riders. Was it better to get track time now to be ready for Australia or to save the days for later in the year? The majority of teams opted to sit it out. The expense of travelling to Jerez was balanced by the value of running.

Saturday saw a fitting penultimate chapter to the 2024 MotoGP season. Pecco Bagnaia knew he had to win both the sprint race and the Sunday GP, and he also knew that he was comfortably the fastest at Barcelona. So he deployed a brilliant qualifying strategy, in an attempt to elicit some help. Normally, when he leaves the pits during Q2, he is irritated when he finds he has a retinue in tow. On Saturday, he was pretty much offering his rear wheel to anyone who wanted it.

Marc Márquez knew that Bagnaia had to be fast, and was looking for the Ducati Lenovo rider's tail. On his second run, he latched onto Bagnaia, with Franco Morbidelli slotting in behind him, and the three of them took the provisional front row of the grid.

But Bagnaia also ran into the limits which will almost certainly see him come up short in the title fight on Sunday. Marc Márquez' time was good enough for the front row, but he was demoted to third by Aleix Espargaro. And Jorge Martin slipped ahead of Morbidelli to qualify fourth for the sprint race.

Normally on Friday I like to examine the pace the riders have set during the day and try to draw some conclusions (erroneous or not) about who might be in contention for the podium on Saturday and Sunday. That seems like a fool's errand at Barcelona, however.

Jorge Martin was asked if he was worried that there seemed to be quite a lot of riders with similar pace to Pecco Bagnaia and him, unlike at the last race in Sepang. "I think there were so many tires to try, and we didn't see any riders with a lot of laps on the tires, so we will see in the race," the Pramac Ducati rider pointed out.

Pace is difficult to figure out when riders are constantly swapping tires, trying to figure out what will be the best choice for the race. Of the ten riders that made it through to Q2 on Friday afternoon, only half of them put 12 laps (sprint race distance or half GP distance) on a rear tire, where normally it would be all ten. Marco Bezzecchi, Aleix Espargaro, Johann Zarco, Maverick Viñales and Alex Márquez stuck with the same tire to do sprint race distance, the rest didn't.

One more day of practice, and then the final points of the season are up for grabs. On Saturday, Jorge Martin has a chance to snatch the MotoGP crown from Pecco Bagnaia, while Bagnaia needs to clean up on Saturday and Sunday to be in with a chance.

Martin stands a chance of becoming the first rider in the MotoGP era to win a title while riding for an independent team. There are some caveats on that claim - Martin has a contract directly with Ducati Corse, rides the same spec Ducati GP24 as Pecco Bagnaia (the few differences are solely down to personal preference, not availability), and the Pramac squad has full factory backing.

But it is still an incredible achievement - the factory Ducati Lenovo team has priority when it comes to processing the data from all of the teams, and the apparatus of Ducati Corse is built with the objective of ensuring the factory team wins the MotoGP title.

So it speaks volumes of the fairness of Ducati that they have proven themselves willing to treat both factory rider Bagnaia and Pramac satellite rider Martin so scrupulously fairly. Ducati have made a very public point of not interfering in the title battle.

Equal opportunities?

At the Sepang International Circuit on Sunday, Pecco Bagnaia won the battle and Jorge Martin won the war. When the race restarted after the horrific crash between Turns 1 and 2, which miraculously saw everyone walk away relatively unharmed, Bagnaia and Martin unleashed three of the most ferocious laps we have seen in MotoGP this year. The reigning champion came out of that battle on top, and went on to win the race. But Jorge Martin finished second and took enough points to be able to clinch the title on Saturday in Barcelona.

You might say that with a 37 points still on the table, and Martin's lead a mere 24 points, that the championship is far from settled. If Pecco Bagnaia can get some riders in between himself and Jorge Martin on both Saturday and Sunday, then he might be able to claw back enough points to win the title. That is correct in theory, but the Malaysian GP demonstrated why that is more of an idle hope. While Pecco Bagnaia had the measure of Martin on Sunday, the pair of them are so much faster than the rest of the field that there is nobody there for Bagnaia to put between himself and Martin.

Saturday at Sepang was an almost perfect distillation of the 2024 MotoGP season. In one of the most thrilling qualifying sessions in recent memory, Jorge Martin and Pecco Bagnaia drove one another to exceptional heights. On his first flying lap in Q2, Pecco Bagnaia smashed his own lap record at Sepang by three tenths of a second.

Five seconds later, Jorge Martin shattered that record by another two tenths, becoming the first rider to lap break into the 1'56s on a race weekend at Sepang, a feat that had previously only been done at the test earlier this year. On his next lap, Martin went a whole lot better, taking four more tenths off his own time and beating Pecco Bagnaia's time from the test by over a tenth.

A time of 1'56.553 was truly breathtaking, an astonishing achievement at Sepang. Surely no one would be able to beat it? That was the body language radiating from Jorge Martin, knowing just how good that lap had been.