MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

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 has been hot and humid at Motegi. Humid enough to rain in the morning, chasing everyone back into the garage for 20 minutes in FP1. That disrupted everyone's practice plans, forcing a rethink of the afternoon session and leaving a lot of questions unanswered.

Questions such as, will the soft rear go the distance on Sunday, or should we use the medium? A lot of riders used the medium during the limited running in the morning, but the tire just didn't want to work for most people in the afternoon. "If you see everyone that put a medium tire in PR, they make 3 laps and come in and put a soft," Pedro Acosta said. "This is not easy to understand. And even the soft is going to be difficult to finish the race with."

That puts a lot of pressure on Saturday morning, to work out whether the medium rear is a better tire for the race. "Last season with this tire they made the whole race and they were fast, and it was not an issue," Acosta said. "But I don't know why, but this soft tire will not finish the race. But the medium, I don't know how is the level of grip, you know?"

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

The problem with having two races at the same track within a couple of weeks of each other is that by the time the riders line up for the start of the second race, the bikes are so dialed in that it is hard to make much of a difference. Each team and rider has reached the level they are at, and the result shows it. Second races tend to be a bit of a bore.

Doubly so at a track like Misano. "This track, it's particularly difficult to overtake, sincerely," Luca Marini told us after spending the second half of the race stuck behind Jack Miller. And so the result of Saturday's sprint race was a very close reflection of the qualifying results.

If you check the lap chart PDF on the MotoGP.com website, you can see that of the top ten, six riders finished the race in the position they crossed the line at the end of the first lap. And of the four that didn't, Pedro Acosta got past Brad Binder for fifth on lap 2, and Pecco Bagnaia passed Jorge Martin for the lead on lap 7.

Close, but no cigar

It would be harsh to call the sprint race at Misano 2 tedious. It had tension, but for the most part, that tension went unfulfilled. It felt like something might happen throughout the race. But in the end, very little did.

The return to Misano has been a return to the current Natural Order in MotoGP. Despite a damp start in the morning, by the afternoon, the timesheet gave a very clear picture of the lie of the land. I will let Marc Márquez explain.

"We know that always in the Covid times, the second GP [at the same track] was always super tight. And in fact everything is very tight, everything is fast, everybody is fast," the Gresini Ducati rider told us.

But that closeness belied the fact that there are two riders who are a cut above the rest at the moment. "It's true that when it's better grip conditions, the pattern of this year is it looks like Martin and Bagnaia do a step, and in fact today, they were much faster than us."

A cut above

The timesheets bear this out. On Friday afternoon, Pecco Bagnaia did a lap of 1'30.902 on a set of medium tires which had 14 laps on them, just over half race distance. Jorge Martin did a 1'30.844 on a set with 12 laps on them.

Nobody else got close. Marc Márquez did a 1'31.3. Enea Bastianini a 1'31.4. Maverick Viñales did a pair of 1'31.6s, and Pedro Acosta matched that on a used soft rear. Bagnaia and Martin have four tenths on the rest of the field, and will be battling for victory at the head of the field. There will be a larger group behind fighting over the last place on the podium, most likely with Marc Márquez at their head.

MotoGP is back at Misano, but conditions are very different to two weeks ago. It was raining on and off on the last part of our drive to Riccione, close to the circuit where my wife and I are staying. There was a brief respite before we went out to dinner, then it started raining as we walked back to the hotel.

And it kept raining, much as it had all day on Wednesday. It was raining when I finished my preview at around 1am on Wednesday night. It was raining when I got up in the middle of the night, and it was raining when we got up around 8:30am. It rained all through breakfast, then all through the morning, and through all of daylight on Thursday, with the briefest of respite toward the end of the afternoon. By the time I left the track around 7pm, it had stopped raining, and stayed dry for a couple of hours, and a few minutes ago - it is 10:40pm here in Riccione - it started hammering it down with rain again.

Tuesday had been brutal too, perhaps even more so. Most of the trucks had been parked in a field near the circuit, which doubles as an overflow car park for paddock workers on a race weekend, but the biblical rain on Tuesday left the drivers struggling to get out, two local tractors being conscripted into trying to drag the truck-trailer combinations out of the mud. It was long, hard, and dirty work.

Overcast in mind

It has been a long ten days with two surprising and exhilarating rounds at Aragon and Misano, and there's a test here on Monday. So instead of a full report, a couple of notes on the things that really mattered at Misano. There is plenty of time in the next two weeks to take a deeper look at some of the other things.

So let's start at the beginning. On Saturday night, a frisson of excitement ran through the paddock as we all received severe weather warnings on our phone for the next day. Would a massive summer storm lash the Misano World Circuit and create a topsy-turvy result? Not once you realized the warning was for all of northern Italy, which is quite a big place. The chances of heavy rain at Misano around race time were vanishingly slim.

The heavy rain didn't come, but from around 1pm onward, the leaden skies over the circuit were doing their best to convince the paddock and the packed crowds at Misano that it might. Drops of rain spattered on screens, truck roofs, umbrellas, but it never seemed to get worse than that. The race started with everyone on slicks, though a few riders had scrubbed in wets on the sighting lap.