MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

Japanese racing legend Yukio Kagayama, who has ridden for Suzuki for more than three decades, started collaborating with Ducati in the 2024 season. He set up and organized Ducati Team KAGAYAMA, and his rider Ryo Mizuno is taking part in the All Japan Road Race Championship with the championship-winning bike Panigale V4R.

Team Kagayama is also racing in the 45th edition of the Suzuka 8-Hours race with Mizuno, Hafizh Syahrin, and Josh Waters. And now, Paolo Ciabatti from Ducati Corse came to Suzuka on Friday to join the team. In the timed practice session, Mizuno set the second fastest time and helped their team proceed to Saturday’s Top 10 Trial superpole shootout. In the Top 10 Trial, Mizuno finished 0.118s behind YART-YAMAHA. Right after the Top10 Trial, we managed to grab an exclusive interview with Ciabatti in their team office.

Q: Ryo’s riding in the top 10 trial and your team’s performance so far this weekend is quite amazing. What do you think of your riders and Panigale V4R's performance?

Paolo Ciabatti: You know, we are very pleased with the results so far. We know that Panigale V4R with the superbike specification, like this one that we gave to Kagayama's team, is super competitive. We can see in any championship where we take part, World Superbike, American Superbike, British Superbike, also in the first rounds of Japanese Championship, the bike was showing good potential. Naturally, we needed to understand better how to use the Bridgestone tire because we never had Bridgestone on a superbike, but with the help of Bridgestone supplying us data, and the team, I think we came up with very good setup solution.

Now qualifying went very well, we missed the pole position by one tenth of a second, I think Yamaha is very strong, but Ryo Mizuno was incredibly fast, he put his best lap time in the top 10 qualifier.

On the first weekend of August, the Suzuka 8 Hours Race was held at Suzuka Circuit in Mie Prefecture, within an hour's drive from Nagoya, the third biggest city in Japan. This year saw the 44th edition, and Honda is the most successful manufacturer in its history: 29 victories.

This number of victories is overwhelming. Since the Suzuka 8 Hours is regarded as one of the most important races for Honda, a string HRC (Honda Racing Corporation) top management came to Suzuka one after another, with HRC President Koji Watanabe also arriving at the racetrack on Saturday morning. In Sunday’s race, their factory team, Team HRC with Japan Post, dominated all through the eight hours and achieved victory for the second year in a row. It was such a beautiful summer night, and everything went silky smooth for them in the 8 Hours race.

Everything is the complete opposite in MotoGP, however. In the premier world championship for motorcycle racing, Honda has been suffering something they have never experienced before.

As of Round 9, the British GP, Honda has taken only one podium from twenty seven opportunities. In the riders’ standings, the highest place for any of Honda's four riders is 14th, and in the manufacturers' championship, Honda lies in 4th place, with their accumulated points less than one third of Ducati's. In the team standings, Honda’s factory squad Repsol Honda Team is placed the lowest of all, 11th. This must be the most critical situation in their racing history.

Nobuatsu Aoki finished his road racing career as a rider at the 2022 Suzuka 8 Hours Race at the age of fifty. As the eldest of well-known Aoki three brothers, Nobu had already shown his potential in the All Japan Road Race Championship when he was a teenager back in the early 1990s. Soon after, he moved up to the 250cc grand prix class, and took an impressive victory in Malaysia in 1993. Then in 1997, he stepped up to the 500cc class to ride for Honda NSR500. He also experienced the dawn of the 4-stroke MotoGP era in Proton KR team before becoming a test rider for Suzuki.

Backed by rich experience, knowledge, and skill, his words are always full of deep insight. And his sense of humor adds a unique flavor to them. We spoke with Nobu for an hour-long interview at Suzuka Circuit on Thursday evening, the day before his last race weekend started.

Q: First of all, could you tell us a little bit about the reason why you have decided to retire from racing?

NA: The reason? Nothing but my age! Unfortunately, when you get old, your body doesn’t respond as it used to. Although I have always been training very hard, in my late 30s, I felt something changed in my body. Then, when you turned forty, that strange feeling started growing even more. For sure, I still think I am still young like a teenager. However, if you train hard like a teenager and ignore your age, you can very easily end up with an injury in training. You run very hard, you lift a heavy barbell like you used to do, then you pull your muscles or injure your joint!