MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

If you had made your MotoGP fantasy picks for the Le Mans grand prix on Friday evening, as I did, you would have been all in on Jack Miller and KTM. The Australian was fastest in both the morning and afternoon sessions, and his pace looked good too. Teammate Brad Binder was third in the morning, seventh in the afternoon, and on pace for another strong result.

Or so it seemed. Qualifying went reasonably for Miller, the Red Bull KTM rider ending up in fourth, just behind polesitter Pecco Bagnaia. Brad Binder had a tougher time, struggling with the front tire locking, and ending up in tenth on the grid.

In the sprint race on Saturday, Binder made up for his poor qualifying by getting one of his trademark rocketship starts and steaming through to finish second, behind an unleashed Jorge Martin. Miller chose the medium front, on the advice of KTM and Michelin, and ended up losing the front at Musée, always a tricky spot when the left-hand side of the tire isn't quite up to temperature. But both riders had shown real potential.

Perhaps the sprint races are starting to calm down a bit. Sure, there were only 17 finishers – Raul Fernandez withdrew on Friday because of his arm pump surgery, and Jack Miller, Augusto Fernandez, Jonas Folger, and Fabio Quartararo all crashed out – but there were no injuries, no riders taking each other out, no excessively enthusiastic attempts at a pass ending in collisions. It was hard, close, clean competition.

Surprising, then, that once again all of the drama is around the standard of stewarding. After the meeting the Stewards had on Friday with the riders, explaining how each contact would be punished and laying out the guidelines they use to assess which penalty to apply in which situation, they went on to apparently throw their own guidelines out of the window and – correctly – not penalize any of the several riders who touched other riders while making hard passes. This left half the riders furious, the other half delighted, and everyone dismissing the role of the Stewards as pointless. It felt like they span the great Wheel O' Penalties again, and we all got lucky when it came back saying "Free Pass".

The complaint commonly leveled at the Circuit of The Americas in Austin, Texas, is that it does not produce great racing. And this is often true. But not this Sunday. In 2023, the fans who flocked to COTA for MotoGP saw three great races on Sunday, and a whole heap of surprises.

The Moto2 race was a great example of how a track like COTA can produce a tense and exciting race. Marc VDS rider Tony Arbolino and Pedro Acosta of the KTM Ajo squad broke away shortly before the halfway mark and a hard chase ensued. At a track which is as physically demanding as COTA, Acosta knew he had to plan an attack on Arbolino, rather than just try to pass and having to spend the rest of the race battling. The additional energy that would take would leave them both with nothing left to finish the race.

So Acosta waited. When Arbolino ran wide into Turn 1, Acosta seized the lead, but the effort of leading saw him outbrake himself and run a little wide into Turn 12. Arbolino snatched back the lead, while Acosta slid back in behind him. On the last lap, Acosta attacked again into Turn 12, the tight left hander at the end of the back straight, and snatched back the lead.

Ducati may have swept the podium and stolen the headlines in Argentina, but behind the triumphant trio of Marco Bezzecchi, Johann Zarco and Alex Marquez there was plenty of fascinating detail to examine. There were surprises, such as Franco Morbidelli outperforming Fabio Quartararo on the Yamaha throughout the weekend, the Aprilias failing in the wet where they had been so strong last year and in the dry, and Jack Miller sealing another strong weekend for KTM. We also had 17 riders lining up on the grid, after Joan Mir was ruled unfit after his crash in the sprint race on Saturday.

But let's start with conditions. Racing in the rain is always difficult enough, but the Termas de Rio Hondo circuit presents an additional challenge. Though the track had been cleaned up by the time the race started, both with blower trucks and by having two days of grand prix machines circulating, there was still a lot of mud and dust around the circuit. Add in a morning of heavy rain, and the spray coming up from the bikes ahead wasn't just water, it was a mixture of water and dirt.

Two Saturdays, two sprint races, and five riders down. MotoGP's sprint races continue their trend of being thrilling and terrifying in equal measure. They produce compelling racing, but the riders are constantly skirting disaster.

And sometimes failing to skirt it: Joan Mir crashed on the first lap, and was taken to hospital for scans on his ankle. MotoGP medical expert Dr Charte told Spanish broadcaster DAZN that Mir had suffered a concussion, and so could miss the grand prix on Sunday. He is due to be evaluated again on Sunday morning, but if he does miss the race, that would bring the grid down to 17. Very threadbare indeed.

Still, there is no argument that the sprint races are exciting. Even the riders think so, though their attitude to the excitement varies with their appetite for risk. And their willingness to fight, and to defend aggressively.

Cutthroat business

If Friday was the warm up for the new schedule, Saturday was when it hit home hardest. The familiar pattern – FP3 in the morning, including a mad dash for a spot in Q2 in the final 15 minutes, then FP4 in the early afternoon followed immediately by qualifying – was gone. In its place, a lot of confused journalists (well, at least one, myself), suddenly confused by the fact that it was not yet 11am and MotoGP was already starting Q1.

Moto2 and Moto3 had a more normal pattern – they kicked off a little earlier in the morning, and qualifying was a little later in the afternoon than last year – but after qualifying for the Moto2 class, it was time for the first ever MotoGP sprint race. That turned into a genuine barn burner, in both senses of the phrase. It was exciting. It was something new. And it was really rather scary.

The day held a lot of surprises. Lap records tumbled in all three classes: by just under a tenth of a second in Moto2, half a second in Moto3, and by a whopping 1.5 seconds in MotoGP. Bikes and riders we had written off stunned the fans. Riders we had hyped up disappeared were utterly faceless. There is no substitute for racing to uncover the reality.

It is no secret that FP4 is my favorite part of a MotoGP weekend. Every Saturday afternoon I watch the live timing carefully for signs of which MotoGP rider has the best race pace, usually pinging comments back and forth with Neil Morrison over WhatsApp. Once the results PDF is published, I pore over the Analysis timesheets, showing times and sector times for each lap, as well as which tires were used, and how fresh or used they were.

Based on that information, plus the outcome of qualifying, listening to what riders have to say and discussing the day with others, I try to make as informed a guess as possible of what might happen in the race. I try to estimate who looks to have the best race pace, based on lap times set in longer runs on very used tires. And if a rider hasn't used older tires – switching between two different rear tires, for example – I try to estimate whether their pace on used tires drops off more than the times in FP4 show.