MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

Shortly after the French Grand Prix at Le Mans, controversy erupted surrounding statements Pecco Bagnaia had made during his media debrief on Sunday evening. Bagnaia had crashed out of the race on lap 5 after a collision between himself and Maverick Viñales.

Though the crash had been a racing incident, both riders conceded, Bagnaia raised a recurring theme in the 2023 MotoGP season, especially since the introduction of sprint races on the Saturday of a grand prix. With the field so close together, and overtaking so difficult, it was becoming ever more imperative to be aggressive at the start of the race, and try to pass as many other riders as possible before your front tire pressure became too high to risk a pass.

Yesterday, I wrote about the stupendous crowds at Le Mans for the 1000th motorcycle grand prix. The circuit and event were the right place to celebrate such a memorable occasion. But the fans who packed the circuit at Le Mans got their money's worth in terms of racing too. The MotoGP race was spectacular and tense in equal measure.

It was also a very messy affair. Of the 21 riders who lined up at 2pm on Sunday – Raul Fernandez had tried to ride after arm pump surgery, but that had proved impossible – only 13 made it to the checkered flag. It was a war of attrition.

Why all the crashes? A lot of reasons. There's a lot of hard braking at Le Mans, and more right than left corners. Temperatures can be relatively cool, and tires can cool off quickly. And riders found themselves caught between choosing a softer front tire and suffering in braking, and going for the medium or hard front and nursing the left side of the tire through Musée and Chemin aux Boeufs.

What we should be talking about tonight is the return of MotoGP to the place that houses its soul, and the explosion of passion and racing that emerged from the Circuito de Jerez. But despite a tense race with a scintillating last lap that played out in front of the largest crowd to pack the Jerez track for perhaps a decade, the main topic of conversation is the level of stewarding. MotoGP at Jerez looked like the pinnacle of motorcycle, surrounded by adoring fans, and overseen by a bunch of amateurs.

The circuit was a cauldron of emotion from the crack of dawn. I walked down to Turn 10 to watch the warm up, to get a sense of who had drive out of that crucial corner, but to be honest I was captivated by the crowds. There was an intensity that has been rare in MotoGP since the Covid-19 pandemic hit, only seen at Le Mans, the Sachsenring, Assen. It felt like the old days.

The new MotoGP format was supposed to bring a little more excitement to a weekend, and it has certainly done that. If anything, it has brought a little too much excitement at some points: Of the 22 riders who turned up on the Thursday before the season opener at Portimão, only 17 started the race a week later in Argentina.

The sprint races themselves have made for fantastic viewing, mainly because they have encouraged riders to try to make more passes. The problem is, the MotoGP manufacturers – or rather, the European manufacturers which are dominating MotoGP – are doing everything in their power to build bikes that are hard to overtake. So the only way to get past is to take a lot more risk, especially on the opening lap.

I say 'only way', but in fact there is another way to get to the front without taking any risks in passing. And that is to take risks during qualifying. And to take risks in qualifying, you first have to take risks in the two practice sessions on Friday, to ensure a spot in Q2. If you are starting on the front row, you have to worry a great deal less about what happens behind you.

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.

Sprint race number three is in the books, and despite the crashes – three in the ten-lap sprint around the Circuit of The Americas in Austin, Texas – everyone made it back to the pits pretty much in one piece and ready to go for Sunday. After the attrition of Portimão and Argentina, this was a welcome change.

Saturday underlined once again what a massive change the sprint races are for MotoGP. They change everything: there is no such thing as "it's only Friday" any longer, as Friday determines who gets through to Q2 directly, and who has the stress of trying to pass through Q1. With qualifying counting for two races rather than one, a spot on the front two rows is now utterly vital.

Conditions had changed too. A very heavy fall of rain overnight had flooded into some of the temporary offices in the paddock, and left the track green and still damp in the morning. Then, when the sun came out, temperatures soared, track temps creeping up towards the high 40s°C.

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.

What did we learn from the Grand Prix of Argentina from Termas de Rio Hondo? First and foremost, we learned not to trust weather forecasts. It was supposed to rain on Friday, and it turned out fine. It was supposed to be fine on Saturday and Sunday, and there were patches of rain on Saturday and a downpour on Sunday.

We also learned that grip levels change everything. In the dry and in the wet, as grip changes, so do the relative strengths and weaknesses of the bikes and riders. We saw that most clearly in the Yamaha garage, where Franco Morbidelli was suddenly outperforming Fabio Quartararo through practice, qualifying, and the sprint race, mainly because Morbidelli gets faster as grip drops off, and there was very little grip available at Termas.

And we saw Marco Bezzecchi fulfill the potential we all believed he had, dominating the feature race on Sunday after getting tangled up on Saturday, and having to settle for a podium.

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.