MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

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.

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.

Writing MotoGP season previews used to be a relatively simple affair: discuss the four or five riders who had a realistic chance of winning the championship, compare the strengths and weaknesses of the Yamaha vs the Honda, and ask whether Ducati have done enough this year to catch up. A few notes on the remainder of the grid, and you were done.

Previewing the 2023 MotoGP season is potentially a much more time-consuming affair. All 22 riders on the 2023 grid have grand prix victories to their name in one class or another. All five MotoGP factories had bikes on the podium last year, and only Honda didn't score a win. There are 13 world champions lining up in MotoGP in 2023. To say the grid is stacked with talent is an understatement.

Potential champions this year? Obviously Pecco Bagnaia has a good chance of defending. But Yamaha have given Fabio Quartararo the extra speed he was missing to be able to challenge. Enea Bastianini could well surprise and upset his factory Ducati teammate. Aprilia have refined the RS-GP to a point where Aleix Espargaro is a serious candidate, and there is no doubting the talent of his teammate Maverick Viñales either. Jorge Martin has a better bike and a point to prove, and sprint races will play right into his hands. Miguel Oliveira is very much in the same boat. And it would be foolish to write Marc Marquez off, whatever the state of the Honda at the moment.

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.

Phillip Island is going to Phillip Island. A truth universally acknowledged, that whatever you thought the weather was going to do at the glorious racetrack overlooking the Bass Strait, the weather systems powered by the mighty Southern Ocean will always have a mind of their own.

So the day started off bright and relatively sunny, confounding forecasts of rain on Friday. "The thing in this country is that is it so difficult to predict the weather," Pecco Bagnaia said. "It was raining a lot yesterday but then it was completely dry during FP2 so it is difficult to know."

The rain from Thursday had left a lot of water around the track, but the strong wind had dried most of the track out, bar a couple of sections where water ran across the surface, including at the last corner and around Siberia. It made FP1 extremely difficult. "Coming back to the Island after three years was quite nice," Alex Rins said. "Sincerely FP1 was so difficult and so dangerous. With two-three wet patches crossing the track and it was on the limit for those conditions and with some kerbs full of water."

The MotoGP paddock had been looking fearfully at weather forecasts the entire week, and well into the night. Some of them drove through flooded roads to arrive at the Buriram circuit in Thailand, a week after losing Saturday to the rain at Motegi. MotoGP feared another washout.

Instead, they appear to have dodged a bullet. There were a couple of rain showers, and some half-wet, half-dry conditions for Moto3 and Moto2, but MotoGP had two sessions of pretty much completely dry practice. And looking at the weather forecast for tomorrow, there is every chance of it being dry again on Saturday. But also, every chance of rain.

After an absence of three years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, MotoGP is returning to the circuits in Asia and Australia. A lot has happened in those three years in terms of motorcycle development; there has been a sea change in the way that bikes are controlled, as ride-height devices have been introduced to aid acceleration and braking, and engineers have gotten a better understanding of aerodynamics, sufficient to start gaining in the corner, as well as on entry and exit.

When MotoGP raced in Argentina for the first time since 2019 earlier this year, Aleix Espargaro's winning time of 41:36.198 was more than 7.5 seconds faster than the 41:43.688 Marc Marquez took to win in 2019. Argentina, however, is not a great basis for comparison, as the track sees very little use in between races, and the condition of the surface can change a lot.

If you wondered why BMW does not build and race a MotoGP bike, Saturday at Motegi gave you your answer. With torrential rain forcing a red flag in the Moto2 Q2 session, the cancellation of MotoGP's untimed practice session FP3 (FP4 had already been scrapped due to the shortened schedule), and the delay of MotoGP Q1 and Q2, Loris Capirossi and his crew were sent out multiple times to assess the state of the track in their safety cars.

That meant that the audience were treated to hour upon hour of BMW cars circulating at speed, with close ups of the cars drifting through the water, the BMW branding on display. (Do not ask me what car it is: I have so little interest in cars I don't even own one. The only thing I know is that it is some form of M model, which, I learned from the introduction of the BMW M1000RR superbike, is BMW's sports brand.)

With this, and the BMW M Award for the best qualifying performances of the year, BMW gets a massive amount of exposure through MotoGP, without the risk of failure associated with actually racing in the series. Why would they trade that in to go racing?

Much of the attention after Sunday's race went to what happened at the front: Enea Bastianini beating fellow Ducati rider Pecco Bagnaia, Brad Binder firing from mid pack to the front in the first couple of corners, and of course, the massive crash caused by Fabio Quartararo hitting the back of Marc Marquez' Repsol Honda, and in the aftermath, Marquez and Takaaki Nakagami colliding, and Marquez being forced to pull out of the race with a piece of Quartararo's fairing stuck in his rear wheel.

But that meant that some of the things which went on behind were overlooked in the media overload. Aleix Espargaro's return to the podium puts him right back in the championship chase. Brad Binder showed his exceptional class to finish fourth, and nearly on the podium. And some of the riders who felt they had the pace to make up ground in the first couple of laps after qualifying badly.