Latest MotoGP News

Motorland Aragon Moto2 Test Sees Triumph Make Debut, Folger Make Temporary Return

Submitted by David Emmett on

Two days after the Barcelona round of MotoGP had completed, some of the Moto2 riders were back testing again. At the Motorland Aragon circuit, a number of Moto2 teams gathered for a private test. Alongside them, the Moto2 chassis manufacturers were there for the first roll out of their 2019 chassis, housing the Triumph 765 Moto2 engine and Magneti Marelli electronics.

Three of the current Moto2 chassis manufacturers were there with their test riders. KTM had Julian Simon and Ricky Cardus, NTS had Alex De Angelis, and Kalex had official test rider Jesko Raffin, and to some surprise, Jonas Folger, who withdrew from the Monster Tech3 Yamaha MotoGP team at the start of this year.

The test was important for the manufacturers, as it was not just a chance to try their chassis with the Triumph engines, but also to test them with the Magneti Marelli electronics. The spec Magneti Marelli electronics package is significantly more sophisticated than Superstock package used with the Honda CBR600RR engines currently being used.

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2018 Barcelona MotoGP Post-Race Test Round Up: What They Did And Didn't Tell Us

Submitted by David Emmett on

The Monday test at Barcelona felt like a proper test. Normally, such tests descend into a simple shoot out in the last fifteen minutes, frail egos demanding to finish fastest, especially when only pride is at stake. But perhaps the Barcelona race had taken a little too much out of the protagonists, or the hot and humid conditions were simply not conducive to spend even more energy risking everything for pointless pride, or perhaps the riders realize that the season is now so tightly packed with no summer break that they cannot risk injury when it doesn't count. Whatever the reason, at the test, people concentrated on testing.

Not that the riders or teams were particularly forthcoming about what exactly they were testing. Some were more open than others: Suzuki said they were testing a new swingarm, and engine update, and retesting the new chassis they have been using since Mugello. Danilo Petrucci tested a new exhaust, a new gearbox, and a new swingarm, which he promptly broke by taking it for a tumble through the gravel.

Show and tell

Some had nowhere they could hide: KTM debuted a new aerodynamic package taken straight out of the HRC playbook, which had in turned been "inspired" by Yamaha. Repsol Honda debuted a new bike in carbon fiber fairings, not the 2019 bike, they insisted, but rather a potential update for this season. But Honda were so intensely secretive that I would not be surprised if they had merely slapped a black fairing on it to distract from parts they were testing on the Repsol bike, as much as I detest conspiracy theories.

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2018 Barcelona MotoGP Sunday Round Up: A War Of Attrition, Internal Politics, And Friendship Between Rivals

Submitted by David Emmett on

How do you win a championship? There are two schools of thought. Casey Stoner believed that the way you won world titles was by focusing on winning races. "If you win races, the championships will look after themselves," he said when he was still racing. Others argue that consistency is key, that you win titles by getting the best result available on the day, and hope that you don't make mistakes. After all, Emilio Alzamora became 125cc World Champion in 1999 through sheer consistency, without winning a single race that season.

The riders in contention for the 2018 MotoGP title have mixed opinions about the best way to win a championship. Marc Márquez wanted to win every race he started in, until the 2015 Honda RC213V got the better of him, and he had to push too hard to try to be competitive, crashing himself out of contention. Since then, he has tamed his approach, winning whenever possible, but understanding that sometimes, he has to grit his teeth and settle for whatever is available on the day.

Valentino Rossi, wily veteran that he is, follows the same approach, take what you can, where you can, and wait to see where it takes you. That's how he came close to racking up title number ten in 2015, and that's how he has remained in contention every season since he came back to Yamaha in 2013. On Sunday night, Andrea Dovizioso affirmed that he was thinking about the championship in every race as well. "My approach to the race is always thinking about the championship," the Ducati rider said. "If I fight for the championship or for another position, I always race for the championship."

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2018 Barcelona MotoGP Saturday Round Up: Making Magic Saves, Mr Unbeatable, And Choosing Tires At The Test

Submitted by David Emmett on

The trouble with racing in MotoGP at the moment is that no matter how spectacular your riding, no matter how phenomenal your achievements, no matter how dominant your performance, you will always, always be upstaged by Marc Márquez. "The worst thing is that we have to deal with the situation of Marc saving [crashes] every week," Cal Crutchlow complained, only half joking. "It makes the rest of us on Honda look like idiots. Imagine how many he has saved this year compared to how many we have we crashed. He saves fifteen a weekend."

Saturday in Barcelona was yet another example, and perhaps Márquez' biggest yet. In the dying seconds of FP4, after passing Xavier Simeon through Turn 12, Márquez entered Turn 14 and the front folded completely on him. Where other riders would simply go down, Márquez was unwilling to surrender without a fight. "It was last corner, last lap and I lose the front," the Repsol Honda rider told the press conference. "I was fighting against everything, against the bike, against my knee pushing a lot. Then it looks like I was able to save it, but the when I go on the dirty part of the track, I again lose the front."

He had not yet had a chance to look at the data, he said. "I already said to [my team] to check, but what I can say is that the steering was full close because I feel, but it was long. It was very long this one. It was maybe the longest one in my career." Long enough to upstage everyone else on Saturday, despite there being many riders deserving of attention.

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MotoGP Potentially Heading To Brazil From 2021

Submitted by David Emmett on

MotoGP could be heading back to Brazil from 2021. Today, Dorna signed a memorandum of understanding with Rio Motorsports, a Brazilian motorsports company, to organize a Brazilian round of MotoGP at a new facility to be built in Rio De Janeiro. If the circuit gets built and the project proceeds to the next phase, it would see Grand Prix motorcycle racing head to Brazil for the first time since 2004.

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2018 Barcelona MotoGP Thursday Round Up: How The World's Media Fooled Itself About Dani Pedrosa

Submitted by David Emmett on

From time to time, the media gets hoist by its own petard. A story comes along which everyone picks up and runs with, pushed to ever more dizzying heights of breathless commentary; what ifs, maybes, and wild speculation. Professional sports are soap opera for men, as the great darts promoter Barry Hearn once said, and the logical corollary of that is that sports media extrapolate throwaway comments and a handful of facts into vast sweeping narratives.

Thus it was that what looked like the entire MotoGP media contingent packed into Honda's hospitality unit to hear what Dani Pedrosa had to say during his media debrief. It was both genuinely impressive and actually quite frightening. Normally, somewhere between 20 and 30 journalists and photographers attend Pedrosa's media debrief in the HRC hospitality, which is held upstairs on a unit built in the space between two trucks holding offices. A large balcony spans the space between the two trucks, with stairs ascending to a space full of chairs on the roof of one of the trucks, and a table where first Marc Márquez, and then Dani Pedrosa sit and give their account of the day to the assembled media.

Instead of 30 journalists, there was what looked like between 200 and 300 people. Honda's design is meant to be spacious and airy, but that amount of people standing on the roof of what is basically a truck trailer made it look crowded, and rather fragile. Coward that I am, I chose to stay downstairs, and listen there.

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2018 Barcelona MotoGP Preview: Will A New Surface Make Montmeló A Yamaha Track Once Again?

Submitted by David Emmett on

Barcelona has always been a challenging track, but the MotoGP paddock has faced additional challenges at the Catalonian circuit over the past three years. The tragic death of Luis Salom – a typical case of confusing the improbable with the impossible, and leaving a section of track with no gravel runoff and fence unprotected – caused the track layout to be changed halfway through the weekend in 2016, dropping the long left of Turn 10 and the sweeping right of Turn 12, and replacing them with the F1 layout.

A year later, the circuit made other changes, revising the F1 chicane to stop bikes which crashed from crossing the track, while still keeping the F1 layout replacing Turn 10, a tight hairpin and quick kink replacing the long sweeping turn. But that, too, had its shortcomings.

Even the revised chicane was a poor compromise, and for 2018, the Circuit de Catalunya chose to make more radical changes. The track badly needed resurfacing, and the circuit chose to reconfigure the runoff at the sweeping right hander which MotoGP used to use instead of the chicane. That restored the old Turn 12 (though it is now Turn 13, confusingly), bringing back much of the track's old glory. The old section, the tighter right hander of Turn 12, followed by the two sweeping turns of Turn 13 and Turn 14 which build towards the finish line.

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Joan Mir Signs Two-Year Deal To Race For Suzuki In MotoGP

Submitted by David Emmett on

Joan Mir is to move up to MotoGP next year, and will be racing in the factory Suzuki Ecstar team for at least the next two season. 

The signing had been widely expected, as the name of Mir had been linked to Suzuki for the past month or so. The Spanish youngster is highly rated throughout the MotoGP paddock, and been pursued by Honda and Ducati, as well as Suzuki, according to his manager. 

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The Comprehensive Silly Season Update: Mugello Madness Sees Lorenzo Go Repsol, Petrucci To Ducati, And More

Submitted by David Emmett on

Secrets are hard to keep in the MotoGP paddock. When it comes to contracts, usually someone around a rider or team has let something slip to a friendly journalist – more often than not, the manager of another rider who was hoping to get a particular seat, but lost out. It is not often that real bombshells drop in MotoGP.

So the report by Italian sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport that Repsol Honda were in talks to sign Jorge Lorenzo came as a huge shock. The assumptions which almost everyone in the paddock had been making – that Lorenzo would be riding a full factory Yamaha M1 in a Petronas-funded satellite team operated by the Sepang International circuit – turned out to have been nothing more than a useful smokescreen. Instead, Lorenzo has signed a two-year deal with HRC to partner Marc Márquez. The announcement was originally due at Barcelona, but the publication by La Gazzetta forced Honda to make a hasty and brief announcement..

The Petronas rumors had plenty of fire to provide the smoke. In an interview with Crash.net, Sepang International Circuit CEO Dato' Razlan Razali openly discussed the possibility of running Yamahas with Lorenzo and Franco Morbidelli. Everyone I spoke to – including other team managers, rider managers, riders, journalists – believed that Jorge Lorenzo would be riding a Yamaha in 2019.

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Danilo Petrucci Joins Andrea Dovizioso At Ducati Factory Team

Submitted by David Emmett on

After Jorge Lorenzo's departure for Repsol Honda was confirmed this morning, the factory Ducati team announced that Danilo Petrucci will be moving up to take his place for the 2019 season.

The move had been widely expected, as the factory had an option on Petrucci's contract which expired at the end of June. After Lorenzo's decision to leave, Petrucci was the obvious choice to replace him.

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Jorge Lorenzo Signs With Repsol Honda For Two Seasons

Submitted by David Emmett on

In a shock move which emerged in the Gazzetta dello Sport on Tuesday, Jorge Lorenzo is to partner Marc Marquez in the Repsol Honda team for the next two seasons. As he had confirmed after his victory at Mugello on Sunday, Lorenzo is to leave Ducati at the end of this year and join his third manufacturer in four seasons.

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Dani Pedrosa Out At Repsol Honda

Submitted by David Emmett on

Dani Pedrosa is to leave Repsol Honda at the end of this season, HRC have confirmed. After 18 years together in all three Grand Prix classes, including 13 in MotoGP, Honda will not be renewing his contract for 2019 onwards.

The move had been widely expected. Rumors that Pedrosa would be leaving Honda have been circulating since Alberto Puig joined Honda as head of the Repsol Honda team. Puig is believed to have wanted to replace Pedrosa from the moment he joined the team.

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