“It’s only Friday.” Something you tend to hear from riders on, well, Fridays, when you ask them who they think is looking strong.
Friday is the day that people are getting up to speed, evaluating different setup directions, making a preliminary assessment of tires, and putting in a banker lap when time and conditions allow.
Drawing conclusions from either session of practice on Friday is fraught with difficulty. Doubly so for Friday at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo, near Barcelona.
Episode 164 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out as our second podcast this week, and this one sees Steve English and Gordon Ritchie on the mics talking about WorldSBK’s return to the Catalunya race track in Spain.
The show starts off with a look at the events of the weekend and the state of the championship, with an extra emphasis on the juggernaut that is Jonathan Rea.
The 2020 MotoGP season motors relentlessly on, as we visit Montmelo for the last race of the current triple header. The seventh race in eleven weeks, Round 8 marks the numerical mid-point of the season.
Sort of: it is race 7 of 14 for the MotoGP class, but race 8 of 15 for Moto2 and Moto3, who raced at Qatar.
And as winter approaches in the northern hemisphere and Covid-19 cases start to rise again in Europe, the chances of us making it all the way to Portimao in late November and completing the remaining 6 races after Barcelona are significantly less than 100%.
The relentless round of races is brutal for everyone except fans and riders, most preferring racing every weekend to sitting at home. Especially in a season as up and down as 2020, where the direction of the championship seems to change every week.
We take a break from today’s chicanery to bring you a quick distraction: Marc Marquez riding the Honda CBR1000RR-R Fireblade SP around the Catalunya track, in a 360° video format.
The video comes from Honda’s initial photo and video shoot for the unveiling of the new CBR1000RR-R, but that doesn’t make it any less cool.
For the maximum experience, watch the video on your phone. The IMU on your smartphone should pick up your movements, and change your field of view as you “look” around the bike as its on track.
MotoGP fans who were missing their doses of Lorenzo Land should be happy with this latest announcement from the Monster Energy Yamaha MotoGP team, as Jorge Lorenzo has been confirmed to race at the Catalan GP.
The Spanish test rider for the Yamaha MotoGP squad will be a wildcard entry for the Catalunya race, an idea that was first floated when Lorenzo signed with the factory outfit last year, thus not making this too big of a surprise.
The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in Montmelo is to host a round of the World Superbike championship in 2020. The event is to be held from 18-20th September 2020, between the Portimao and Magny-Cours rounds of the series.
The addition of Barcelona presages a few of the changes coming in both the WorldSBK and MotoGP calendars in future years. Next year, WorldSBK loses Buriram in Thailand to MotoGP, and also looks set to lose the race at Laguna Seca in the USA. Instead, WorldSBK will head to Barcelona in September, and the German circuit of Oschersleben in August.
Luck has always played a role in racing. Sometimes the rain falls just after you set pole position. Sometimes your main rival has a technical problem at a track where you knew they would beat you.
Sometimes the rider ahead makes the smallest mistake and opens up the perfect gap for you to aim through. Things happen over which you have no control, and you have to hope the dice will roll in your favor.
Perhaps you can load the dice a little, sometimes. Bear in mind the saying attributed to golfing legend Gary Player: “the more I practice, the luckier I get.” Luck can be made, on occasion, opportunity recognized and seized. If you tackle the conditions you find, rather than the conditions you wish you had, you at least have a chance.
Conditions at Barcelona put everyone on the back foot. Temperatures rose from relatively cool to typically scorching, after a week of heavy rain. That rain brought down the dust and sand blown north from the Sahara by the Sirocco winds, leaving the track dirty and green.
No grip and constantly changing conditions made consistency an illusion. Finding the right race tire was more guesswork than science, Sunday morning warm up being critical. The Barcelona race looked to be a lottery.
Episode 106 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and in it we see Neil Morrison and David Emmett joined on the microphones, as we discuss the happenings at the Catalan GP at Barcelona, Spain.
Unfortunately because of some technical difficulties, the audio on this show isn’t up to our usual standard. But, the guys still cover in great details the on track action at the race, as well as the goings on behind the scenes in the paddock.
It has been a strange weekend so far in Barcelona, with changing conditions once again the culprit. First, there was the heavy rain on Wednesday and Thursday, which left the track coated in fine sand and dust blown in from the Sahara.
Then there is the rapidly changing weather: temperatures have been rising rapidly every day, with track temperatures 10°C higher on Saturday than they had been on Friday, with a similar increase expected again on Sunday.
Track temperatures for the race are expected to be well over 50°C, spelling disaster for grip levels.
Completing the trifecta of problems, the Moto2 race is likely to leave a thick layer of Dunlop rubber on the surface, which will make grip levels even more unpredictable. “After Moto2, it will be worse,” Michelin’s Two Wheel Motorsports manager Piero Taramasso predicted on Saturday evening.
“Many times this problem happens when you have aggressive asphalt, which is the case here, and on a track in very hot conditions, which is also the case. So I think that tomorrow after the Moto2 race, the conditions will be not as good as we would like.”
Another day of track action and the running of the Moto2 race may help sweep some of the dust and sand from the track, but the rubber the Moto2 bikes leave behind in the forecast hot and humid conditions will leave the surface greasy and without grip.
“The track will be cleaner, but without Michelin rubber on the track,” Taramasso said. One step forward, two steps back.
Why are the MotoGP bikes so much slower at Barcelona than last year? In FP1, fastest man Marc Márquez was a second and a quarter slower than Valentino Rossi was in the first session of 2018. Fabio Quartararo, fastest rider in FP2, was 1.2 seconds slower than Jorge Lorenzo was in the same session in 2018.
“If you compare to last year, in FP2 somebody did a 1’38 and many riders were able to do a 1’39, but this year, nobody was able to do a 1’39,” Takaaki Nakagami wondered. “More or less 1 second slower than last year.”
The answer came from the skies. When I walked to my car this morning, I found it covered in thick drops of very fine dust. According to the locals, this is a fine dust carried from sandstorms in the Sahara, 1000km south of Barcelona.
Heavy rain earlier in the week, then brief showers overnight, and at the start of the afternoon, left this fine Saharan sand all over the track, making it dusty, and robbing it of grip.
A lack of grip wasn’t the only problem. The sand on the track was also incredibly abrasive, chewing through tires, especially fronts, and especially in FP1. When Marc Márquez came back from his second run on the medium front tire, the right side looked like someone had taken a cheese grater to it.
Things were much better in the afternoon, but it did make figuring out who was doing what much more difficult. With conditions so rough in the morning, most riders were using up their allocation of tires they did not expect to need for either qualifying or the race. But some were also approaching the weekend from a different angle.
Was FP1 a wasted session? “No, it was not a waste of a session for sure,” Fabio Quartararo told us on Friday afternoon, after setting the fastest time of the day. The brief rain shower in the afternoon had made FP2 a tricky proposition as well, the Petronas Yamaha SRT rider said.
“Also in FP2, there was some rain in Moto3, it looked like it wasn’t water, it was more dirt. I work a lot with the rear brake, and today, I couldn’t touch it, because as soon as you touch it, the bike is sliding a lot. So for me the track today was really dirty, and we see that the lap times are really far from last year already.”
If MotoGP has a home, it is in Barcelona. There are many other places which have a solid claim to that title, of course. The Grand Prix championship was born in the Isle of Man, the 1949 TT being the first event to count towards the motorcycle racing world championship.
Freddie Frith won the 350cc class race on 13th of June of that year, the race which kicked off the championship. (Dorna is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the start of the championship this week, so keep an eye out for that).
But the Isle of Man hasn’t been on the calendar since 1976, the circuit rightly ruled too dangerous to race a Grand Prix at, even by the standards of the 1970s.
If not the Isle of Man, is Britain the home of Grand Prix racing? The UK once provided the bulk of the riders in the championship, and many of the bikes.
But British influence has waned, and though the paddock is still full of Brits, especially in organizational capacities, there are just a handful of British riders in the championship, and the Moto2 engines of the British brand Triumph are actually produced in Thailand.
Italy certainly has a valid claim to be the spiritual home of racing. The two riders with the largest number of victories in Grand Prix racing, Giacomo Agostini and Valentino Rossi, hail from Italy, and both are widely touted as the greatest motorcycle racers in history.
There are two Italian factories in MotoGP, Ducati having been a mainstay of the premier class, while Aprilia formed the backbone of the smaller classes when they were still two strokes. And there is a generation of young Italian riders on the way up, brought on in large part by Valentino Rossi’s massive investment in Italian talent.
Japan, perhaps? Honda and Yamaha kept Grand Prix running from the dawn of the two stroke era up until the present day, while Suzuki did their part in the 1970s and ’80s, and are slowly looking to expand their support again, with a satellite squad likely to enter in 2021.
Japanese motorcycles have dominated the championship, and Japan has had its fair share of world champions, though predominantly in the lower classes. But though the championship would not exist without the efforts of the Japanese factories, often at considerable cost to themselves, Japan has never actively engaged in running the series, happy to settle for a role as chief supplier.