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Gigi Dall’Igna

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The role of tire pressures, and especially for the front tire, has grown in importance in recent years, as aerodynamics and ride-height devices have made the front ever more sensitive to pressure and temperature changes.

It is common to hear riders complain of temperatures and pressures skyrocketing after getting stuck behind other bikes, and kept out of the cooling air.

It is therefore not surprising that factories and teams try to manage tire pressures as carefully as possible.

The first big contract to be signed in MotoGP’s so far torpid silly season is one of the least surprising.

On Monday, Ducati announced that they had signed up Pecco Bagnaia for two more years, meaning the Italian will stay with the Bologna factory for the 2023 and 2024 MotoGP seasons.

It had been the intention of both parties to continue for the foreseeable future, especially after Bagnaia’s exception 2021 season, in which he came close to preventing Fabio Quartararo from taking the MotoGP title.

Another day, another MotoGP team launch presentation. This time, our eye candy comes from the Ducati Corse factory team, which hopes to find grand prix greatness in the 2022 season.

Though a third of the bikes on the 2022 grid will come from the factory workshop in Bologna, not all of those machines will be 2022-spec Ducati Desmosedici GP22 race bikes.

Additionally, the photos here are almost certainly not the machines we will see on the grid in Qatar at the start of the season, but the high-resolution photos do give an indication of how hard Ducati is pushing the rules and the progress in the MotoGP paddock.

Episode 186 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and this one get us ready for the MotoGP action, as we dissect what we can learn from the MotoGP team launches from Ducati, KTM, and Yamaha.

To handle that topic, we have Neil Morrison, Steve English, David Emmett, and Adam Wheeler on the mics, as they discuss what the riders and team bosses had to say about the upcoming MotoGP Championship.

It had promised to be a spectacular Silly Season in MotoGP this year. With all 22 rider contracts up for renewal at the end of this season, several long months of hard bargaining was expected, resulting in a major shakeup of the grid. Few seats were expected to be left untouched.

Yamaha dealt the first body blow to any major grid shakeup, moving quickly to extend Maverick Viñales’ contract through 2022, then moving rookie sensation Fabio Quartararo to race alongside him in the Monster Energy Yamaha team.

Valentino Rossi was promised full factory support from Yamaha in a satellite team if he decided to continue racing after 2020 instead of retiring.

Yamaha’s hand had been forced by Ducati. The Italian factory had made an aggressive play for both Viñales and Quartararo, and Yamaha had brought the decision on their future plans forward to early January.

Yamaha decided to go with youth over experience, and Ducati was left empty-handed.

On Thursday, Ducati presented its 2020 MotoGP team at a spectacular location: the Palazzo Re Enzo in the heart of Bologna’s main Piazzo Maggiore square.

Before the launch was live-streamed to the public, the main protagonists spoke to the media to lay out Ducati’s plans for the 2020 MotoGP season. And though nothing inside the team is changing, and factories always attempt to keep their cards close to their chest, they always manage to let one or two things slip, whether inadvertently or not.

Ducati CEO Claudio Domenicali kicked off the press conference with a justification of why Ducati goes racing. The crux of his argument was that disruptive technologies and a rapidly changing political environment made it imperative for companies to be as independent as possible. That meant being able to rely on their own knowledge, and not having it taken away by outside factors.

“To be economically independent, we at Ducati absolutely think that investment in research in development is crucial,” Domenicali told us.

“And we at Ducati consider racing as the most advanced part of our research and development. And when we put together all the effort for racing, for production bike research and development and all the tooling to make and produce new bikes for racing and production we are above 10% of our total company turnover.”

After the press conference part of Ducati’s 2020 MotoGP launch, we got a chance to ask Ducati Corse boss Gigi Dall’Igna a few more questions about the Italian factory’s plans for the coming season.

Dall’Igna expanded on some of the things he had told the press conference, such as his priority for the Desmosedici GP20, and how he expected the new Michelin rear tire to affect the racing.

But Dall’Igna also answered some other questions as well. The Ducati Corse boss talked about why he wanted more power from the GP20, the support on offer for Johann Zarco, how he sees rider contracts, and Ducati’s thoughts on racing in Endurance.

He even fielded a question about Marc Márquez, and managed to answer it by not answering it.

Since they returned to the MotoGP paddock officially – and not under the guise of the ART, the RSV4-based bike which raced first under the Claiming Rule Team banner, and then in the Open Class – Aprilia has struggled.

Their MotoGP program got off to a bad start, the loss of Gigi Dall’Igna to Ducati forcing them to reschedule their plans.

Romano Albesiano, who took over as head of Aprilia Racing, found it hard to combine his role as lead engineer with the organizational duties of managing the racing department.

Albesiano came from a development and engineering background, and seemed to lack interest in the practicalities of a running a race team. Those took time away from developing the RS-GP, and so the project floundered.

You would think, with only two riders not yet signed up for 2020, and both of those (Jack Miller and Takaaki Nakagami) saying they are just working out the details, that there would not be much drama over contracts in the MotoGP paddock.

Things are not quite the same in the WorldSBK paddock, where Alvaro Bautista’s reign of terror has come to a very premature end, opening all sorts of speculation for the 2020 season.

Those two strands are starting to come together after Brno, amplified by moves in Moto2 and WorldSBK. The rumors are flying, some more sensible than others. And many of them are very much in the category of insanity.

At the core of these rumors is Jorge Lorenzo, and his extended absence from the MotoGP paddock due to the injuries sustained in his crashes at the Barcelona test and practice at Assen.

Since then, the rumor mill has gone into overdrive, with questions over whether Lorenzo will continue with Repsol Honda or try to do something else.

Over the summer break, there were rumors he would retire, and the latest rumor has him going back to Ducati in some form or another.

The FIM MotoGP Court of Appeal sat today in Mies, near Geneve, Switzerland, to hear the appeal by four other factories against the ruling of Technical Director Danny Aldridge that Ducati’s swing arm-mounted spoiler was legal.

The court convened at 11am, and rose shortly before 6pm, but without issuing a decision. That will have to wait until early next week, with Monday or Tuesday the likely dates for an announcement.

The five manufacturers involved were all represented by the highest levels of management, according to GPOne.com. For Ducati, Ducati Corse director Gigi Dall’Igna was present, along with Technical Coordinator Fabiano Sterlacchini.

Appealing the decision of the FIM Stewards were Massimo Rivola for Aprillia, Alberto Puig for Honda, Mike Leitner for KTM, and Davide Brivio for Suzuki.

The Sepang MotoGP test proved to be most instructive, both for the fans, who got a first taste of what the 2018 season could look like, and for the factories, who put the first imaginings of this year’s bikes – and especially engines – through their paces.

We learned that Ducati has taken another step forward, that Honda has improved, that Yamaha has solved one problem but possibly created another, that Suzuki is showing promise, that Aprilia is still waiting on a new engine to match their new chassis, and that KTM is starting to realize that closing in on the top ten was much easier than getting into the top five will be.

From Sepang, MotoGP moves to Thailand, some 1300km almost due north. The Chang International Circuit – mostly referred to as Buriram among the MotoGP faithful, as the circuit is owned by (and named after) the main Thai rival to Official MotoGP Beer Supplier Singha – may prove a good deal less instructive than Sepang, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it offers more of the same, especially from a climate point of view. And secondly, it offers less, in terms of variety of corners and bike maneuverability.

The layout of the Buriram circuit is relatively simple. There are no real elevation changes, though the track has one or two crests and dips.

The track consists of three straights strung together with tight corners, and then an ornery section of tightish corners taking the riders back to the final first-gear corner, and back onto the relatively short start and finish straight.

It is, unsurprisingly, a Hermann Tilke track, and exactly what you would expect as a result.

That doesn’t mean the track is completely without entertainment value. Turn 4 is fast left hander with a lot of run off behind it, giving riders the confidence to attack it. The long Turn 9 is relatively slow, but it leads onto a complex left-right section taken at speed which demands a lot of effort from the rider.

The final corner is a favorite overtaking point, but it tends to bring out the worst in riders. The only pass available is one of the kamikaze variety, offering glory or the gravel trap. To see a lap of the Buriram circuit, watch this video on the WorldSBK website.