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With seven races left in the 2022 MotoGP season, we are approaching the final stretch. There are 175 points left to play for, and Fabio Quartararo has a lead of 32 points over Aleix Espargaro.

That means that Espargaro still has his fate in his own hands: he can become 2022 MotoGP champion by the simple expedient of winning every MotoGP race left, and if Quartararo finishes second in all seven races, the Aprilia rider would take his first championship by a slim margin of 3 points.

A bit of a Christmas surprise landed in our inbox today, as the Ducati MotoE project is further along than expected, with their “V21L” prototype bike caught making laps at the Misano World Circuit.

The bike is the first iteration of what will be raced in the MotoE World Cup, starting in the 2023 season.

And while Ducati just announced its intent to takeover that series a few months ago, the Italian brand is clearly far from the beginning stages of that project.

Episode 248 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and this one is our Moto2 and Moto3 follow-up to Episode 247, which focused on the MotoGP action from the Emilia-Romagna GP at the Misano World Circuit.

On the mics, we have Steve EnglishNeil Morrison, and David Emmett, as they walk us through the on-track action in the support classes.

It has been something of an irrelevant day at Misano. On Friday morning, the track was soaking, rain keeping it wet. In the afternoon, it started off wet, but a dry line started to form.

“At the end, the last 10 minutes to go, we had one dry line, but lap by lap it was getting wider,” was how Takaaki Nakagami described it.

With damp conditions expected on Saturday, and a cold and dry Sunday, nothing of importance was learned on Friday.

It was a wasted day in terms of finding race setup, perhaps, but it was still useful in overall terms. MotoGP is full of young riders who haven’t had all that much time in the wet, and so Friday offered a chance to gain some valuable experience.

Of necessity, the past two MotoGP seasons have seen races repeatedly run on the same race track. 2020 was a succession of back-to-back races at the same track: Jerez 1 and 2, Austria 1 and 2, Misano 1 and 2, Aragon 1 and 2, Valencia 1 and 2.

With a better grip on the Covid-19 pandemic, 2021 was much better: the first 15 races have been at 13 different tracks. So far we have only had Qatar 1 and 2 and Austria 1 and 2.

The next three rounds will see MotoGP visit just one new circuit. We have the Gran Premio Nolan del Made in Italy e dell’Emilia-Romagna, or Misano 2, the Grande Prémio do Algarve, or Portimão 2, and then Valencia.

Episode 245 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and this show is a preview of the MotoGP action that is coming this weekend at the Emilia-Romagna GP at the Misano World Circuit.

On the mics, we have Steve EnglishNeil Morrison, and Adam Wheeler, as they gear us up for MotoGP’s second race of the season at Misano, and Valentino Rossi’s final goodbye to his home circuit.

The weather cooperated for the second and final day of the Misano MotoGP test.

It stayed dry and warm all day, which meant everyone got the track time they were looking for. In the case of Maverick Viñales, that was a lot of track time: the Aprilia rider racked up 109 laps, a grand total of 460.6 kilometers.

Equivalent to Misano to Turin, London to Paris, Dallas, Texas to San Antonio, Texas.

The problem with all that track time, of course, is that a lot of rubber gets laid down. That adds oodles of grip, making conditions ideal for MotoGP machines.