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MotoGP Preview of the San Marino GP: Rossi’s Home Race, Dovizioso Returns, & Michelin Musings

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While Mugello is Valentino Rossi’s spiritual home, Misano is truly the Italian’s home circuit.

It is quite literally walking distance from his home town of Tavullia: on the Sunday morning before the MotoGP race, a part of the Valentino Rossi official fan club gather in Tavullia to walk to the Misano World Circuit Marco Simoncelli.

It is a little over 12 kilometers, so it’s not short, but it is easily doable.

It is also the home of the VR46 Riders Academy, who use it to train on Yamaha R6s and Yamaha R1s, to keep their brains up to speed, as well as using the karting track to race minibikes, sharpening their elbows, which have already been honed at the ranch.

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MotoGP Preview of the Aragon GP: Quartararo’s Challenge & Viñales’ New Challenge

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These past two pandemic-stricken season have been strange years for me as a journalist. Instead of heading to race tracks almost every weekend, I have been sat at home, staring at a computer screen to talk to riders.

There have been ups and downs: on the plus side, we journalists get to talk to more riders than when we were at the track, because computers make it possible to switch from one rider to another with a couple of mouse clicks, rather than sprint through half the paddock from race truck to hospitality and back again.

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MotoGP Preview of the British GP: A Glorious Track

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It is hard to overstate just how different Silverstone is from Spielberg, where the last two MotoGP rounds were held.

Sure, both have very high average speeds – Silverstone at 179.7 km/h is among the fastest tracks on the calendar, and Spielberg’s 188 km/h is the fastest of the season – but that is pretty much where the similarity ends.

Silverstone has 18 corners, where Spielberg has only 10. The Austrian circuit is 4.3km long, while Silverstone is 5.9 kilometers.

The Red Bull Ring is three fast straights with a bunch of corners holding them together, while Silverstone is a complex of flowing corners and combinations of turns which present a real challenge to get right.

Oh, and Spielberg has steep climbs and sweeping drops, built on the side of a mountain (the clue is in the name, SpielBERG), while Silverstone is pretty much flat as a pancake, built around an old airfield on the top of a hill.

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MotoGP Preview of the Austria GP: Spielberg’s Bad Vibes

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The Red Bull Ring has faced much criticism in the six years since MotoGP started going back there, mostly about the safety of the riders on track. But one thing that gets overlooked is the circuit’s propensity for generating drama off track.

In 2020, we had Andrea Dovizioso announcing he would not be racing with Ducati again in 2021.

In 2019, we had the drama with Johann Zarco splitting with KTM, with additional drama around Jack Miller possibly losing a place to Jorge Lorenzo, who would return to Ducati to take Miller’s place at Pramac.

The year before, Yamaha had held a press conference in which management and engineers officially apologized to factory riders Valentino Rossi and Maverick Viñales for building a dog-slow bike that left them 11th and 14th on the grid.

Spielberg was the place where Romano Fenati got into an altercation with the Sky VR46 Moto2 team, and was sacked in 2016.

So much discord and division. Perhaps the circuit is built on a conjunction of ley lines, or perhaps the Spielberg track was built on an ancient cemetery where the contemporaries of Ötzi were buried.

Or perhaps the middle of a MotoGP season is when tensions generally reach boiling point. The latter explanation is the most likely, perhaps, though a good deal less entertaining.

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MotoGP Preview of the Styria GP: Danger & Opportunity in the Alps

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If it’s scenery you’re after, the Red Bull Ring, or Spielberg, or Zeltweg – choose your favorite name for the Austrian circuit – is hard to beat.

Mugello maybe? The Italian track sits in a valley, rather than being set up against the lower slopes of a mountain, but Spielberg wins on the mountain backdrop behind it.

Phillip Island, perhaps? The Bass Strait makes for a stunning setting, but is it more dramatic than the Austrian Alps which frame the Red Bull Ring?

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MotoGP Preview of the Dutch TT: A Special Track

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“This track is special.” Alex Rins summed up what most of the MotoGP riders, and indeed, almost anyone who has raced a motorcycle, think of the Circuit van Drenthe, the official name of the TT Circuit, or as most fans around the world know it, Assen. “One of my favorite tracks,” is how championship leader Fabio Quartararo described it.

Pecco Bagnaia loves it so much he has a tattoo of the circuit on his arm. “I really like the layout of this track,” the Ducati Lenovo Team rider told us. He had good reason to like the layout, as Assen has been a happy hunting ground for him.

“My first victory, the best weekend of my career in Moto2 here, when I was first in all the sessions and in the race,” Bagnaia told. Reason enough to create an indelible reminder of the occasion on his own body.

“Assen is a great place,” Valentino Rossi said. “It is the track that more or less every rider loves because, first of all, it is the track with the most history in motorcycle racing and was on the calendar from the beginning, and secondly, the layout is fantastic. Now it is modified but it remains the taste of the old Assen and the ride here is always a great pleasure.”

One might accuse Rossi of being biased, having been made an honorary citizen of the city of Assen by the Mayor, Marco Out. But the fact that it was almost impossible to find a dissenting voice suggests he was not lying.

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MotoGP Preview of the German GP: Beating Marc Marquez

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Earlier this week, I wrote an article setting out why I think that Marc Márquez is the favorite to win at the Sachsenring. What the riders told the media on Thursday at the Sachsenring merely cemented the Repsol Honda rider’s status as front runner.

Despite his entirely mediocre results since his return to racing, Márquez was identified as at least a potential podium candidate by just about anyone you asked.

Should this be a surprise? Not when you consider that, as veteran US journalist Dennis Noyes pointed out to me, Marc Márquez has quite the record at anticlockwise circuits, tracks with more left handers than rights.

How good? He wins nearly 7 out of every 10 races he starts at a track which mainly turns left.

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MotoGP Preview of the Catalan GP: A Changed Circuit, A Curious Crash, & A Strange Swap

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Another week, another race track. We are a third of the way into the 2021 MotoGP season (probably, possibly, pandemic permitting), and things are starting to move fast. A third of the way now, and in three weeks’ time, we will be at the halfway mark.

It is hard to overstate how important this part of the season is. Jerez, Le Mans, Mugello, Barcelona, and Assen are the guts of the season, the foundations on which championships are built.

By the time we pack up for the summer break – a long one this time, five weeks between Assen and Austria, with Sachsenring taking place before Assen instead of after, its usual slot – we should have a very good idea of who is in the driving seat for this year.

What makes the triumvirate of Mugello, Barcelona, and Assen key? They are fast, punishing tracks that test man and machine.

They are riders’ tracks, where a fast rider can make the difference, but they also need a bike to be set up well in pursuit of a good result. There are no shortcuts at those three circuits, no relying on one aspect of the machine to get you out of trouble.

The bike has to do a lot of things well, from braking to turning to accelerating. That needs a good crew chief to analyze strengths and weaknesses, a competent team to find the right balance between them, and a good rider to use that bike between them.

If motorcycle racing is about finding the best compromise between braking, acceleration, turning, speed, the Mugello-Barcelona-Assen is the ultimate test of that.

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MotoGP Preview of the Italian GP: The Peril & Power of Motorcycle Racing, Set in the Tuscan Hills

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There is nowhere that encapsulates the essence of motorcycle racing like Mugello.

The track snakes along the sides of the Tuscan valley in which it sits, echoing the country roads and mountain passes where racing first started, shortly after enough motorcycles had been made for riders to challenge each other to tests of skill and bravery.

That is precisely what Mugello is: a test of skill and bravery, of rider and machine, of guts and brains. Calculating risk is everything, both from the technical and human perspective.

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