Episode 170 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and this one comes to us from the MotoGP paddock in Motorland Aragon.
On the mics, we have our usual grand prix duo, David Emmett and Neil Morrison, and joining them on this show is MotoGP photographer Cormac Ryan-Meenan.
The guys dive into the results of the Spanish round, which showed the promise of Alex Marquez, and vaulted Joan Mir to the top of the MotoGP Championship standings.
It looked like we would have another twist in this weird and unsettling season this morning. At Turn 14, the current MotoGP championship leader’s Yamaha M1 got a little squirrelly as he rode over the kerbs.
A little too squirrelly, the front stepping out and then the rear gripping and flicking Fabio Quartararo up into the air, and down onto his left hip. When the Frenchman finally slid to a halt, he struggled to get up, clearly in enormous pain.
He was stretchered into a waiting ambulance, and taken off to the medical center.
For a while, it looked like this could be a serious blow to Quartararo’s title chances, handing the advantage to Joan Mir.
But scans and X-rays revealed that the Petronas Yamaha rider had gotten off relatively lightly, with only bruising and a hematoma in his left hip.
A match for the bruise to his right hip suffered in a crash on Friday morning.
There is a particular type of crash which happens in the wet. A rider will be heading toward a corner, and will start to brake for a corner. At the moment they start to tip the bike into the corner, the front wheel whips out from underneath them almost instantaneously, dumping them on the floor.
The crash happens without warning, and without there being anything the rider can do about it. One minute you are up, the next you are on the ground.
The crash happens because on a wet track, grip is unpredictable. Tires cool, and where you thought there was traction, there was in fact none. A tire that might have been working on one side a couple of corners previously has lost so much heat due to the rain, the wind, that the grip you had previously disappears into thin air.
We saw a lot of those crashes in MotoGP FP1 this morning at Aragon, despite clear blue skies and a bone dry track. The reason? The track temperature was simply too cold, and as a result, the tires don’t reach the required temperature either.
The rubber which is soft and sticky when up to temperature is suddenly stiff and slick as glass, like the tires on a 1:12 Tamiya replica of a MotoGP bike.
Johann Zarco and Fabio Quartararo both went down at Turn 14, a notorious point for that particular type of crash to happen.
In Brno, it was a TV cameraman. In Austria, it was a rider in the Red Bull Rookies Cup. At Misano, it was Jorge Martin. At Le Mans, it was a Yamaha engineer.
And at Aragon, the coronavirus finally reaches the MotoGP grid, with Valentino Rossi testing positive for the virus on Thursday afternoon, before he was scheduled to depart from his home in Tavullia to travel to Aragon.
It was inevitable really. As case numbers start to explode at the start of the European winter, and with a group of 1400 people traveling between their homes (if they are lucky – staff from outside of Europe are stuck in Europe until the end of the season, with no opportunities to see friends and family until almost December) and various race tracks, the probability of Covid-19 hitting the paddock was large.
Despite the rigorous protocols put in place by Dorna for MotoGP (compare and contrast with WorldSBK, where things are much less strict) Valentino Rossi has tested positive, along with a number of other paddock workers.
It is an open question whether we make it to the end of the season, or even past the Grand Prix of Teruel at Aragon next week. As cases rise, the need to be leading the championship grows ever more imperative.
The second wave of the coronavirus outbreak is underway worldwide right now, with increases in COVID-19 cases being counted in Europe, North America, and other continents.
Even the MotoGP paddock isn’t immune to this trend, with news and rumors of positive tests occurring within its ranks in the past several days and weeks.
And now today we get news from Valentino Rossi himself that he has tested positive with COVID-19, after experiencing symptoms of the disease this morning.
Episode 165 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and this one sees David Emmett, Steve English, and Neil Morrison on the mics, as the trio looks at the Catalunya GP in Spain.
The ninth MotoGP round of the year thus far, we end three weekends in a row in Spain with the Catalunya round, and so the guys look back not only this weekend’s racing, but where we are in the championship thus far.
Taking a number of questions from our listeners, the guys examine some of the top names in the paddock right now, but give particular attention to performance of Maverick Viñales, who had another forgettable race result.
What did we learn from qualifying for the Grand Prix of Catalonia on Saturday? We learned that qualifying is extremely deceptive.
The front of the grid is a mixture of riders who are genuinely fast on race pace, and riders who are only quick over a single lap.
But what we also learned is that the track at Montmelo, outside Barcelona, is so hard on tires that qualifying is only a very small part of the story. It is uncertain whether where you qualify will have any bearing on the outcome of the race.
The problem at Barcelona is that the track is punishing on tires. You do not get to the end of the race with tire to spare. Indeed, you may not make it to the end of the race at all.
“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.
Episode 161 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and this one sees Steve English and Neil Morrison on the mics, first talking about the second WorldSBK round at Motorland Aragon, and then looking ahead at the MotoGP round at Misano.