We have been fortunate this year compared to 2020. Last year, we had repeat-races at five circuits, making up ten of the fourteen MotoGP rounds held.
In 2021, the situation with the COVID-19 pandemic has improved to the point that MotoGP managed to visit three different continents, needing to return to the same circuit only three times.
Six races out of eighteen is far from perfect, but much better than the situation in 2020.
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.
It has been four years since anyone lapped the Circuit of The Americas quite so rapidly. In 2018 and 2019, nobody, not even Marc Marquez, managed to get under the 2’03s.
So it is a testament to how much faster the MotoGP riders are going that two riders managed it on Saturday in Austin. And this, despite the fact that the track has become so much more bumpy in the past couple of years.
So bumpy, in fact, that it appears as if the circuit has been issued an ultimatum: resurfaces the section from the exit of Turn 1 all the way through Turn 10, or MotoGP is not coming back.
Pol Espargaro summed up the complex emotions of almost the entire grid (possibly bar Jack Miller, but more of that later) at the end of an eventful first day of practice at the Circuit of The Americas in Austin, Texas.
“First of all we need to say that it’s super nice to come here to America, to be able to race here,” the Repsol Honda rider said. “Already this is something super good after so long in Europe.”
“And to see the American fans is super nice, they are super excited and it’s nice. Saying that, I think we are in a professional MotoGP championship that, we need a minimum of quality in the tracks, about safety, run off area.”
Then came the ‘but’. “We must say that the track is not at the level of a MotoGP championship, sure. First of all, there are parts where the asphalt is super bad.”
For the first time in two years, MotoGP is headed for a flyaway race which isn’t in Qatar.
After a long period of uncertainty, and facing a certain amount of opposition from inside the Grand Prix paddock, the series is heading to the Circuit of The Americas in Austin, Texas.
After having 12 of the first 14 races all inside the same timezone (give or take an hour), a flyaway race feels like something of a novelty.
The novelty will not be quite as great as hoped for all those traveling to Austin.
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.
It was supposed to rain, so of course it didn’t, proving that the weather on Italy’s Adriatic coast is just as fickle as any other place in the world at the moment.
Instead, it was hot and humid, with the threat of rain looming in the distance, providing a brief shower during qualifying for the Moto2 class, but leaving the rest of the sessions untouched. The recent rains did leave their mark, however.
The standing water left by the heavy showers of recent weeks had allowed midges, mosquitoes, and other insect life to breed copiously, and clouds of midges swarmed sections of the track. To the misfortune of Jack Miller, who had to come into the pits after getting one of the little mites in his eye.
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.
Marc Marquez arrived at Aragon as the clear favorite to win. Based on his record – five wins from seven races, and crashing out of the lead in a sixth – and on the fact that this is a counterclockwise circuit, like the Sachsenring.
Before the Sachsenring, Marquez had a seventh, a ninth, and three DNFs, but he went on to win the race in Germany with ease, despite still not being completely fit.
Marquez arrived at Aragon – his third most successful circuit – with a seventh place, an eighth, a fifteenth after a fall, and a first-lap crash with Jorge Martin. If the pattern is to repeat itself, then surely Marquez is on for another win at the Motorland Aragon circuit?
Two crashes on the first two days suggest that may be harder than we all thought.
With 21 riders covered by less than 1.3 seconds at a track over 5 km long, it is hard to pick a winner after Friday.
Take Jack Miller’s stellar lap out of the equation, and it’s even closer: the gap between Aleix Espargaro in second place and Joan Mir in 21st is precisely 1 second; Espargaro to Enea Bastianini in tenth is exactly two tenths of a second; Espargaro to Danilo Petrucci in fifteenth is half a second.
If ever you needed an example of just how close the current era of MotoGP is, Friday at Aragon delivered.