The Silverstone circuit is to be resurfaced in June, ahead of the British F1 Grand Prix, and to be ready for the 2019 British round of MotoGP at the circuit in August.
The resurfacing was a condition for the Northamptonshire circuit to be able to host MotoGP. After last year’s debacle, when the race had to be canceled because the track was not clearing water fast enough to be able to race safely, the FIM suspended Silverstone’s license to host international motorcycle racing events.
The day after the Spanish round of MotoGP, the riders were back on track, busting out lap after lap with a lot of work to be done. After 25 laps on Sunday in the punishing heat, almost the entire grid did another three race distances or more on the Monday.
Everyone rode, with the exception of Andrea Iannone, who was still suffering with an extremely painful ankle after a crash on Saturday, and Stefan Bradl, who had handed his test bike over to Marc Márquez to turn some laps on.
Conditions were ideal, the track all rubbered in after Sunday’s race and the track temperature in the mid-40s, perfect for Jerez. That was both a good thing and a bad thing: riders who wanting to work on something specific, such as corner entry or mid-corner speed, could take full advantage of the grip to understand the finer details of what they were working.
We came to Jerez expecting records. A new surface with most of the bumps removed meant the bikes were always going to be quicker around the track. A weekend of stable weather conditions promised ideal conditions for realizing unbelievably quick laps around the track.
And a field which is closer than ever ramps up the pressure on the riders to extract the absolute maximum from their bikes. In FP3, for example, there were 16 riders within a second, and the gap between Andrea Dovizioso in fourth and Pol Espargaro in thirteenth was precisely two tenths of a second.
Friday is turning into update day, especially since Ducati opened the can of worms which is aerodynamics in places not covered by aerodynamics. The first day of practice at any race now is the day the other factories roll out their new swingarm attachments, or devices, or whatever you want to call them. But let’s be honest: they are aerodynamic spoilers.
Jerez was no different. On Friday, both Aprilia and Yamaha debuted their versions of Ducati’s swingarm spoiler (poetic justice for Yamaha, as their water-deflecting spoiler from last year was the inspiration for Aprilia and Ducati to start adding parts to the swingarm).
Stefan Bradl, making an appearance as a wildcard as a reward for his role as HRC test rider, was spotted riding a chassis covered in carbon fiber (stuck on top of aluminum, not an entirely CF frame).
Normally, test riders don’t attract too much media attention, but HRC’s obsessive secrecy managed to change that around. As soon as Bradl entered the garage, mechanics from the test team put up massive screens, hermetically sealing off the garage to prying eyes.
This alerted the media to the fact that Something Big Was Going On in Bradl’s garage, and a group of keen observers gathered every time he exited the pits. That kind of behavior did more to draw attention to what Honda was doing, rather than keep it out of the public eye.
These clearly visible changes were a reminder that there are plenty of updates brought at almost every race.
But for the most part, these changes are to the parts we cannot see: software updates, chassis updates where stiffness has been modified using different wall thicknesses, a slightly different way of layering carbon fiber to build a swingarm, which looks identical to the previous version, but behaves slightly differently.
Ducati have had a different swingarm for a couple of races, though nobody noticed it. It was only the paddock grapevine which brought us this news.
While all eyes were on the swingarm spoilers at Aprilia and Yamaha, Ducati used the distraction to roll out a bunch of updates at Jerez. First, there were the much enlarged (and much stiffer – they are no longer rubbing against the tire wall, erasing the Michelin logo as they go) wheel covers on the front wheel.
Instead of covering less than a quarter of the bottom of the front wheel, they now extend from much further forward all the way back to the brake caliper. They have gone from covering an arc of perhaps 80° to something closer to 130°, at a rough estimate. See below for the old and the new wheel covers.
Old wheel covers (photo Tom Morsellino)
New wheel covers (photo Niki Kovacs)
A lot of people had spotted the wheel covers, but only the eagle-eyed photographer Niki Kovacs saw that Ducati also appear to have not one, but three different versions of the swingarm spoiler, or what the Italians like to refer to as the ‘spoon’. First, the original version of the spoiler, a full length spoiler with three long aerofoils.
Original spoiler – long, and angled sharply forward (photo Niki Kovacs)
In addition to the original version, Ducati had another version which used a shortened lower aerofoil, and so was not quite as long as the standard one.
‘Mid-sized’ spoiler – angled sharply forward, but with a shortened lower aerofoil (photo Niki Kovacs)
Finally, there was a shortened version, which was more vertical and less angled forward. That also used a shortened lower aerofoil.
‘Short’ spoiler – angled closer to the vertical, with the shortened lower aerofoil (photo Niki Kovacs)
MotoMatters subscribers have access to a gallery with much larger versions of these pictures, but these should give you an idea of just how important aero is to Ducati.
How come Ducati can use different versions of the swingarm spoiler? The regulations only talk about the aero body being homologated, and limited to one update a season.
But the whole issue with Ducati’s wheel covers and swingarm spoiler is that they fall outside of the aerodynamics regulations, and so can be altered at will. Now that Ducati have established that the swingarm spoiler is to cool the rear tire, they can change it as often as they like. Which they appear to be doing.
(It is also worth noting that all of these photos are of parts which appeared on the factory Ducati bikes. Jack Miller is using only the original wheel covers, and the original swingarm spoiler).
Ducati aren’t the only ones to have cottoned on to the freedom allowed by the swingarm spoiler. I saw two versions of Aprilia’s spoiler, one on Aleix Espargaro’s bike, one on Andrea Iannone’s bike. The Aprilia spoiler looks very much like the Ducati version, with three aerofoils.
But the aerofoils are detachable, and so Iannone used a version with two aerofoils inserted in the morning, then with three in the afternoon. Espargaro’s spoiler had all three aerofoils fitted in both FP1 and FP2.
While Ducati, Aprilia, and Yamaha all had highly visible updates, Honda had one which could not be seen, according to Marc Márquez. The crashes at Austin of Marc Márquez and Cal Crutchlow had come from the rear of the bike as much as the front, the engine brake struggling to cope with the Honda RC213V’s flailing rear end as the riders brake hard for a corner. Sometimes the rear bites, and then pushes the front, and that tips riders over the limit and onto the floor.
That has been fixed with a software update, and maybe a little bit more, Marc Márquez revealed. “I’m very happy today, because honestly speaking the problem that we had in the first three races – okay in Argentina you can say ‘you won’ but the problem was there, I was able to adjust. But in Austin I was not able to adjust,” Márquez said.
“The Repsol Honda team did a great job, especially in Japan, they worked with the test team and we improve a lot on that area and especially in the entry of the corner,” he explained.
“Now I feel better in the way that is more predictable, the engine. So this is something that helps a lot to be safer on the bike because if not sometimes I was doing some mistakes that I didn’t understand. And today we were working in a better way.”
The news that Honda has solved their problem with unpredictability on corner entry should be a concern to Márquez’ title rivals. In previous years, it took them until Barcelona at least before they fixed the problem. If the new setup is enough to solve the issue from Jerez, then Márquez will be a tough man to beat.
The times from Friday only confirm that impression. Márquez was fastest in FP1, then fourth quickest in FP2, but that doesn’t tell the full story at all. Márquez set his best time at the end of the morning session on a hard rear tire with 18 laps on it.
He then put the same rear tire in at the end of FP2, and set his quickest lap on the hard rear’s 21st lap. Almost everyone else did their best FP2 time on tire which was either new, or had just 2 or 3 laps on it. Márquez is fast without even trying, and that must be a concern.
The weather played a huge role too. It was hot and sunny, track temperatures rising quickly from the morning to the afternoon, the track over 20° warmer in FP2, and hovering just under the 50°C mark, where grip vanishes completely. That meant that while some Yamahas were fast in the cooler conditions of the morning, they went backwards in the afternoon.
“When we lose grip, we don’t lose two tenths or three tenths, we lose one second,” a frustrated Maverick Viñales explained. “It’s very difficult to find a setup, because in the morning it’s working well, in the afternoon it’s very difficult to go with it. So it’s difficult to find a compromise on the bike.”
The problem was the electronics, Viñales explained, something which has been an issue for the past two years for the Yamaha. But they had made progress, the Spaniard said. “We worked hard, we made five or six runs in FP2, and finally we found something better, but still we need much more to be competitive.”
Things were much worse for his teammate, however. “I was not fast and my pace is not fantastic,” Valentino Rossi said. “I am quite low in the ranking and we are a bit in trouble, we are not strong. It looks like the marriage between the M1 and the tires and the track is not fantastic.”
They had hoped that the new asphalt would help, Rossi explained, but the fact that the new surface is so dark means it is holding a lot of heat, and making it even hotter. “We tried the spoiler, the spoon, for us to have a bit less temperature in the tire. It is a small help but I tried with and without and it is not a big difference.”
The problem was also that Jerez has been difficult for Yamaha in the past few years. That did not give Rossi much for the Spanish GP this weekend, but it left him optimistic that solutions could be found at other tracks. “If we are able to be strong here it is very positive, but if we struggle here it is negative for this weekend,” Rossi said.
“For me, it is not the final answer to the season for this weekend. It is Jerez. Maybe we will struggle in Jerez but we go to Le Mans next week and the bike works well. It does not finish everything here. But for us to continue to fight in the championship we need to take some points, and we need to stay concentrated and work harder than in other places where the bike is good so we can take as much as possible.”
If there is some light on the horizon for the Yamahas, it is that the rest of the weekend should be a little cooler, but more importantly, see a bit more cloud. Cloud cover should shield the asphalt from the suns fierce rays, and help to reduce the track temperature significantly. That may be enough to bring them back into contention.
The Hondas are up – Jorge Lorenzo was quick in the morning, suffering a little more in the afternoon with track temperature – and the Yamahas are down, but the Ducatis are fast pretty much whatever the conditions. Andrea Dovizioso was particularly pleased with progress on the first day, ending FP2 in second behind teammate Danilo Petrucci, and finishing the day third overall.
“Overall the grip is good,” Dovizioso said. “We will see because we have just started the weekend and the track will change before the race. At the moment in the afternoon our speed was really good. I’m happy because we did a small improvement with the set-up and our speed was of the top group. So I’m happy about that. I don’t think it will be enough because there are some riders with a really good speed and there is still time to improve the situation with this weather. But overall our base is good.”
Danilo Petrucci was equally pleased. “For sure the feeling is very good,” the factory Ducati rider said, after finishing the day as fastest. “I’m happy about the feeling with the bike. I was talking before with my people and the bike the same like Austin, but I have a better feeling here. It’s good for me because I can ride the bike like I want.” Qualifying was a worry, he said, as pushing for a single lap was not his forte.
And he will need to do a quick lap, as will so many others – Alex Rins spent the day working on tire choice, for example, rather than chasing a single lap. The new surface has a lot of grip, without being too abrasive, meaning tire wear should not be a massive issue.
But the added grip means that times were very fast. Marc Márquez’ time in FP1 was just three tenths off the outright pole record, and some in the paddock suspect we could see a 1’36 when qualifying comes around on Saturday afternoon. If the track is a few degrees cooler than it was on Friday afternoon, we could see records shattered.
Photo: Ducati Corse
And so MotoGP returns to terra cognita. At Qatar, the sand and dust conspire with temperature and moisture to make for unpredictable conditions. Termas De Rio Hondo, despite its magnificent layout, barely gets used, meaning conditions change from session to session.
And the shifting substrate below the Circuit of the Americas means bumps come and go, and shift around from year to year in Austin. Furthermore, MotoGP visits Argentina and Austin just once a year, meaning the teams have very limited data for the track, making setup just that little bit more complicated.
How very different is Jerez. There cannot be a rider on the MotoGP paddock who does not have thousands, if not tens of thousands of laps around the Circuito de Jerez in Andalusia, Spain. If they raced in the Spanish CEV championship (now the FIM CEV championship), they raced there once or twice a year.
When they got to 125s or Moto3, they tested there two or three times a year. Same again in 250s or Moto2. Even in MotoGP they test there regularly, both private tests and now at the official IRTA test in November. Each and every one of them could post a lap of the track blindfolded.
Yet there are still some unknowns at Jerez this year. Though the entire field tested here in November last year, the track has been resurfaced since then. The worst corners, where the asphalt had cracked and holes started to form, torn up and given a brand new layer of asphalt. The bumps are gone, the track has grip, and things are very different now.
KTM has exercised the option it held over Miguel Oliveira’s contract, extending it for the second year, according to German-language website Speedweek. The Portuguese rider will now race for the satellite Red Bull KTM Tech3 for the 2019 and 2020 seasons at least.
That KTM should decide to sign Oliveira up early is hardly surprising. The Portuguese rider has been quietly impressive since moving up to MotoGP. He rode well in the first half of the season opener at Qatar, before burning up his tires and dropping down to finish seventeenth.
But he learned quickly, and put on an outstanding display in Argentina, just losing out in the battle for ninth from Aleix Espargaro on the Aprilia and brother Pol Espargaro on the factory KTM. In Austin, he finished shortly behind the other factory KTM of Johann Zarco, whom Oliveira has frequently outperformed this year.
There are only three certainties in life: Death, taxes, and Marc Márquez winning any MotoGP race organized in the United States of America. That has been true since the Spaniard moved up to MotoGP, and for both years he spent in Moto2 as well.
There is something about America which makes Márquez nigh on invincible. Is it the anticlockwise tracks? Is it the low grip and tricky surfaces found at the circuits? Or is high fructose corn syrup Márquez’ equivalent of Popeye’s spinach?
MotoGP went to Austin hoping this might be the year when things changed. With good reason: the racing in the series has been getting closer and closer almost on a race-by-race basis. Valentino Rossi finished just 0.6 seconds behind race winner Andrea Dovizioso at Qatar, but he crossed the line in fifth place.
In Argentina, the seven riders fighting for second place were separated by 3 seconds on the penultimate lap. The Ducati Desmosedici GP19 is faster and better than ever, the Yamaha M1 has made a huge step forward since 2018, and the Suzuki has consistently been in the hunt for podiums since the middle of last year.
That is all very well and good, but the margin of Marc Márquez’ victory in Termas de Rio Hondo suggested that ending Márquez’ reign in the US would require something extraordinary to happen. The Repsol Honda rider had a 12 second lead going into the last lap in Argentina.
The Honda RC213V had the highest top speed in both Qatar and Argentina, the bike having both more horsepower and better acceleration. Then, during qualifying, Márquez took pole – his seventh in a row at the Circuit of the Americas – with an advantage of more than a quarter of a second over Valentino Rossi. Normal service had been resumed.
It never rains, but it pours. Especially around Austin, where warm damp air blows in from the Gulf of Mexico, and the rising terrain of the start of Hill Country generates turbulence which causes the towering clouds to dump their burden of moisture onto the earth below.
That happened early on Saturday morning, when the heavens opened and a torrential rain drenched the ground, causing deep puddles and running streams throughout the area east of Austin that houses the Circuit of the Americas. And it happened again in the late morning, a brief but enormously intense storm dumped another centimeter or so of rain onto the track in the space of a quarter of an hour.
Both rainstorms were accompanied by thunder and lightning, which caused the most problems for the organizers. Lightning poses a significant danger, not just to anyone foolish enough to try to race a motorcycle in a thunderstorm, but to corner workers, the fans and the staff who work around the track. Lightning strikes regularly claim lives in Texas, so when a thunderstorm hits, it gets taken very seriously indeed.
It never rains but it pours in the metaphorical sense as well. After Friday’s raft of complaints aimed at the bumpiness of the Austin track, Saturday started off with track action being first delayed, and then canceled, and fans being locked out of the circuit for safety reasons. It was very much an inauspicious start to the weekend.
It is becoming a familiar refrain. At the end of each day at the Circuit of the Americas, the riders express their admiration for the event, for the setting, for the venue. And they express their dismay at the state of the asphalt, at the bumps in the track – the most common comparison was with speed bumps put in to slow traffic – and at the danger that entails.
The Grand Prix of the Americas is one of the paddock’s favorite events at one of their favorite venues, at one of their favorite track layouts. It is also the race with the worst asphalt.
Despite this, opinions are split, though not diametrically opposed. There are those who think the track is dangerous now, and who fear we will not be able to return if the track is not resurfaced, and there are those who feel that the track is fixable, and not quite as bad as the more apocalyptic predictions suggest.
The Grand Prix of the Americas is one of the MotoGP paddock’s favorite races, because of the setting, the atmosphere, and the city of Austin. The layout of the Circuit of the Americas is beloved by many a rider.
They love the challenge of threading the needle of Turns 2 through 10, the braking for Turn 11, Turn 12, Turn 1. They love the run up the hill to Turn 1, the sweep down through Turn 2, the fact that the back straight is not straight, but meanders like the straights at many great tracks.
The front straight at Mugello wanders, the Veenslang at Assen is anything but straight, that adds an element of challenge to a straight.
What the riders don’t love are the bumps. The bumps turn the Austin racetrack into a rodeo, the MotoGP bikes into bucking broncos. At close to 350 km/h along the back straight, the bikes become very difficult to control.
The bumps turn into whoops, a motocross track taken at light speed, and almost impossible to ride safely. Turn 2, that glorious sweeping downhill right hander has a bump in it which threatens to unseat anyone who takes it at the speed it begs of a rider.
Whether the work undertaken to try to address the problem will be sufficient remains to be seen. “I check a little bit and I know that they did a few modifications,” Marc Márquez said. “They didn’t do what we asked in the Safety Commission. But we will see in FP1 what is going on, how is the track.” Past experience holds out little hope.
The area around Turn 10 has been resurfaced, and the top of some of the larger bumps has once again been shaved off. That didn’t make a great deal of difference last year, but we will have to wait until Friday to see if it has been effective for the 2019 race.
After a display of utter domination by Marc Márquez in Argentina, MotoGP heads 7000km north to Austin where if history is to be the judge, we are in for a repeat performance. Marc Márquez has never been beaten at Austin, and indeed, has not been beaten on US soil since he moved up to Moto2 in 2011. It seems foolish to bet against him at the Circuit of the Americas.
Yet the Termas De Rio Hondo circuit and the Circuit of the Americas are two very different beasts indeed. Termas flows, with only a couple of points where the brakes are challenged, and is a track where corner speed and the ability to ride the bike on the rear is paramount. COTA is more a collection of corners than a flowing race track.
Three tight corners where the brakes are taken to the limit – Turn 12 being the toughest, braking from nearly 340 km/h to just under 65 km/h – a dizzying extended esses section from Turn 2 to Turn 9, a tight infield section and a big sweeping right hander.
If there is a section where the track sort of flows, it is from the top of the hill. The first corner is one of the most difficult on the calendar. The riders charge uphill hard on the gas, then slam on the brakes compressing the suspension harder than at any point on the calendar.
At the top of the hill they release the brakes and try to turn in, managing rebounding suspension with a corner which rises, crests, and then falls away down towards Turn 2.