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Aleix Espargaro

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The dark horse in the 2022 MotoGP Championship has to be the Aprilia RS-GP race bike. With a budget that is a fraction of the other factories, Aprilia has been able to evolve the RS-GP each season into a sharper weapon – albeit, slowly.

The Italian squad made big steps in the 2021 season, however, and Aprilia is keen to keep that momentum moving forward and see Aleix Espargaro and Maverick Vinales on the top rankings of the score sheets.

Taking one look at the 2022-spec bike, which was on hand for the team’s season unveiling and photography, and we can already see the evolutions in place for the coming season, and motions are under way for a breakout year.

With the bikes all crated up and shipped to Indonesia, and the entire paddock flown to Mandalika on the island of Lombok (bar those stuck in quarantine in Malaysia after testing positive for COVID-19), there is time to look back at the Sepang MotoGP test.

Because this year is so different to previous years in a number of ways, I am breaking it down into two parts.

First, some general points that apply to the test itself and across several or all manufacturers, and later in the week, a breakdown manufacturer by manufacturer.

For a variety of reasons, the MotoGP team unveilings have become a dreadful boring affair in the recent years.

It used to be, that these events would be our first chance to see the new bikes from the coming season, but now these new bike revisions have become too secret to show before the racing started.

Instead, the events have become a release of new livery designs, plastered on last year’s bikes. The liveries rarely change though, and with the current rules package, the same could be said about the machinery.

That is not the case with the factory Aprilia Racing squad, however. Developing the Aprilia RS-GP at a rapid pace, we are witnessing a constantly evolving motorcycle.

World championship motorcycle racing takes another step back to the season returning at Misano.

The next three days sees both MotoGP and WorldSBK teams testing at the Italian circuit, preparing for the resumption of hostilities at Jerez in July and August.

Present are the MotoGP teams of KTM and Aprilia, allowed extra testing due to their status as concessions teams. Aleix Espargaro and Bradley Smith are riding for Aprilia, the second test for the Italian factory.

It was a day of good news and bad news for Aprilia.

On the day that the Court of Arbitration of Sport announced that WADA had appealed against the penalty imposed on Andrea Iannone, demanding his suspension be extended to the full four years set out in the doping code, the Italian factory was also able to announce a two-year contract extension with Aleix Espargaro.

The Spaniard will remain with Aprilia for the 2021 and 2022 seasons in MotoGP.

The last of the factory teams to unveil their 2020 team and livery, Aprilia Racing is showing off an early iteration of its 2020 Aprilia RS-GP MotoGP race bike.

Unlike some other debuts, Aprilia (like KTM) is showing us some of the actual changes we will see for next season, most notably the RS-GP’s revised intake and aerodynamics package.

Of note is the lengthy amount of work gone into streamlining the front wheel area of the Aprilia RS-GP, and we can see that the tail section sports a salad box configuration, similar to what Ducati pioneered.

Since they returned to the MotoGP paddock officially – and not under the guise of the ART, the RSV4-based bike which raced first under the Claiming Rule Team banner, and then in the Open Class – Aprilia has struggled.

Their MotoGP program got off to a bad start, the loss of Gigi Dall’Igna to Ducati forcing them to reschedule their plans.

Romano Albesiano, who took over as head of Aprilia Racing, found it hard to combine his role as lead engineer with the organizational duties of managing the racing department.

Albesiano came from a development and engineering background, and seemed to lack interest in the practicalities of a running a race team. Those took time away from developing the RS-GP, and so the project floundered.

Six races into the season gives everyone a chance to size up where the riders, and more importantly, the manufacturers all stand.

Teams have had a few races to analyze and optimize the setup of the 2019 bikes, plus a test at Jerez to find upgrades and solutions to problems which only emerge during race.

Mugello is the third European race, meaning the paddock is back at tracks that they know like the back of their hand. There may still be a long way to go until the title is settled, but the shape of the championship is starting to shake out.

That leads to frustration for the riders who feel their manufacturers are not making progress. At Mugello, the frustration felt by factory Aprilia rider Aleix Espargaro boiled over into outright criticism of the Italian factory over the lack of progress being made.

How do you win a MotoGP race? In the Michelin era, you need a strategy. With all six tires that the French manufacturer brings to each weekend capable of lasting the race, selecting the right tire for your bike, and your setup, is crucial.

Once the race is under way, you have to manage your pace, know when you can push hard, and when you have to sit and wait. Watch for weakness by your rivals, try to match them when attack without wrecking your own chances. With spec electronics and a wide range of tire options, MotoGP is a more intellectual game.

But it has also become more of a gamble. To find the ideal setup, the best strategy is to focus on the race during free practice, rather than worry about qualifying. But that risks leaving a rider stuck in Q1, and having to juggle front tires for Q2. You get an extra rear tire if you go through from Q1 to Q2, but not an extra front.

Naming a corner after a rider confers a particular honor on that rider, but it also puts enormous pressure on them. The last time it happened – Jerez in 2013, where the final corner was named after Jorge Lorenzo – things didn’t quite work out the way the honoree had hoped.

Dani Pedrosa went on to win the race comfortably, while Lorenzo was bumped aside in his eponymous corner by Marc Márquez, finishing the race in third, and clearly upset. That gave rise to an episode of “Handshakegate”, a recurring paddock melodrama, where Jorge Lorenzo refused the proffered hand of Marc Márquez, wagging his finger in the younger Spaniard’s face as a sign of disapproval.

So what does this mean for Turn 10 at the Motorland Aragon circuit? The long left hander which starts at the bottom of the “Sacacorchos”, Aragon’s very own version of Laguna Seca’s Corkscrew, dips then rises round towards Turn 11, and the back half of the circuit.

Today, after resisting for several years, Marc Márquez finally accepted the honor of having the corner named after him, in a ceremony featuring Dorna boss Carmelo Ezpeleta, the circuit director Santiago Abad, and circuit President Marta Gaston.

The legacy of the Lost Grand Prix lingers on. Silverstone was on the minds of many at Misano, and there was still much to be said about the race. The conclusion remained nearly unanimous, with one dissenting opinion: it was way too dangerous to race at Silverstone, and the new surface was simply not draining correctly.

Riders chimed in with their opinions of what had gone wrong with laying the asphalt, but those opinions should probably be taken with a pinch of salt. They may be intimately familiar with the feel and texture of asphalt, but the ability to ride a motorcycle almost inhumanly fast does not equate to understanding the underlying engineering and chemistry of large-scale civil engineering projects.

What riders do understand better than anyone, of course, is whether a race track is safe to race on, and all but Jack Miller felt the same way eleven days on from Silverstone. “The amount of rain was not enough to produce those conditions on the track,” Marc Márquez told the press conference.

“For me it was more about the asphalt, more than the weather conditions. And it was T2 and T3, that part was something that you cannot ride like this. Because there are many bumps, the water was there but inside the bump was even more water, and it was impossible to understand the track.”

It had rained far more in 2015, when the race had been able to go ahead, than it had in 2018, when the race had been called off, Márquez said. “For example in 2015 it was raining much more, in Motegi last year it was raining much more. But for some reason, we already went out from the box and it was only light rain but the water was there. It was something strange.”

2015 Was Worse

Valentino Rossi agreed. “For me, the rain was hard, for sure, but from what I remember very similar to 2015,” the Movistar Yamaha rider said. “In 2015 it was very slippery but the amount of water on the track was normal. The problem of this year is that also with less rain, the water remained on the track. In fact, during FP4, when all the riders arrived to Turn 7, half-crashed and half went straight on.”

“So it means that it’s not normal, because also in FP4 it started to rain quite lightly. And for example last year, in Motegi, it rained a lot more. But there wasn’t a worst place of the track, it was all the same. When we did the sighting lap to the grid, the amount of water was too much everywhere. The problem is the asphalt more than the bumps, I think.”

Jorge Lorenzo was one of the first riders to run into problems during FP4, being forced to run straight on into the gravel when the heavy rain came. He explained his view of proceedings. “I was one of the riders who went straight in FP4,” he said. “It was very strange, because before arriving there, before arriving in the second part of the long straight, there was almost no water, or only very little splashes.”

“An almost dry track, so we were riding with confidence. But then I went into fourth or fifth gear, it was a different world there, it was like a big swimming pool in the straight, a little bit foggy. It was very strange and I started to close the throttle, but even like that it was not enough to stop the bike. To stop the bike, I needed like 400 meters, 500 meters, and even like that, the front was locking, the rear was locking, and I couldn’t stop.”

Things had improved by Sunday, after the work done at Stowe to try to improve drainage. “In the two sighting laps on Sunday before the race, it looks like they made some work in that area on Saturday afternoon, they improved a little bit the drainage of the tarmac, so it was a little bit better in that zone, but the problem was everywhere, in all the corners that the drainage was not correct, and we were spinning in all acceleration points, and it was very difficult to ride.”