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The role of tire pressures, and especially for the front tire, has grown in importance in recent years, as aerodynamics and ride-height devices have made the front ever more sensitive to pressure and temperature changes.

It is common to hear riders complain of temperatures and pressures skyrocketing after getting stuck behind other bikes, and kept out of the cooling air.

It is therefore not surprising that factories and teams try to manage tire pressures as carefully as possible.

It has been hard to make sense of the start of the 2022 MotoGP season. In the first three races, nine different riders filled the nine podium positions.

In Texas, we had our first repeat winner in Enea Bastianini, and Alex Rins repeated his podium from Argentina, while Jack Miller became the tenth rider to stand on the podium in four races.

In one respect, the 2022 season is picking up where 2021 left off. In 2021, MotoGP had eight different winners in 18 races, and 15 different riders on the podium.

The 2020 season before it had nine winners and 15 different riders on the podium from just 14 races, the season drastically shortened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Much of that variation can surely be ascribed to the absence of Marc Marquez as a competitive factor.

Honda went into the Indonesian Grand Prix widely seen as potential front runners. Pol Espargaro had been fastest in the test at Mandalika a month previously, Marc Marquez had been quickest on the second day of the test, Honda riders had set a consistently fast pace, looking better than their single-lap speed.

What’s more, Espargaro was coming off a podium at the season opener at Qatar, the race where Marc Marquez had finished fifth.

To say the Indonesian Grand Prix ended badly for Honda is an understatement. Pol Espargaro was fastest Honda once again, but the Repsol rider crossed the line way down in 12th, 33 seconds behind the winner, Miguel Oliveira.

Espargaro was one of only two Honda riders to finish in the points, crossing the line just ahead of Alex Marquez on the LCR Honda in 13th. Takaaki Nakagami could only struggle to a 19th place, 49 seconds behind the winner.

That wasn’t the really bad news, however. The worst blow for Honda was the fact that Marc Marquez manage to miss the race, and perhaps endanger his chances of the 2022 title, or worse. Much worse.

After the first MotoGP race of 2022, the Qatar Grand Prix was over, an observant Twitter follower asked me why the symbol used for Marc Marquez’ front tire choice was different to everyone else.

Watching the replay and then consulting the analysis PDFs on MotoGP’s new results section made clear what Marquez had done.

He and his team and chosen to fit a soft front tire that had been scrubbed in, and consequently, had been used for one lap already.

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic threw a spanner into the works for MotoGP in all sorts of ways. In response to the pandemic, the MSMA decided on an engine and aerodynamics freeze for 2020 and 2021, to limit costs in a time of uncertainty.

That went a long way to restraining costs, but as the world adapted to the pandemic, and it became clear that a global economic crisis had been averted, development budgets started to rise again.

There has been a lot of talk of tires in 2021. Tires are always a key part of the performance package in motorcycle racing, but they seem to have played an even more important role in 2021.

At Silverstone, Pecco Bagnaia complained of a bad rear tire, while Joan Mir said his front tire was off.

Two weeks later, it was the turn of Fabio Quartararo to complain of his rear tire, and there have been a litany of complaints from riders throughout this season. 

Are these complaints justified? From outside, it is hard to tell.

With grids commonly separated by a second, and grid rows separated by a tenth or less, the differences between being perfect and being just slightly off in terms of setup, tire pressure, bike balance have grown massively in importance.

This is not made any easier by the fact that the Michelins have a relatively narrow operating window in terms of temperature.

Go just outside that temperature range, and performance drops off dramatically. The devil is increasingly in the detail, and tires are the biggest detail of all.

Episode 233 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and this show covers the MotoGP action from the British GP at Silverstone.

On the mics, we have David Emmett, Neil Morrison, and Adam Wheeler, as they cover what turned out to be a very eventful weekend in Austria.

The guys cover a busy weekend in the UK, and start things off with a discussion of Quartararo’s win, and whether it means he has the 2022 title in the bag, or whether a crash like he had in FP2 could still stop him in his tracks.

One week later, MotoGP is back at the same race track, with the same riders, and likely racing in pretty much the same conditions. Does this mean we are going to see exactly the same result in the Doha Grand Prix as we did for the Qatar Grand Prix?

That will depend. And it will perhaps depend on how well the MotoGP riders learn the lessons of last week, as well as the lessons of the past. If Maverick Viñales maintains the form he showed last Sunday, he will be very difficult to beat.

Be careful what you wish for. For four months, MotoGP riders sat at home and twiddled their thumbs, hoping for the racing to return. They got their wish, but there was a catch: the season opener is in Jerez, in July, in the withering heat of an Andalusian summer.

It was positively punishing on track, especially in the afternoon, once track temperatures started to creep into the mid 50s °C. The track gets greasy, and that catches riders out, especially rookies. Alex Márquez was one such rider: the Repsol Honda rider tucked the front at Turn 8, disrupting the plan for the session.

“In the crash, I was too optimistic, coming from the morning with a good feeling on track, you know,” the younger Márquez brother told us. “I made a rookie mistake.

The grip changed quite a lot from the morning to the afternoon. I was a little bit wide in the entry, but I was on a good lap so I tried to go back to the right line but I was a with a little bit too much lean angle on a dirty surface, and then the front was just closed.”

Understanding how the heat affected the track was the key to the afternoon. The track has plenty of grip when temperatures are in the 30s and 40s°C, but once the mercury creeps past 50°C, the grip goes away, turning the MotoGP bikes into a real handful.

By the end of FP1, track temperatures had hit 40°C. By the start of FP2, the track temperature was already 54°C, and rising.

Why is the Suzuka 8-Hours dominated by Bridgestone tires? During last year’s edition, Michael Laverty and Sylvain Guintoli sat down with Asphalt & Rubber to explain why Bridgestone is the preferred tire of choice at Suzuka.

Even the most talkative factory riders get tight lipped when the topic of tires is raised. After taking nine tenths of a second off the unofficial lap record, Jonathan Rea was asked to compare the feeling with Bridgestone tires compared to the Pirelli rubber used in WorldSBK.

The triple world champion side-stepped that landmine with customary ease by saying “they're both very high performance tires.”

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