Dani Pedrosa has suffered more bad luck at Motegi. For the second time in his career, he has crashed there and broken a collarbone.
The Repsol Honda rider suffered a huge highside at the end of the afternoon FP2 session, being flung high into the air at Turn 11. The Spaniard immediately got up holding his collarbone, and was taken on the back of a scooter to the medical center. There, he was diagnosed with a fractured right collarbone.
Pedrosa is to fly back immediately to Spain, where he will undergo surgery to fix the collarbone. Officially, the Repsol Honda team have only ruled him out of Sunday’s race at Motegi.
However, it is extremely unlikely that the Spaniard will return before Valencia. Dr Xavier Mir, one of the official doctors for MotoGP, told Spanish reporters he did not expect to see Pedrosa back until the final race of the season.
MotoGP is about to enter the toughest stretch of the season. Three races on three consecutive weekends is tough enough.
But three races separated by three, seven plus hour flights, kicking off with a race in a time zone seven hours ahead of the place most riders live. So riders, mechanics and team staff all start off a triple header struggling with jet lag and facing a grueling schedule.
And they are thrown in the deep end from the very start. Only the MotoGP riders can afford to stay at the Twin Ring circuit near Motegi. Most of the team staff stay in Mito, an hour’s drive from the track, meaning they have to travel for two hours a day.
Up in the hills in the middle of Japan’s main island, and sufficiently far north for temperatures to drop in the fall, Motegi is notorious for poor weather. It is usually cold, often damp, and sometimes ravaged by typhoons.
It is not just challenging on the riders and teams, however. The road circuit which sits half inside, half outside the oval course, giving the Twin Ring its name, is like Le Mans on steroids.
A series of straights of varying lengths, connected by a series of precisely engineered corners, as befits a circuit designed specifically as a test track.
Three days after announcing that they would not be replacing the injured Andrea Iannone, the factory Ducati squad has changed its mind.
On Thursday, the Bologna factory announced that Hector Barbera would be taking Iannone’s place in the factory Ducati team, while Barbera’s slot in the Avintia Ducati MotoGP team will be taken by Australian rider Mike Jones.
The decision was forced upon Ducati by Dorna and IRTA. Under the FIM regulations, teams must make “every reasonable effort” to replace an absent rider, with only force majeure (or exceptional circumstances beyond their control) acceptable as a reason to leave a seat empty.
The series organizers clearly believed that force majeure did not apply in this case, as Iannone’s decision to skip the race was due to an injury picked up at Misano, five weeks ago.
The legal oddity that riders’ contracts are out of sync with the MotoGP season creates an uncomfortable truce among the factories.
When riders sign with a factory, their contracts run from January 1st to December 31st. But for the factories and teams, the new season starts on the Tuesday after the last race of the year, at Valencia.
This is a particular problem for the 2017 season, with so many riders changing factories. Traditionally, there has been a gentlemen’s agreement among the factories to allow the riders to test with their new team, despite still being under contract to the old one.
So in previous years, the likes of Valentino Rossi (twice) and Casey Stoner have lapped Valencia aboard their new steeds dressed in plain leathers.
The plain leathers are just one side of the compromise. As a rule, the riders switching factories are not allowed to speak to the media, or only allowed to speak in the most general of terms, avoiding direct comparison between their new bikes and their old bikes.
The riders continue to perform PR duties for their old factories up until the end of the contract deadline.
Andrea Iannone is to miss the MotoGP round at Motegi. The Italian has been advised by his doctors to skip the first of the three Pacific flyaway rounds to allow the vertebra he fractured at Misano to heal.
Iannone picked up the injury on the first day of his home race at Misano. Though the injury is on the forward side of the T3 vertebra, making it less vulnerable to a repeat injury, the fracture has caused him to miss both Misano and Aragon. Motegi will be the third race which Iannone will be forced to miss.
Three quarters of the way through their first season back in MotoGP, and their first as a spec tire supplier, Michelin took the unique decision to start holding regular debriefs for the media at each race.
Aragon was the first of such debriefs, and was therefore a lengthy affair. In it, Michelin’s Racing Technical Director, faced some very broad-ranging questions about the development of the French firm’s tires throughout the season.
But he also covered more general questions, such as the R&D and marketing benefits of going racing, the direction Michelin are following, and how they are trying to accommodate of so many different riders.
Goubert offered a fascinating insight into where Michelin stands at the moment, and how they intend to move forward.
Some illness amongst our crew is the reason this show is getting to you a bit late, but never fear, Episode 39 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is here.
Re-capping the Aragon GP, David Emmett, Neil Morrison, and Steve English talk about the racing events in Spain, and place a friendly wager about how the rest of the season is going to shape up in the MotoGP paddock.
Turning to more serious discussion though, the guys also examine the FIM’s concussion protocol, as it was center stage in Aragon after Danilo Petrucci’s heavy crash, and perhaps hasty return to riding a motorcycle.
The attention then turns to the World Superbike paddock, with a talk about the recent round at Magny-Cours, and how the production-class racers are faring so far this season, and what is in store for next year. We also have a short interview with rider Chaz Davies about the progress of the Ducati squad.
We think this show is well worth the wait, so we hope you like it.
As always, be sure to follow the Paddock Pass Podcast on Facebook, Twitter and subscribe to the show on iTunes and SoundCloud – we even have an RSS feed for you. If you like the show, we would really appreciate you giving it a review on iTunes. Thanks for listening!
The 2017 season is starting to take shape. After the announcement of the provisional 2017 MotoGP calendar in the run up to Aragon, Dorna published the schedule of official tests for the 2017 preseason. Like the race calendar, the test calendar looks remarkably similar to last year.
Testing kicks off after the final race of 2016 in Valencia, and as last year, the riders get a day off between the race and the test, with the bikes taking to the track on Tuesday.
Up until last year, the test had always started on the Monday after the race, but that was changed last year, with the explanation that the teams needed an extra day of preparation to get the bikes set up with the Michelin tires and spec electronics.
No major technical rules are to change for 2017 (with the exception of the banning of winglets), but the extra day of rest is to be maintained.
We have had to wait nearly an entire year for Suzuki to finalize and release its new superbike, after first teasing us at the 2016 EIMCA show with it. But today at INTERMOT, the 2017 Suzuki GSX-R1000 is finally ready for primetime.
Because Suzuki already teased us the new GSX-R1000 a year ago, much about the machine is already known. But, for a proper plot twist, there will in fact be two variations of the Suzuki GSX-R1000 for 2017, with a higher spec 2017 Suzuki GSX-R1000R debuting as well.
For the 2017 Suzuki GSX-R1000 base model, of course everything is brand new. The inline-four engine on this liter-bike features a variable valve timing (VVT), a first in the superbike segment. Peak power is just shy of 200hp, with Suzuki claiming 199hp and 86.7 lbs•ft of torque.
The crown jewel of the electronics package is a six-axis IMU, which brings a 10-level traction control system, riding modes, cornering ABS, launch control, up-and-down quickshifts to the once “King of Superbikes” (the latter three items being on the GSXR-1000R).
With a wet weight of 441 lbs, the 2017 Suzuki GSX-R1000 is in the hunt to reclaim that crown, making this a strong return for the Japanese brand in the superbike segment.
Momentum. That’s what the last race before the Australasian triple header is all about. Momentum heading towards the end of the championship. Coming out on top and carrying it forward to Motegi, Phillip Island, and Sepang is vital.
The deal may get done on one of the flyaways, but Aragon is the place where the riders put their chips on the table.
All three races on Sunday had a huge impact on the MotoGP championship. In the first race of the day, a title was settled. In the second race of the day, the championship was blown even further open.
The final race of the day saw another brick hammered into the wall of Marc Márquez’s third MotoGP title, and further cemented his legacy. It was a good day’s racing.
There are a lot of ways to win titles, but the way the 2016 Moto3 championship was settled was about as fitting as it could be. At the end of a classic Moto3 race, where a strong group battled for control until the final four laps, four men broke away from the pack.
That group consisted of Brad Binder, the two men who could still mathematically challenge Binder for the 2016 title, Enea Bastianini and Jorge Navarro, and rookie revelation Fabio Di Giannantonio.