The Kymiring will have to wait. Today, the FIM announced that due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the complications posed by travel, the Finnish Grand Prix at the Kymiring has been canceled for 2021.
But in compensation, the circuit in Finland is to get a five-year contract to host MotoGP for the years 2022 to 2026.
We have already talked about how Sylvain Guintoli is a keen asset for the Suzuki MotoGP program, and a leading contribution in the development of the Suzuki GSX-RR race bike.
Episode 159 of the Paddock Pass Podcast is out, and it sees us covering another amazing weekend at the Red Bull Ring, this time for the Styria GP.
On the mics, we have David Emmett and Neil Morrison, as they discuss this eventful weekend in Spielberg, Austria.
In the show, the guys dissect another win by KTM at the Red Bull Ring, and how the Austrian factory has made so much progress is such a short amount of time.
Qualifying at the Red Bull Ring proved as exhilarating a spectacle as ever, but like Banquo’s ghost at Macbeth’s banquet, an absent specter took some of the attention away from a celebration of racing.
A little over an hour after qualifying finished – delayed because Jaume Masia tore the fairing from his Leopard Honda Moto3 bike after crashing in Q1, then rode back to the pits dumping oil and water all over the track – a press release from the Repsol Honda team reminded us of the absentee champion.
Marc Márquez, the press release announced, would be out for another two to three months, to allow him to recover fully from the broken humerus he suffered at the first round of MotoGP on July 19th.
It’s groundhog day. The MotoGP paddock is back in exactly the same place and doing exactly the same thing it was doing a week ago. The coronavirus-curtailed 2020 season is big on repetition, and as a result, on disorientation.
With no distractions at the track, everyone is starting to go a little stir crazy. What things will be like at the second race at Valencia, in the middle of the third run of three back-to-back races doubling up at some circuits, heaven only knows.
What does change from last Friday was the work to be done. Better weather and a weekend’s worth of data mean that most teams are much closer to their base set up. (But no everyone: there are a few riders who are a bit lost, and grasping around for a solution).
That leaves the teams free to experiment with the tires they weren’t sure about a week ago, riders swapping between the soft and medium rears, for example.
“Not too much difference,” Jack Miller said. “It is what it is. Don’t get too focused on what worked the week before. You’ve got to keep an open mind. For example, I’m leaning towards the medium tire this weekend, but we need more analysis.”
A week later, and back in the same place. Plus ça change pas… The same riders are back at the same track, in the same situation. So we should have the same result, right?
That’s not quite what the data from Jerez says. Sure, the first two places were the same in both races. But behind that, the results were completely different between the two races, a week apart on the same circuit.
Only 9 of the 22 riders on the entry list of the first race finished both races, three of them ending up injured in the carnage of the two opening rounds.
Only Pol Espargaro crossed the line within one place of his finishing position in the second race, ending sixth in the first race, seventh in the second.
Only Johann Zarco’s finishing position varied by two places, crossing the line eleventh in the first race, ninth in the second. The rest of the field either finished three or more places out of position, or crashed out – and there were a lot of riders who didn’t cross the line one way or another.
The biggest name not to finish in either of the MotoGP races at Jerez was, of course Marc Márquez. The reigning world champion won’t be at the second race at the Red Bull Ring, Repsol Honda announced earlier this week, and an eerie silence surrounds when he will be back.
And so Honda languish in fifth in the manufacturer standings, and the factory Repsol Honda team is dead last in the team standings. Only Takaaki Nakagami is sparing Honda’s blushes, and he is riding a 2019 bike.
Johann Zarco did not come away completely unhurt by the massive crash he had with Franco Morbidelli in the Austrian MotoGP race at the Red Bull Ring on Sunday.
Scans made on Monday revealed that the Frenchman had suffered a fractured scaphoid in his right wrist in the crash.
The Frenchman is to travel to Modena in Italy to have surgery on the scaphoid, before returning to Spielberg to attempt to ride in the Styrian Grand Prix, the second race at the Red Bull Ring to be held this weekend.
We nearly got away with it. The clouds hung heavy over the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg for much of the morning, but it stayed dry for all three classes, and the Red Bull Rookies practice as well – I will leave it to the imagination of the reader as to why the Red Bull Rookies are racing in Spielberg this weekend.
But halfway through FP2 for the Moto3 class, at the beginning of the afternoon, the heavens parted and the deluge began.
The weird thing about the rain is that it was so incredibly localized. The Red Bull Ring is a relatively compact circuit, not elongated like Assen, or spread out over a vast territory like Silverstone, so to have a downpour in Turn 3, the track completely soaked and water running across the track, while a few hundred meters downhill, along the front straight and at Turn 1, the track was completely dry, made for impossible conditions.
A few Moto3 riders nearly got caught out as they hammered up the hill toward Turn 3, then found themselves unable to brake for the corner and forced to run wide.
And so MotoGP lost out on FP2 almost completely. The track was neither one thing nor the other, soaking wet at the top half, between Turns 3 and 4, and desert dry down the bottom near the pits.
It was way too dangerous to go out on slicks, and a waste of time to go out on rain tires and burn up the limited sets they have. The wet parts of the track were wet enough for the soft wets, the dry parts of the track were capable of destroying even the medium wet within a few laps.
A short hop over the Alps – or rather, a short drive south, and then west between the Alps, to avoid the slow but spectacular progress over the mountain passes to the north of Spielberg – and the MotoGP paddock reassembles at the Red Bull Ring in Austria.
From one of the best tracks on the calendar, plagued by financial problems, to one of the best-funded tracks on the calendar, plagued by the fact that, well, frankly, it’s not a very good circuit for motorcycle racing.
The setting is spectacular, nestled at the foot of the hills rising from the valley of the river Mur and heading up to snow-capped peaks a couple of kilometers skywards.
The circuit sits on a slope at the bottom of those hills, making for a surprisingly steep climb up to Turn 1, then up the hill to Turn 3, along the hillside to Turn 4, before rolling down through a huge Omega right-left-right combination to get back to the bottom of the hill, and the straight which runs along it.
But the circuit belies its heritage, as a spectacular but treacherous mountain circuit crossing hills and woods.
And like many mountain circuits, there is little room for mistakes, with runoff limited at Turn 1, Turn 3, between the barriers from Turn 3 to Turn 4, and at the bottom of the hill into the final corner. In the dry, it is all just about manageable. But in the wet, it can be a terrifying place.
After thirteen and a half weeks of silence, MotoGP bikes are to roar into life once again in their natural habitat.
The KTM RC16 machines are to spend two days testing at the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, Austria, on May 27th and 28th. The last time MotoGP bikes were on track was at Qatar, on February 24th.
Factory rider Pol Espargaro will be joined at the Red Bull Ring by test rider Dani Pedrosa, where they will continue work on the RC16.
Racing in Austria has always been about speed. When Grand Prix motorcycles first raced in Austria, they went to the Salzburgring, a hairy, narrow track that snakes along one section of the mountain east of Salzburg, then down a bit, and then all the way back again.
It was fast, and it was terrifying, and by the time Grand Prix left the track, the average speed of a lap was over 194 km/h. But it was also incredibly dangerous, with no runoff in sections, and steel barriers along large parts of the track.
After abandoning the Salzburgring, Grand Prix moved to the A1 Ring, the predecessor of the modern Red Bull Ring.
The A1 Ring was a shortened and neutered version of the original Österreichring, a terrifyingly quick circuit that rolled over the hill which overlooks the little town of Spielberg, where the F1 cars reached average speeds of over 255 km/h.
Shortened and neutered it may have been, but speeds were still high. In 1997, Mick Doohan took pole for the race at an average speed of 175 km/h, faster than the 171 km/h average speed for pole at Phillip Island, a notoriously quick track.
When MotoGP returned to Austria after an absence of 20 years, speeds were still high: Andrea Iannone’s pole lap was set with an average speed of nearly 187 km/h, making it the fastest track on the calendar.
And yet the track is not fast in the traditional sense. It is not fast and flowing like Phillip Island, Mugello, Assen, or Termas de Rio Hondo.
Nor it is a track where the bikes explore the limits of outright top speed: at the Red Bull Ring, the highest recorded speed is 316.5km/h on the climb up the hill, 40 km/h slower than the front straight at Mugello, where they have clocked 356.7 km/h.