Repsol Honda has officially confirmed that Alex Marquez will partner his brother Marc at the Repsol Honda team for next year. It is the first time that a pair of brothers have raced in the same team in MotoGP.
There have been other brothers riding in the same class at the same time – Aleix and Pol Espargaro the latest example of that, but never before have brothers raced in the same team in either 500cc or MotoGP.
It has been four years since the Ducati 959 Panigale replaced the 899 as the Italian brand’s “middleweight” superbike, and 26 years since the Ducati 748 Superbike first hit the streets, and started this smaller Italian v-twin adventure.
In that two-decades-plus, we have seen this middleweight offering from Ducati outgrow the Supersport Championship rules, and it now approaches near liter-bike capacities – an inch-by-inch search for more power and performance.
Updated once again for the 2020 model year, it will be the Ducati Panigale V2 keeping those v-twin hopes alive for Ducatisti around the world, as the Italian brand continues to offer this curious motorcycle.
Of course, better minds will know that the Ducati Panigale V2 is not a middleweight, as Ducati so often calls it (though to be fair, the term “super-mid” is starting to be used), but the oddly displaced machine is an excellent track bike, especially for those who have grown tired of chasing absolute horsepower, and instead want to make their lap times with actual on-bike talent.
Finding ourselves at the demanding Jerez circuit in Spain, this tight and technical track proved not only to be a good testing ground for the Ducati Panigale V2, but also a testament into how much fun a superbike like this v-twin can be for those who aren’t swept up in the industry marketing and who aren’t hand-bound by racing rules.
This was supposed to be a quiet weekend. Winding down at the last race of the season, with only the most symbolic of prizes still on the line: the team championship; third overall in MotoGP. But the final round of MotoGP at Valencia has exploded into a frenzy of rabid rumor, wild speculation, and bizarre conspiracy theories.
It all started off with Jorge Lorenzo announcing he would be retiring at the end of 2019. Though the rumor had been floating around the paddock since the summer, it still came as a surprise.
The rumor mill had calmed down a little since LCR Honda had first announced that Johann Zarco would be stepping in to replace Takaaki Nakagami for the last three races of the season. There had been a lot of talk of whether that meant Honda would sack Lorenzo, or Lorenzo would leave Honda for another team, with no satisfactory outcome.
Lorenzo’s retirement was the sort of surprise which you half expect. After an evening of digesting the idea of MotoGP without Jorge Lorenzo, the hive mind of the paddock turned to thoughts of who might replace the Spaniard.
On Friday, it didn’t seem like it would be settled any time soon, rumor suggesting that Honda would not make a decision before the Jerez test.
Valencia is a fine place to celebrate the end of the MotoGP season. For the vast majority of the paddock it is close to home, at most a couple of hours by airplane, car, or train. It has a fine building in which to host the end of season awards ceremony, the Palacio de Congresos, designed by renowned architect Norman Foster.
And it draws a massive crowd, over 100,000 fans turning up on Sunday to watch a race which usually doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, beyond rider pride (and there is little much grander than rider pride).
But it also has its downsides. The track is neatly folded inside a tight little bowl, but at the cost of having a lot of left-hand corners, and only a couple of rights. And with the season at its current length, the race is in mid November, and even when the sun is shining, temperatures can be Baltic, something the winter winds don’t do much to help.
Caution is advised in these conditions. With the track temperature in the mid teens, even very soft rubber on the right hand side of the tire is not enough to save you at Turn 4 if you try pushing too hard, too early. As Valentino Rossi found to his cost.
In FP1, the Italian entered the first right hander of the circuit a little too fast with a new tire, and found it wasn’t quite up to temperature. “Sincerely, I made a mistake, a stupid mistake, because I had the soft front, but I pushed a little bit too much already in the first lap, and I crashed.”
It has been a long year in MotoGP. Valencia is full of tired faces, the cold and windy weather a good reflection of the mood of the paddock. The last race of the season should be a festive occasion, but after eighteen races, and the last four overseas, there is little energy or enthusiasm left for the season finale.
Valencia made a fitting backdrop for Jorge Lorenzo’s announcement that he would be retiring. It came as a surprise to almost everyone – except for one canny journo who had put a bet back on the Spaniard hanging up his helmet back in August – but it was a move that was widely understood.
Spinal and head injuries are the two greatest fears of motorcycle racers, and the fact that Lorenzo came very close to suffering a life-changing injury made it easy to find sympathy for him. There was respect not just for Lorenzo’s choice, but also for the Spaniard’s achievements.
Until Marc Márquez came along, Lorenzo looked set to go down in history as Spain’s greatest ever premier class rider. Even then, he remains the only rider so far to have won a title in the Márquez era.
He was a rider whose ability to carry corner speed astounded his rivals, left them befuddled at how he could go so fast through corners without crashing.
He leaves MotoGP as the fifth most successful premier class rider, and the sixth most successful rider of all time in all classes.
Greetings from Jerez, Spain where we are about to take the “new” Ducati Panigale V2 sport bike for a spin at this popular grand prix circuit.
Don’t let the name fool you, the bike we are riding is an update to the Ducati 959 Panigale, a “middleweight” alternative from the Italian brand that takes more than a few cues from its Panigale V4 counterpart.
Jorge Lorenzo is set to retire from motorcycle racing. The 32-year-old Spaniard has decided to end his career as a result of the disastrous season at Repsol Honda, hampered by extreme crashes and severe injury, and never having become comfortable on the bike.
“I always thought that there are four significant days for a rider,” Lorenzo told a specially convened press conference at Valencia. “The first is you first race, the second your first win and then your first world championship – not everyone can win a world championship but some of us made it – and then the day you retire.”
The decision to retire came because he could no longer summon the required energy to continue at the level which was necessary. “Everything started when I was three years old, almost 30 years of complete dedication to my sport,” Lorenzo said.
“People who work with me know how much of a perfectionist I am, how much energy and intensity I have always put into my sport.”
“This level of perfectionism requires a lot of motivation, that is why after nine years at Yamaha – so wonderful, probably the best years that I enjoyed in my career – I felt that I needed a change, if I wanted to keep this full commitment to my sport.”
“That’s why I wanted to move to Ducati, it gave me a big boost of motivation and even though the results were very bad, I used the motivation to not give up and keep fighting until I achieved this beautiful Mugello victory in front of all the Ducati fans.”
When it was announced that Jorge Lorenzo would be holding a special press conference at 3pm, the Thursday before the start of the Valencia round for MotoGP, and that Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta would be talking at the media event as well, the news could only mean one thing: Jorge Lorenzo was about to announce his retirement from the MotoGP Championship.
It is true what they say about smoke and fire, and today the smoke cleared for an announcement from the man himself, telling a packed press conference room that “this will be my last race in MotoGP” and his last race-weekend as a professional rider.
Iker Lecuona’s MotoGP debut has been moved forward a few days. The Spaniard will replace Miguel Oliveira in the Red Bull KTM Tech3 MotoGP team at Valencia, Lecuona’s home Grand Prix.
The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in Montmelo is to host a round of the World Superbike championship in 2020. The event is to be held from 18-20th September 2020, between the Portimao and Magny-Cours rounds of the series.
The addition of Barcelona presages a few of the changes coming in both the WorldSBK and MotoGP calendars in future years. Next year, WorldSBK loses Buriram in Thailand to MotoGP, and also looks set to lose the race at Laguna Seca in the USA. Instead, WorldSBK will head to Barcelona in September, and the German circuit of Oschersleben in August.
In all likelihood, how you view Sunday’s MotoGP race at Aragon will be a matter of perception. For many people, it will be a forgettable affair, the race over after the first couple of corners, Marc Márquez clearing off into the distance.
For a few, it will be the greatest display of motorcycle racing they have ever seen. Both views are valid, because, in all likelihood, Marc Márquez will win Sunday’s race by something approaching the largest margin in a dry MotoGP race ever.
That might seem like a bold prediction, but just look at Márquez’ performance so far this weekend. In FP1, he came within a quarter of a second of the outright lap record. In FP2, he was posting times in race trim to match his rivals best laps on brand new soft tires.
In FP4, he was a ‘mere’ four tenths faster than Maverick Viñales, but of the 17 full laps he posted in the session, 6 were faster than Viñales’ best lap. And 10 were faster than Fabio Quartararo’s fastest lap in the session, the Frenchman finishing third in the session.
Securing pole position was almost a formality, his 61st pole maintaining his 50% record. (And stop to think how insane that is, that Márquez starts from pole in half of the races he contests.)
He was a third of a second faster than second-place man Fabio Quartararo, and didn’t really look like he was trying. He had time to spare on ramping up the pressure on his rivals, choosing his position to make sure they knew he was there, and coming through.