Michael Scott | April 27, 2022
Cycle News In The Paddock
COLUMN
MotoGP’s Egg-and-Spoon Race
Racing, like all sport, is better when you don’t know who is going to win. My question is this: Is it still better when you literally haven’t got a clue? When it could be almost any one of the 24 on the grid?
Or does that reduce it to the level of a junior-school sport-day egg-and-spoon race?
MotoGP, this year more than ever, has become just such a lottery. In the first four races, there were three different winners. And for the first three of them, nine different riders on the podium. Not a single repeat.
Bike-wise, all six manufacturers have made it into the top three. Even Aprilia, until now the poor relation.
This seems to be the year that anyone can win.
Carry on like this, and the same will be true of the championship. Anyone could win it. Although probably not, as happened in 2013, one of the five rookies.
Bemused riders confirm the precariousness. Qualify off the first three rows and your weekend’s effectively over. Run wide once, and you lose three places. It’s just so, so close, and it is quite without precedent in the premier class.
Tales of the unexpected, and a surprise at every turn. But what happens when you take a bit of perspective.
Looking back over racing history, the so-called Golden Age was in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was the heyday of 500cc two-strokes—which those who were there at the time are still prone to call “real grand prix bikes.”
It was golden because back then you didn’t know who would win, but it was a safe bet that it would be one of four or five riders: Eddie Lawson, Wayne Rainey, Kevin Schwantz, Wayne Gardner or (latterly) Mick Doohan. The rest, with a couple of notable exceptions, just made up the numbers.
That era came to an end in 1994. The first four had, for various reasons, gone missing. For the next five years, you knew exactly who was going to win. Mick Doohan. Over and over again. Nobody could touch him.
Through no fault of his own the sport was the worse for it. He even, most unfairly, faced criticism for making racing boring. “What do you want me to do,” he memorably said. “Slow down?”
Mick’s era also ended abruptly, with one crash too many at Jerez in 1999.
It was followed, after a brief Criville-Roberts interregnum, by Valentino Rossi.
Once again, despite some occasional spirited opposition, the top class became something of a one-man show. Although with one important difference. By employing a ruthless combination of charm and showmanship, even if it meant making it look harder than it was, Rossi managed to keep pleasing the fans and enhancing his earnings.
Fast forward to now, leapfrogging six Marc Marquez years of domination, and we arrive at the present day. The new anything-could-happen era.
It is, we are slavishly told by Dorna’s commentators, the best racing of all time.
In one way they are right, so they are not only talking through their wallets. Results in 2022 are marvelously unpredictable, and that is entirely thanks to Dorna’s dumb-down policy of the past decade or so.
Limited numbers of engines of a prescribed size—four cylinders, maximum bore 81 mm—run on prescribed fuel to a limit of 22 liters. Engine development is frozen throughout the season. Riders must choose from a very restricted range of Michelin tires. Aerodynamics are likewise strictly controlled, both in size and in development. The bikes become increasingly similar.
Fast forward to now, leapfrogging six Marc Marquez years of domination, and we arrive at the present day. The new anything-could-happen era.
More than any of these, the most leveling comes from control electronics: both hardware and software.
A certain amount of fiddling is possible within these parameters, but designers seeking effective loopholes, most notably Ducati’s Gigi Dall’Igna, have to think well outside the box, only to face having new ideas stomped on, like next year’s ban on mid-race front ride-height adjustment. An idea that may or may not have been of value, eliminated before it could be fully developed.
So, you have to agree. The evidence is clear. The variety of results and the closeness of the racing show the plan has worked. Never before have so many riders been packed into such a small space.
Yet still I wonder. Grand prix racing is a test of excellence, a search for the outstanding, not a socialist drive for blanket fairness and equality—a forum where the outstanding are kept in check in the interests of the merely mediocre.
It’s not about cutting down tall poppies, surely, but rather encouraging their growth.
I have a feeling, however, that circumstances may solve this dilemma. That title-winning rookie of 2013, Marc Marquez, is back. And fast regaining his full potential.
Then the question will not be who is going to win, but who will come second.
It could be anyone.CN
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